as a leader what you learn first is the core of it is self-discipline if you're not out there doing a lot and failing a good percentage of the time it means we're not doing enough and although people sometimes worry if I don't have my hand on every chest piece that we're going to lose I would argue if you have your hand on every chest piece you will lose okay welcome back or welcome to the finding Master podcast I am your host Dr Michael JY by trade and training a high performance psychologist and I am absolutely thrilled and honored to welcome one of the United States most accomplished and well-known military leaders General Stanley a crystal so what does leadership look like in the middle of a war zone one of the most dynamic and agile and consequential environments on the planet General mccristal knows he knows it intimately what it's like like and he has been committed to teaching his hard-earned leadership insights to others and that's really what this conversation is about heading up the joint Special Operations Command he led the US military's most elite spec ops teams against al- Qaeda in Iraq and from there was commissioned to command the war on terror in Afghanistan while that mission in it of itself is treacherous General Stanley mccristal also crashed headon with a political cont University one that led to the end of his military career but it opened the door to teaching leadership at Yale University authoring multiple bestsellers founding the mistal group his well-known management consulting company and even being portrayed by none other than Brad Pitt in the movie War Machine so after 34 years of service General mccristal retired as a fourstar general the highest rank currently achievable in the US Army so how does a high highly touted leader like him managed the stress and sometimes fear in some of the world's most elite operators and teams as you'll hear today General mccristal calls it shared Consciousness and empowered execution these two principles he says are the groundwork for guiding any organization from the war room to the boardroom to successfully carrying out any mission in your life and you may be surprised to find that his famously tough General's approach to leadership is less about barking orders on a battlefield and more about Believe It or Not gardening it's a fascinating discussion that we had it's rich with gems and insights and so with that let's jump right into this week's conversation with General Stanley mccristal General mccristal Stan I am so excited to have you in this conversation and your bodyw work is incredible and I mean hopefully what we're going to do is cover a lot of unlocks for our community because you've been at this for a long time and you've got a deep discernment and real exercises um that you've been through that allow the the insights that you've experienced to be actionable and real so I just want to start first by saying I'm honor to have the conversation with you and I just want to check in like how are you doing I'm doing really well Mike thanks for asking and I've been looking forward to this conversation oh awesome okay so you've LED in highly complex and volatile environment and you've also written about it more than most people ever will so on leadership and management and on teams on risk and you know these are topics that are tier zero when it comes to Military and business and Sport and those organizations that are constantly trying to understand and you know integrate these practices that you've come to understand in their teams so I we could start in so many different directions but I thought we'd start in two of your foundational ideas which is shared Consciousness and empowered execution can you just set the stage for our community on those two concepts shared Consciousness and empowered execution yeah Mike you started right at the core of what I think is most important so thanks for that um shared Consciousness and empowered execution are very carefully chosen terms and they were chosen after the fact and what I mean is I lived a life in the military and a series of leadership experiences that I went through and reacted to and adapted with and then only studied afterward and I studied them and I wrote them afterward and we actually coined the term shared Consciousness and empowered execution sometime after when we actually experienced creating that but I give you a background it really came from when I was commanding our counterterrorist forces called joint Special Operations Command that's the United States most elite special operating forces focused at things like hostage rescue Precision raids counter hijacking so it's a demographic of very experienced professionals all specially selected exquisitly trained the organization is lavishly resourced and so very high standards of execution are expected of it and I grew up in the organization most of my career but then in the fall of 2000 2003 became its Commanding General and that intersected with a moment for that command when we were graduating from the first 22 years of our history where we had done some great things but fairly narrow in scope and time and we suddenly were faced with a new problem and it happened to be in Iraq and it was in the the uh face of al-Qaeda in Iraq which was in an emerging terrorist group led by a young Jordanian named Abu musaba zaka what it did was it presented a bigger more complex constantly changing challenge than we had ever faced before it wasn't a discreet event a hostage crisis that you get a solution to or a single Target it was a campaign that we waged for years against this constantly morphing and constantly growing threat and what it forced us to do was instead of being a series of highly trained but siloed organizations like Delta 4 Seal Team 6 the Rangers and