Navy SEAL to Author & CEO: Marty Strong's Mission-Ready Mindset
This is the EWN Podcast Network.
Cathy Worthington:Welcome to late boomers, our podcast guide to creating your third act with style, power, and impact. Hi. I'm Kathy Worthington.
Merry Elkins:And I'm Mary Elkins. Join us as we bring you conversations with entrepreneurs, entertainers, and people with vision who are making a difference in the world.
Cathy Worthington:Everyone has a story, and we'll take you along for the ride on each interview, recounting the journey our guests have taken to get where they are, inspiring you to create your own path to success. Let's get started.
Cathy Worthington:Hello. I'm Kathy Worthington. Welcome to late boomers. Our special guest today is a retired and decorated Navy Seal officer who parlayed his experience in the military to become a successful business leader, author, and sought after motivational speaker.
Merry Elkins:And I'm Mary Elkins. Marty Strong's passion is influencing change. With the world changing so much as we speak, I know our boomer audience will be interested to hear what he has to say. Welcome, Marty.
Marty Strong:Thanks for having me.
Merry Elkins:Great to have you.
Cathy Worthington:Yeah. You grew up in a military family, and so you lived in different countries. And how do you think this influenced you and led you to the choices you've made in your life as a younger man and today?
Marty Strong:Well, I think and this would be the same whether you moved around a lot because of the military or because your one of your parents happened to be, in a business where they had to relocate a lot. You end up with a lot of emotional maturity and kinda psychological resilience because you're always switching friends. In my case, I'm switching football jerseys, colors of football jerseys and things. Oh. And you play for one team, all of sudden, you're in another high school in another state, and you're playing for another team.
Marty Strong:And at the time, of course, it's terrible. You you as a kid, like most human beings, you're looking for stability. You're looking for some longevity so you can set up relationships and all that. But you really don't understand how it makes you stronger for the future because later when you're an adult and say somebody finds out they have to move maybe just to the other side of the city, it emotionally, they break down. It's such a terrible thing.
Marty Strong:I I can walk to where I where I buy my food. I can I like I like the neighborhood, and it's really a big hit? Right? So I'm listening to that going like, yeah. Try going from Nebraska to Japan or from Japan to you know?
Marty Strong:And and that I think it's a strength, and I think that that else that also you know, going into the military for twenty years, I was obviously traveling a lot there too. So you end up being less attached to just a physical place all the time, and you get more a sense of yourself. Kind of like like knowing your body in space as a gymnast, you kinda know your own mind and and personality and your what you like, what you don't like, your own value system and everything, because you're not tied down to one particular format or context.
Cathy Worthington:I love that.
Merry Elkins:Yeah. It's a good answer. I do too. We'll talk about your time as a Navy SEAL and also about the rigorous training a Navy SEAL has to undergo.
Marty Strong:Well, so when I when I first came in the SEAL teams, they were highly classified, and there were no movies or no TV shows. Actually, there were no books. The closest thing to anything related to the seals was a movie with Richard Widmer called the frogmen, which many of the Vietnam era seals cite as their reason for joining the navy to become frogmen. So it gives you the choice of the power the power of the of the cultural media. So that meant that I didn't really know much about it.
Marty Strong:I didn't know really what I was getting into. It's a volunteer organization. In those days, it was mostly word-of-mouth, and you kind of one person led you to another person who eventually found out who you had to put an application in with. I ended up showing up because there was a mistake in my orders, so I didn't even volunteer to go there. And the the master chief who was talking to me when I arrived there talked me into volunteering.
Marty Strong:Now I'm I'm eighteen eighteen years old, so I'm I'm pretty much malleable.
Merry Elkins:Yeah. Especially if somebody's some guy's sitting
Marty Strong:there and
Merry Elkins:go malleable.
Marty Strong:Yeah. I I Yeah. And, you he's sitting there, he's got a big chest full of metals, and he's he's very, very smooth talker and very fatherly. And and I thought, you know, hey. If you don't make it, it's volunteer thing.
Marty Strong:You can quit. You're not gonna get in trouble or anything. And then maybe he'll send you where you were supposed to go in the first place. So, you know, like a dummy, I said, sure. I'll try this.
Marty Strong:And that's how I got in into the SEAL teams. Now it's a much, much more manufactured process. It's it's on on purpose because they need a lot of them. So when I I made it through training, we had a 26 guys that that started my class, and 13 of us graduated six months later.
Merry Elkins:Oh, boy.
Marty Strong:Yeah. And and of those thirteen, two were kicked out of of their first SAIL team before they even showed up because they got in trouble racing a car or something. And and so out of my whole 13 person class, 11 of us actually got to start being seals as a profession. So that's a heck of an attrition rate. We lost another one during the first four months of the training at the seal team I was assigned to, which is a seal team two.
Marty Strong:So now we're starting basically with 10 that made it through the basic, the intermediary training, and ended up getting the the gold eagle badge, which we call the Budweiser. And that just means that you've made through the basic intermediate. You're not really a seal yet. So those are those are pretty pretty tough odds. Right?
