Facing adversity: Build resilience like a Navy SEAL | Brent Gleeson & Nathan Rosenberg | Big Think E

You hello! I'm Nathan Rosenberg. Welcome to today's Big Think Edge. We're really pleased to have you here. I'm the founder of a management consulting firm, Signum. We start out our work in organizational transformation—a discipline I helped found, working at the transformation of Ford Motor Company back in the early 80s.

I'm a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy. I was an officer in the Navy; I flew helicopters, search and rescue. I worked for the Secretary of Defense as his executive support officer.

We're going to be delving into the area of leadership, management, and discipline with Brent Gleeson. Brent is a former Navy SEAL, a combat veteran with three deployments. He is an entrepreneur and has become an award-winning entrepreneur and a best-selling author.

We'll talk about both the book that he's already written, "Taking Point", and his book that will be coming out in the fall, "Embrace the Suck". He’s known around the world as an acclaimed speaker and consultant on topics ranging from leadership to building high-performance teams, from corporate culture to organizational transformation. He and I share those passions.

Brent is the founder and CEO of his management consulting firm, Taking Point Leadership, which is a progressive leadership management consulting firm with a focus on business transformation and building high-performance cultures. Besides that, as I said, his current book, the one that you can buy today at Amazon, "Taking Point", focuses on Navy SEALs and failsafe principles from navigating change.

So Brent, welcome! We're happy to have you here, and on behalf of everybody at Big Think, thanks for taking the time to be with us.

Brent: Thanks so much, Nathan. It's good to be here. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Nathan: Good! Brent, I think I'd really like to start out with kind of a softball, but one that everybody in the audience would think about. Tell us about the transition from being a Navy SEAL to being an entrepreneur and a management consultant. How does one make that transition? It seems like so even more industry-related.

Brent: Well, what happened before I joined the Navy? I actually grew up in Dallas, Texas, and did my undergraduate education at Southern Methodist University with degrees in finance and economics. After that, I took a job as a financial analyst with a global real estate development firm.

Now during that time, I had a college buddy, one of my fraternity brothers who was a year behind me at SMU. So he was now a senior, while I was working in corporate America, doing the finance thing. He was one of these young men that had a lifelong passion and dream to join the Navy and at least attempt to be accepted into the Naval Special Warfare training program for the SEAL Teams.

While I thought that was highly admirable, I deemed it to be somewhat unrealistic as a career path, understanding the rigors of the job and the extremely high attrition rate. So I was working, but we started training together; for me, it was just a way to stay fit and help a friend prepare for his arduous journey.

During that time, I started reading more books about the history of the Naval Special Warfare community, from our forefathers and the UDT teams during World War II to how we really cut our teeth as a premier assault force in Vietnam.

Over the years since then, I became really fascinated with the mindset and culture of that organization—a culture of high performance and how they became essentially one of the most elite Special Operations units in the world.

That growing fascination, coupled with the somewhat boring nature of my entry-level financial analyst position, led me to the culmination of making the decision to live a life of no regrets, knowing that pivot tables and spreadsheets would be there for me when I returned.

So one day, I wrote my parents a letter and told them I was quitting my job. They were just thrilled that I had, in the first place, made the decision to join the Navy and attempt to be accepted into the SEAL program. By the grace of God, I was accepted...