Cathy Worthington:And what year was that? What year?
Marty Strong:I went into training in, I think it was fall, end of summer of '70 '7, graduated at the end of the spring of seventy seven, and went to army jump school in Fort Benning, which, again, they don't do anymore. They have their own jump school. Then showed up at SEAL team too on the East Coast in Virginia. So I was there for eight years. And an interesting thing in my career is I was enlisted SEAL, and at the end of eight years, I went to the SEAL training command on the West Coast, same place I'd gone through the basic training.
Marty Strong:And I was the senior enlisted instructor in that first phase. It was I worked for the lieutenant who was in charge of all of it. So one of my main duties was man managing hell week, which is whatever he hears about as the crucible, you don't sleep for five days and all that. And the biggest shock to me, and this is kind of an insight to the training, it's it was conveyed to all of us by the instructors as we were going through the students that it was all chaos, and it was random. We would be told we're gonna go to a class, then they'd be mad at us for some reason, tell us to form up out on the beach, they take us on a nine mile sand run.
Marty Strong:And so we so that was the punishment for being for getting in trouble. We weren't even sure how we got in trouble, why we got in trouble, but suddenly we're on the beach. They'd tell us we're gonna do, you know, a a two mile run, and it would turn it into a 12 mile run. It did Uh-huh. It tells us we're gonna mostly, they're constantly telling us something that was not correct, and that was part of the the conditioning, but it was also part of setting the the experiment up because they weren't gonna cause us to to fail or quit or anything.
Marty Strong:We were gonna do it to ourselves. We were gonna everybody was gonna have their own opinion of whether they could handle this chaos and uncertainty, and people just started, you know, punching out on their own. They said, I can't handle this. I don't know what's going on. I can't plan for anything.
Marty Strong:I can't, you know, I can't hold back today for tomorrow because tomorrow's the day that we're gonna do something. You just basically had to keep putting one foot in front of the other and trying to execute at the best you could, and I didn't I thought that was the way it was. So I show up, you know, eight years later, and the very first event that I walk into the in the instructor office to witness is a 14 mile run-in combat boots on the sand. Oh, gosh. They've got this big long board going from one end room to the other, and there's a complete mission briefing on it, like a like it was a seal mission, like a combat mission.
Marty Strong:Everybody has assignments. You know, radio, primary, secondary, and tertiary radio call signs, radio frequencies, two different kinds of radios. There was vehicles. There was all kinds of watering points where the medical points were gonna be. And I'm looking at all this, and I turned to one of the other guys, and I said, why why is this so why is this so overmanaged?
Marty Strong:He says, we do everything like this. It's always been this way. Mhmm. You just didn't know what you were going through.
Cathy Worthington:Somebody set that up.
Marty Strong:So it was it was like you were yeah. It was like you were at, you know, Wolly World, and people just popped out of a bush in the in the ground and grabbed the piece of trash so you couldn't see what was going on. And and then so that's the first part. Right? That is heavily choreographed, heavily observed, heavily managed, heavily supervised, and yet it's kinda hidden from the students so they don't perceive that.
Marty Strong:The second thing was, I think I like most people going in, I still thought it was mostly a physical exercise. It was a physical contest. And as an instructor, it only took me about a month and a half till I till I realized it has nothing to do with that. It's all psychology. It's all what's going on between their ears.
Marty Strong:I have a a speech program I call the the voices in your head. It's basically all those the inner critic that gets you to the point where you go from risk calculation to just fear of failure, and you just start calculating how am I gonna get out of this. You start coming up with your draft scheme plan, your draft I quits quit message, and you could watch the students. You could see it in their eyes. You could see the light bulb kinda turning out, and they just look dull.
Marty Strong:And you can also kind of compare that to the students that seem to be very kind of lit up, energized, not like cheerleader energized, but just like a soft intensity, like like they were going with it, and they weren't gonna quit. And the other thing was kind of a companion to that was a sense of humor. Pretty much every single solitary person in the seals, the green berets, all have an incredible sense of humor. They're all like stand up comics, and I think that's one of those. It's it's an escape mechanism sometimes collectively, but it's also kind of a personal way of looking at bad things.
Marty Strong:Something happens to you, you can, you know, you can kinda roll with it and go, oh, whatever. You know? Or somebody else can say something funny about what happened happened to you, and you're like, can't it just makes light of it and puts it in its perspective, you know, and, anyway, it's over, so put one foot in front of the other. So that's when I learned it wasn't about the physical part, that the whole contest, the whole crucible was set up as an environment to let these young men go through and make their own decisions.
Merry Elkins:Ah.
Marty Strong:And what you get out of that is or people that think that way, and are capable of dealing with all that uncertainty, and that's what you that's what what you train. That's the raw material of what becomes a Navy SEAL.
Merry Elkins:Wow. Well, I've heard that one Navy SEAL motto is the only easy day was yesterday. Would you tell us how that can work as a motto for business leaders? And can you going we're pivoting here, but can you give us some effective business lessons and principles and pointers on how to address the kind of change that, you were referring to earlier and chaos?
Marty Strong:Sure. So one I I I wanna screw this up. There was a class was before my class, but not that long, maybe a year and a half before my class. And every class comes up with what's called a class t shirt. Now that started sometime in the early seventies, and you would go to a local t shirt shop.
Marty Strong:You couldn't wear it because you weren't a graduate yet, but those are called your your your class shirt. And but you had to come up with something. Had to come up with an image, and you had to come up with a saying. They came up with the only easy day is yesterday. I have no idea what did they took that from a song?
Marty Strong:I don't know where they found it, but, eventually, it it kind of encapsulated it's there's two ways of looking at it. One way of looking at it is it's never gonna get any any easier. Mhmm. You just basically have to suck it up because it get worse and worse and worse. That's one way of looking at it.
Marty Strong:Yesterday was a good time compared to what's gonna happen today kind of thing. The other way I like to look at it is the way I when I brief when I give presentations to military guys, mostly seals, they're leaving the service. And they're leaving having, you know, wonderful careers, and everybody in The United States knows who they are, you know, because now we have books and movies and everything. And they're they're leaving on a high point. Right?
Marty Strong:And I have a a presentation I give to them that's called thank you for your service, and that's the first slide. And then the second slide is now what? Question mark. And the third slide is, who cares? Question mark.
Marty Strong:Because Uh-huh. I think the only easy day is yesterday means if you won the Olympic gold yesterday, you basked in that yesterday, now you have to prepare for the next Olympic Olympic competition or the next race. Wow. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna win. You've gotta keep putting everything into this game.
Marty Strong:You have to keep producing. You have to keep improving. And and that's really what I think the only easy day was yesterday means is that it's you're on a you're on a journey of continuous self improvement, whether it's intellectual, psychological, physical, whatever, emotional. And there therefore, it can be kind of a mantra, a positive mantra, rather than it's gonna get worse and worse and worse and worse, which I think is kind of a negative way to look at it.
Merry Elkins:Yeah. Mhmm. The,
Marty Strong:you know, the the takeaways as far as practicality, the everything I just said will resonate with anybody whether they're in the military or not. It's Mhmm. I'm actually just started started my fourth business book. It's not really a business book. It's a fourth book, and it's the title is ask
Cathy Worthington:you can I ask you before that? Because we are gonna talk about your books, but I wanted to also ask you about being a UBS investment adviser, and now you are the CEO of a health care company and a board member of two technology companies. So I'm assuming your training as a seal led you to form these teams in the business world. And what would you say is the single biggest difference between the two paradigms?
Marty Strong:So the trend the transition and and the working title I have is is infinite focus. It's about personal development. So it doesn't matter if you're a seal, doesn't matter if you're a business person. Doesn't matter if you're a business person, you're running a health care company, or you're you're running a financial services firm, or you're a participant in in a company. The the idea of that is that you are always going to be focusing on your performance, short range focus, which is what most people think of the word focus, or discipline.
Marty Strong:But the other thing is you have to focus on what the end game is, what the outcome is that you're that you're reaching for, and that's the long range focus. So there's actually two different kinds of focus. There's the short range focus that allows you the discipline, the the habit forming, the repeat behaviors that gets you, you know, through the productive part of getting something accomplished or or phases of things, and then there's that long term outlook. What am I focusing on on the horizon? You know, it's a, you know, cup of coffee way down there.
Marty Strong:It's a certain dollar amount. It's whatever it is that you're focusing on. And that translates, and it it translated as a UBS guy, because I started from scratch with that too. Didn't have any clients. Didn't have any rich friends.
Marty Strong:And I had ended up after eight years doing high net worth management. It was all fee based, and I was a portfolio manager. And I had to learn it every single day, kinda like your own well, you said it was yesterday thing, but it was all learnable as long as you had the attitude that my job is to learn this and get better at this. Not just most people think about the numbers, but really it was about human nature, because everybody treats money differently. And you've got people.
Marty Strong:Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, people come in there, and they they've just got their their whole life savings was it sunk in a business. They just sold it, and they're sitting there with $2,000,000, and they're shaking like this. They've never had that kind of money before.
Marty Strong:They had no problem making hard calls as a business owner, and they went through all the the strife and and the journey to to start a business all the way through. But the idea that they had this money and they might blow it, they're freaking out. Mhmm. People that inherit money, same thing. I've never been around anybody with a lot of money, so I had to learn things I didn't think I was gonna have to learn.
Marty Strong:It had nothing to do with the markets. That stuff I kind of understood, or, like, it's easier to learn. It had to do with human nature. And ironically, what they're looking for in a an adviser, somebody that's helping them, is leadership.
Merry Elkins:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Marty Strong:They don't really need a therapist. They don't need somebody who's just gonna listen to them and say, I hear your pain or, you know, that kind stuff. What they're looking for, they're they're looking for someone who's going to sit there and tell them, we've got a handle on this. We can we can create something that protects what you have, and we can build on it slowly. We don't have to take big chances.
Marty Strong:Let me put together a plan. That's lead you're leading them towards a comfort or a calm space related to this fear they have about money. I never would have thought that. Right? The second thing is I talked to people that were self made most of my high net worth people were self made millionaires.
Marty Strong:Most of them had been bankrupt a couple of times. I thought if you went bankrupt, you couldn't do anything after that. It was like, you you were done. No. It was part of the learning process.
Marty Strong:That's the way they looked at it, looking back at at their at their lives. They also you'd think that if you had all the money in the world, right, you have $10,000,000 in the bank, and you got some big house, and you got boats and everything. You think that person would be happy, or you think that person would be in a good place, and you find out when they wanna talk to you. They don't wanna talk to you about their money. They wanna talk to you about the the son-in-law they can't stand or the daughter that won't listen to them, or it's it's regular people stuff.
Marty Strong:It's just like talking to the guy next door or talking to the woman at the at the grocery store. It's regular human. It I said, alright. So I have to understand human nature, and these aren't seals. These are civilians.
Marty Strong:These are not people I've been around for twenty years. These are a different kind of person. SEALs, you look at them and you say, are you good? Yeah. I'm good.
Marty Strong:They're not gonna sit there and go, no. I've got all these problems. So I went from that extreme to to normal people, which to me felt like it was an extreme until I realized this is the way most people are.
Merry Elkins:So you have
Cathy Worthington:to Already built into you. You had a very high tolerance for chaos. It was built into your training. It was built into your psychology. So you could
Marty Strong:tolerate all that change. My family divorce caused me to get smart about who I was, and a lot of the moving had to do with the divorce. So I was able I was a stronger person at 18 years old than a lot of people were, you know, at 24, 20 five because I was emotionally strong. And then you go through the training, and you're around those kinds of guys, and they're putting you through more chaos later on. They're trying to trying to trip you up.
Marty Strong:They're throwing all kinds of crazy stuff at you. Then you actually go into combat, and it's, like, you know, a tenth of the the difficulty because they were prepping you for worst case scenarios all the time. But if you kinda go in there and you're up against, you know, a a c class adversary, and you got the might of the United States Air Force and everything else behind you, it's not as terrible as they made it out in training. Right? So it's all to build up your your tolerance for chaos, and then also the judgment that you have to have when when everything falls apart, what do you do?
Marty Strong:You have to plan for what are we gonna do with what we know? What can we do with what we have? So all that leads to, you know, being more effective as a as an adviser to high net worth people.
Cathy Worthington:Right. Right. And and your entrepreneurial spirit really came out because you now you've published all these books. You have three business books, be nimble, be visionary, be different. Those are all three different books.
Cathy Worthington:And nine, Seal Strike series novels. Yeah. So you you are doing it all, but tell us about writing all those books.
Marty Strong:Same type of same, I guess, same sort of mantra or or approach to life. When I wrote my first novel, I didn't know how to write a novel, so I started reading everything I could find about it. I went from being clearly dumb on the subject, and so that's fine. So I'm just gonna start reading and and studying and looking at things and do whatever I have to do and try to get to a point where I can write something and go through whatever the process is.
Merry Elkins:How did you do it? And just just sat down and used your your discipline and your training to actually Sure. Make yourself sit there in front of the the computer? How did you do that?
Marty Strong:For every one person that's written a novel, there's about 500 that are selling you a book on how to write a novel.
Merry Elkins:So there's You're right.
Merry Elkins:You're right.
Marty Strong:So there's no lack of how creepy love their people.
Cathy Worthington:Mary's writing a novel too. She knows all about the strain. Yeah.
Merry Elkins:So yeah. And I'm not a nigger seal. You know, you
Marty Strong:start reading the the the generalist books, and then you start getting into the niche books, you know, how to find, you know, how to find a a publisher, how to find a an agent, how to find an agent in the subgenre. But you just keep reading and studying, and you you listen to webinars and master classes and all that. But I sat down, and, you know, and if you've been writing, the that's all great. It kinda gets you in a zone where you have confidence you can you understand the format. And then at some point, you have to go, you know, to to to to you have to start working it.
Marty Strong:Right? And and I had to write I mean, everybody goes to school has to write. I had to write in the navy a lot under under time to rest to a certain standard to be reviewed by senior leaders and all that. So I I didn't have a problem with the productivity part of it. Didn't have you know?
Marty Strong:Or even the discipline of it. I thought, alright. I'll just get up every morning, 05:30, have cup of coffee, sit down, and I'll write. But everybody's got a different approach to it that that works for them. I do a stream of consciousness writing for my novels.
Marty Strong:I do a very structured, kinda like a a storyboard approach to my business books. My business books, I wanna I want to pass along certain ideas, thoughts, principles, whatever, and I can't just be all over the place when I'm writing those and then just let it happen. Oh, that's an interesting thing. Think I'll throw that in chapter three. There has to be some kind of a a flow to it, to be taking somebody from where they start to someplace, hopefully, that's better.
Marty Strong:In novel, you don't have to do that. In novel, you know, if if Susie walks up to the curb and you're writing, you can say Susie takes a step off the curb. Susie, Michael Jackson, moonwalks back from the curb. Susie, you know, suddenly takes off and flies across the the street and lands.
Merry Elkins:You know? You can do anything you wanna do with Susie.
Marty Strong:There's no
Merry Elkins:right and wrong way. Creating a whole new world.
Marty Strong:It's fiction. You can make Susie Susie a superhero. Right? You can make her a sniper. You can make a sniper her a sniper target.
Marty Strong:You can
Merry Elkins:Well, talking about that, tell us tell us a little bit about the steel strike steel strike series. I mean, talk talk about the the subject a little bit.
Marty Strong:The first thing, it's not about me. The the main character is a a facsimile, a profile of pretty much any young young officer in any military, doesn't know a whole lot, is very concerned about their the the lack of respect of the enlisted men looking at them, because most of enlisted people have been in the business for a while, and the officer is the one rookie. They, make all kinds of mistakes, rookie mistakes. They overlead. They underlead.
Marty Strong:They they try to become as good as the enlisted guys, or they try to dominate them, or they try to become their friends. These are all kinda classic things. You can go back to World War two movies in the fifties. You'll find the same kinda characters. It it's just a standard character thing.
Marty Strong:Mhmm. I was an officer after being a seal for ten for, yeah, for ten years, and I was a senior. I was a senior enlisted. I a chief petty officer, so I was not a rookie officer. I looked like it because I was really I looked I've always looked really young from my age, but as as a brand new ensign, I had ten years of being a seal under my belt.
Marty Strong:So I couldn't write about that because that would be that wouldn't be as interesting. I needed to have a a character that had some conflict built in. But then I evolved him. Mhmm. I evolved him over the course of the books.
Marty Strong:And Wow. In a natural kind of logical way, he and he had setbacks and all that. Eventually, he was he was kicked out of the knee because of all of his medical problems, including traumatic brain injury. And then he became suicidal, and then he gets a call from a friend whose daughter's been kidnapped in Hawaii, and he's begging him to do something to help him. And so he ends up getting right when he's about to, you know, to check out, he gets pulled back into life.
Marty Strong:So it becomes a big redemption story because now he has a mission. Now he has something of value. Mhmm. And through that book, he ends up kinda getting his feedback under him and seeing himself in a different light. And then there's a couple books after that.
Marty Strong:So and a lot of that was talking to seals that have been through that kind of struggle. Human trafficking is what he ends up running into with the with the girl. There's a seal named Craig Sawyer that has been rescuing kids down in the Southwest Part Of The United States for about the last ten years. Wow. And I called him up, and he told me so that he gave me their background research on all that and what's going on globally and in The United States.
Marty Strong:So you don't I don't I didn't write the novel because I thought I gonna end up doing a research project, but you end up if you wanna have some credibility, unless it's a pure fantasy. Right. You can't talk about Boston and not describe Boston the right way because people have been to Boston, and then they'll go, that that's exactly what you're describing. Yeah.
Merry Elkins:Right. For sure.
Marty Strong:And it gets really bad when you get to equipment and things. So it it was free spirited writing on the storyline and in the characters, but research with you know, if they use the Kiwi's five thousand radio, I better make sure that that actually existed in the time frame. And Yeah. Can we look at a picture of it and say, okay. How many other tanners does it have?
Marty Strong:Because I'm gonna have to talk to it.
Merry Elkins:Yeah. That's true. Well, you have to do the same type of research, don't you, with your nonfiction? And, also, in your book, Be Nimble, you talk about crisis and chaos as we we're talking a little little bit about as opportunities for leaders and, frankly frankly, everybody to shine. How do you, aren't those really the hardest moments for a leader to shine?
Marty Strong:It's well, it depends on how you look at leadership. The the my definite of leadership is that it's, one, it's not management. And it's been it's been, I guess, blurred over the last twenty, twenty five years. And mostly in business schools, they they they act like management is the same thing as leadership. And management is what you do when you have systems and processes and people working as designed and as promised.
Marty Strong:And if something goes wrong, it's usually a system it's just a snag. And what do you do? You have people that either solve it or you pull out an instruction manual, you follow the procedures because the system's been documented. The person's got their, you know, their resume. That's the document documentation there.
Marty Strong:Where leadership is different, and you can be a person with both capabilities. The flip side of the coin of management is when you when your system blows up on you, when you don't have that system at all, it's not a it's not a fix. You don't go oil a spot and walk away to start humming again. It's a complete failure. If you haven't been trained or prepared to handle the kind of the kind of implications and consequences of that failure, you're just gonna sit there on your hands and and look around it, because you've been given guidance on everything you've been managing.
Marty Strong:Unless you're the inventor of the machines you're using I mean, look at a basic office environment. The copier goes down. And I don't care how many degrees you have. We all stare at each other because we're we're all we're all hope we're all hopeless. Right?
Marty Strong:And that's just one little machine. You can imagine if it's something major in your organization. Another one would be, you know, your number one salesperson, and anybody knows anything about sales. If you have 10 salespeople, it's usually a Pareto thing. There's probably one or two that are bringing in 80% of all your sales.
Marty Strong:Right? So you lose your number one salesperson. Wow. Okay. Immediately, you can calculate how much your your revenue drops.
Marty Strong:Then you get another another text. They went to our major competitor. Oh, man. So you lost market share, and you lost revenue.
Merry Elkins:Right.
Marty Strong:And you have to place that person, and you can't just go on the street and say, I you're a top salesperson, and you're not, but I'm a hire you because I know you're You put them in there, you you find out whether they can do it or not, because they all promise they can. So that's leadership. That sitting in there and reacting to that impact. Everything about COVID everything that COVID did to companies, probably more in the April 2020 time frame where it wasn't gonna only be two weeks, and your your main supplier all of sudden shut down. Well, if you only relied on one main supplier, then that's manageable.
Marty Strong:You can manage your way into redundant, you know, capabilities, but you can't manage your way out of the factory having zero. You know? You have to react to that by leading. Mhmm. You have to come up with a new plan, new way.
Marty Strong:You have to reinvent, reignite everybody's imagination, creativity, and get them in a room, get them emotionally stable because everybody's reacting to it as a crisis, and that's leadership. To be poised and controlled, maybe a little bit of humor, and then get practical, actually execute something that's that's constructive. Okay.
Cathy Worthington:Well, I was gonna
Merry Elkins:ask you.
Cathy Worthington:How how do you advise people to master disruption in order to survive and thrive? That sounds like this. Right?
Marty Strong:Sure. So if you were talking about martial arts, the way you would teach somebody to master an attack in a parking lot would be to prepare ahead of time by learning martial arts. Mhmm. You you there's nothing in the moment that's gonna prepare you for it. You need to prepare for that moment ahead of time.
Marty Strong:So in in combat training and in combat special ops training, you do lots and lots of storyboarding, lot of what ifs, all different kinds of contingencies, what if this happens, what if that happens? Okay. If this happens, what are you gonna do? If that happens, what are you gonna do? If you lose this radio, what are you gonna do?
Marty Strong:Do wanna go to the backup radio? What if you lose the backup radio? And you get all this stuff, and you're thinking all the time that probably things aren't gonna go the way they're planned, and therefore, I have to be thinking one or two or three steps beyond that first failure. Right. And then when it's all done, if I know what the job is, is there a way I can kind of MacGyver this thing and work around and get something together and still get the job done?
Marty Strong:And that's a mindset that you're taught to to to follow. Well, that's not the way people in commercial organizations, civilian organizations are taught. They're not taught to be constantly contingency thinking. They're not having boardroom tabletop exercises of a What so let's say we lost our number one salesperson. You see, they're not living the the potential of the of the crisis moment.
Marty Strong:Right. So it's more of a crisis moment, and it's more of a crisis because when somebody walks up to them in the parking lot and they realize, I don't know how to defend myself, and it's too late. It's too late. That's how you master disruption on the downside, how to limit the downside. You prepare for it.
Marty Strong:You think about it. You train all your leaders to be thinking about these things in advance, to bring things up bring things to your attention so you can start to foreshadow certain scenarios, and how do we deal with it at the top? Let's get three vendors instead of the one we have. Let's not be so dependent on the one salesperson. Mhmm.
Marty Strong:The the upside of disruption and mastering disruption is, in business especially, is the disruption and chaos that that are happening around you offer a essentially, a a a a broken field that you can kinda run through where before you couldn't because there was a whole line of people blocking you. Everything was controlled. All the players were in place. All the rules were in place. And so you couldn't beat them at their rules because they established these rules fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, and then they've been running the thing, and they're the master of the rules.
Marty Strong:And then something shakes up like an earthquake, and now there's all these little gaps and holes and slots, and and and you the vacuum can be filled by people that are quick weighted, you know, aggressive enough, and can think through a different way to achieve something in the new the new normal. That's how and and there's every single chaotic event in United States history, every one of the major stock market crashes, you know, 02/2008 and the COVID twenty twenty being the last two, gave rise to all kinds of new industries, new new tech titans after World War one, after World War two, after the twenty nine crash. You can go back and and if you look up that particular subject that way, you're gonna find all these big name companies that you remember that were powerhouses in the fifties and sixties. They were started in some guy's garage, you know, 1934.
Cathy Worthington:Yeah. We talked to people all the time that turned the COVID crisis into a new career. They pivoted, and we started our podcast during that time on Zoom when people started using Zoom. And and it was like we talked to people constantly who have done all this, you know, have engineered through it, the entrepreneurs.
Merry Elkins:Right.
Cathy Worthington:But it's difficult. Right? Yeah. It's
Merry Elkins:it's not
Marty Strong:It's it's more difficult because it's not normal to think that way. So it goes kinda comes down to your thinking.
Merry Elkins:We haven't been raised that way either, especially so many of us in Western society have had it very easy, And, they don't even know you were talking about failure. I mean, dealing with failure, so many people are raised not to even fail ever. And Mhmm. Talk talk about that. Talk about how do you how do you manage failure, and also the fear of it, because you have no idea what it looks like.
Merry Elkins:And then also, what about stress? Because a lot of this disruption causes a great deal of stress.
Marty Strong:So it's gonna sound like I'm just repeating myself, but let's go back to the the potential assault in the parking lot. If you are a master, you know, MMA fighter, and somebody's approaching you because they think they're gonna be able to beat you up and take your money, And your level of stress on a scale of one to 10 is probably a one. Probably more related to, I hope I don't kill this guy because I don't wanna go to jail, not a 10 where this guy's gonna kill me. You know? But if you're just the average person standing there, it's probably a 10.
Marty Strong:The difference between those two reactions to the same stimuli is the preparedness. Now some of it's physical in that example, but most of it's psychological. So it goes back to what we've been conditioned to by the society, institutions, etcetera, or to obey the rules, the intellectual rules, to follow the thought the thought patterns that have been approved, and to strive for stability, and that stability equals safety and security. Mhmm. And therefore, we've been given kind of a false hope that the universe, which is never never static, it's constantly changing.
Marty Strong:Every molecule is changing something. Right? We're given this false impression as humans, because eventually, when you're running a company, you've got that false impression as the CEO of a company too. If you've been raised this way and haven't been trained any other way, you think what your do is, if you follow the rules and do all the things you're supposed to do, you've checked all the boxes, you you're you deserve stability, safety, and security. Mhmm.
Marty Strong:And so it becomes more of a crisis for that kind of a person when the world doesn't go along with that. What the real world says, out of the blue, you lost your job. Out of the blue, you found out, you know, your your spouse is cheating. Out of the blue, you get into a car wreck, and and you're suddenly laid up in a hospital for three months. Because that's what happens every day, all around us, in every every place on the planet.
Marty Strong:It's almost like that way of thinking is a kinda like going, ma, ma, ma, ma. It's a it's a way of trying to ignore the reality by creating a false a false reality. So if you so if you recognize that, then you step back and you say, alright. And, military is pretty good about training people for this because the battlefield is is always chaotic. It's it's somebody told me one time that when you're planning a a mission, they give you all the information.
Marty Strong:Right? So it's kinda like army man. There'll be two guys in front of this door. There'll be one guy over here at this tower. There'll be a road.
Marty Strong:There'll be a truck, and there'll be all that. And and there's a combat veteran. He said, yeah. You can plan for all that, and you can come up with a perfect plan on how we're gonna do this for those two guys, but this is what it's really like. Think about you walk in your kitchen, you turn the light out, and all the all the cockroaches go.
Marty Strong:And there's no there's no cockroaches in half a second, and you don't know where they are. That's how combat works. Oh. The first time somebody takes a shot, the two guys in front of the door aren't gonna be in front of the door anymore. The truck that was coming in isn't gonna be there anymore.
Marty Strong:The guy in the tower is not gonna. Everybody's gonna do whatever the heck they wanna do, however they wanna do it, and so your plan is gonna go go, you know, go to hell in a handbasket. So you can't plan for the choreo the choreography, whatever the movie show you. It it doesn't work that way. Real people panic, and real people do do weird things in all in all walks of life.
Cathy Worthington:So So does does that mean do you do you believe that people can learn to lead effectively, or is that a trait people are born with? I think I know the answer, but I wanna hear you. Tell
Marty Strong:me. No. No. You can you can definitely all the things we're talking about is is psychology that we've learned, and then psychology we can unlearn. Everything we're talking about is the reality of the world and examples of crisis, personal or otherwise, and also how you can prepare yourself or prepare a team for the inevitability of that crisis by being conditioned and be thinking in a contingent manner and be always kind of second guessing what could go wrong, and then, okay, if this goes wrong, like that tabletop exercise, then what what can we do now?
Marty Strong:Either to diminish the impact and consequences if it happens.
Merry Elkins:Well, let's talk about taking risks a little bit, because as a former Navy SEAL, you had to know a lot about taking a risk. Talk about taking risks in life and in business.
Marty Strong:Yeah. That that's a really good segue. So if you're let's say you're the the a person that believes in stability, therefore, that affects that stability is what?
Merry Elkins:Causes stress.
Marty Strong:It's a risk. A risk. Right?
Merry Elkins:Mhmm. Uh-huh.
Marty Strong:And if you're the b person who who has prepared themselves and conditioned themselves in a different way, then there's less risk in life and less risk in business, more opportunity. Right? So if you are a, say, the type a person, imagine how they can actually be destructive being risk adverse. They think they're being absolutely, you know, constructive, proactive, and they're they're reinforcing stability, which is all good, good, good, good, a plus grades. Right?
Marty Strong:That person's like a librarian who, according to the Dewey Decimal System, has every book in its place, and the front door is locked. He doesn't like to let anybody come in and check out a book because that is disruption. It's also a risk to the stability they created. The world is perfect. My job is to protect this perfection.
Marty Strong:Then you have another librarian that believes in learning and everything, and throws open the door, and is behind them putting the door the books back where they're supposed to be because there's so many people coming in, and they're just, you know, loving every minute of it because they're seeing smiling people, and people that are that are learning through this this exchange of knowledge and not so much focused on a library as a containment zone for the for the books. They're inviting disruption because they think this disruption is the change of a of a person's mind through information and knowledge, which it is. It changes your paradigm. It changes the way what what you think. So the the risk mitigation, from a business standpoint, taught as a a method or even as a title in some places, Really, what you're doing is you're saying, what we want you to do while we're trying to push this company forward, everything else we're doing is we're trying to grow fast, we're trying to get big and all that.
Marty Strong:We want you to focus all your time on throwing out anchors and throwing out drogue parachutes and doing anything to keep that from happening. Because if we're successful in what we're gonna do, we're gonna change almost everything we are. Mhmm. And therefore, there's gonna be disruption, and there's gonna be people freaking out about change. And if you and anybody else tries to tell everybody in the company, we can do all these other great things and stay the same, well, then you're lying to them because that's not that's not what's gonna happen.
Marty Strong:So companies that are very dynamic have problems internally because the people in internally, if they're told everything is gonna be static like the library that's not being used, and suddenly, it's not like that. Suddenly, it's it's there's chaos, and there's all kinds of crap going on around them, and they're saying, we were told the change wouldn't do this. We're we're told we keep our jobs. We keep our titles. We we'd stay in the same office space.
Marty Strong:And that was never gonna be the truth because you can't do both. You can't try to change and also tell everybody you're not gonna change.
Merry Elkins:What would you like to have our boomer audience have as a takeaway today?
Marty Strong:I think that the the number one observation for baby boomers, which is unfortunate, it's also for younger people too, is Mhmm. The idea that that success is linear, that there's a foot a football play or plan that you have to do. You gotta follow it like a model airplane instructions, and that's the only way you can be successful. And that the path that you start on and the vocation or profession that you get into initially is supposed to be the be all, end all. For some reason, our generation, we were taught that.
Marty Strong:Get good grades. You can get into college, get good grades, get a good job, get a good job, stay there for twenty, thirty years, retire. Right? The world is so fractured, but it's filled with so much opportunity. You don't have to follow that game plan, and definitely young people don't.
Marty Strong:But lots of young people think that, well, if I don't have the master plan for the next twenty five years, I'm a failure. And in reality, especially if you're a boomer, if you've lived five or six or seven decades, you could have been in a different profession every one of those decades.
Merry Elkins:Right.
Marty Strong:In in this country, you could have and and when I when I helped, seals that are getting out, or I did this with the Naval Academy group, asked somebody, how old are you getting out? He said, I'm 39. I said, okay. How old will you be when you get through law school and become a lawyer? Or how old will you be when you become an engineer after you get through engineering school?
Marty Strong:He goes, what do you mean? I said, well, it takes four years, so I add it up. Oh, I'll be, you know, 43. And you kinda looked at me. Yeah.
Marty Strong:You could be a brand new lawyer at 43 or a brand new engineer at 43 or a brand new software designer or whatever because it's not about the it's not about the old plan anymore. And that that's the biggest takeaway, I think. Don't lock your yourself psychologically into there. You had one shot at it as a kid or one shot at it as a young person, and you blew it. Look at it as I can do anything I wanna do.
Marty Strong:I'll go ahead and do it. And if God comes along and takes me away while I'm doing it, well, so what? Yeah. Don't sit static and don't do that.
Merry Elkins:Go go to the next. You so much, Marty. That's great advice. Our guest today on late boomers has been Marty Strong, former Navy Seal officer, entrepreneur, and business leader, author of 12 books, and sought after speaker. You can learn more about Marty through his website, MartyStrong.com.
Merry Elkins:Thank you.
Cathy Worthington:And thanks for listening to us, and please subscribe to our YouTube channel for the late boomers podcast and take us along in the car, and let us know if we inspired you to take action. Please follow us on Instagram at I am Kathy Worthington and at I am Mary Elkins and at late boomers. Tune in next week when we'll be talking to another exciting guest. Thanks so much, Boomers fans, and thank you so much to Marty Strong.
Marty Strong:Thank you, Kathy. Thank you, Mary.
Cathy Worthington:Thank you for joining us on late boomers, the podcast that is your guide to creating a third act with style, power, and impact. Please visit our website and get in touch with us at lateboomers.biz. If you would like to listen to or download other episodes of late boomers, go to ewnpodcastnetwork.com.
Merry Elkins:This podcast is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and most other major podcast sites. We hope you make use of the wisdom you've gained here and that you enjoy a successful third act with your own style, power, and impact.