then other participants like the Central Intelligence Agency and FBI instead of Us coming together for a very short amount of time in a discreet execution we had to wage this long-term campaign in which collaboration across those organization was essential before we used to think of it as a nice to do if you do it occasionally but the reality is you don't commit yourself as an organization to that and we found that to to compete in this battle we were waging a lethal battle we had to completely change how we operated at the core of that was to have a shared Mission a single understanding of what we were trying to do and that required us to have what we ultimately call shared Consciousness that's understanding contextually what is happening we used to to say in our meetings that the goal was to have every person understand everything all the time now that's impossible but the reality was instead of just understanding my role or my unit's Mission or my goals I had to understand the wider context of of what we were trying to do so that as I applied my actions it fit within the context of that larger strategy and situation and that way instead of me just doing what I'm told I'm not on the assembly line just waiting for the the uh Appliance to come down and I put on the part that I'm assigned instead I'm part of building this Appliance so I have to understand what's happening everywhere all the time and so it required a level of sharing of information that we'd never done before because we were very hesitant in that world and a curiosity I would say an individual curiosity and an organizational curiosity to understand what's happening outside my lane on the other side of the wall because ultimately it affects me and the analogy I would use for the organization is you're you're keeping your eye on the scoreboard of the game not on your personal statistics your batting average or your yards because they only matter within the context of whether we're affecting the overall campaign so the shared Consciousness was core and it was very foreign to us in fact it's not very common in the military or in fact I would argue in many other organizations but it was Central enabler now the product from that was empowered execution and sometimes people say well that's just decentralized authority to act well it it's more than that uh if we say I decentralized Authority for you to do something and then I hope you'll go do it that's that's fine but in reality for you to act effectively you have to have that contextual understanding from shared Consciousness to know what to do and to know when to do it and so instead of people waiting to be told what to do we provide them the shared Consciousness and then we Empower them with both the expectation that they act but also the contextual understanding that they can act effectively and those two fit together now they're they're easy to brief it's easy for us to talk about in the conversation today it's devilishly hard to achieve inside organizations but when you do it unlocks great potential yeah great clarity um in the way that you just described it and I love that you're nodding of how complicated it can be especially in complex environments and those two words I know you understand um with great depth complex and complex and and complexity so let me just dial this down one more level is that something that people and there's some it's the um the orthogonal tension between Concepts that make something difficult to get at like um empowerment and accountability people want empowerment they want to know that what they're seeing and feeling that they can Implement and do you know something um to take action towards the shared goal right and so but don't always necessarily want the accountability so you're working to enable empowerment how do you hold decisions and actions and those actors accountable when there's a mistake and of course you celebrate the successes but how do you do the accountability bit yeah you really need to frame this because if you think of a typical organization shaped think of a pyramid shaped hierarchy there's most senior leaders and it goes down and the goal is always to push empowered execution authority to act as low as you can not always to the very lowest level but as low as you can I used to tell people to decentralize until you're uncomfortable and then go one more level now the great question would be asked not by people at the top but by leaders in the middle and I would say I want you to to push down authority to act and expectation and they'd say well if I push that down am I still responsible for the outcomes and they're really asking for the failures if I let my subordinates make a decision and they fail am I responsible and my my answer was yes and they go well that's not fair and I said maybe so but it's not my problem because here's how I want you to think about it not my problem okay good the goal is that your responsibility is to prepare those subordinates as best you can both with training with confidence by picking the right subordinates with the right information to set up the environment that maximizes the probability that they will be successful and you are going to be responsible for their successes and their failures and it took a while for a lot of middle of the organization leaders to begin to feel comfortable with that the more Junior people when they got Authority it wasn't uniform but many of them grabbed it and they felt pretty good they needed to have confidence that they really had that Authority but they were pretty good about grabbing it but then the question comes down to what about failure because there's going to be a percentage of failure and in our counterterrorism Command our failure rate was about 30% and that means you go in an operation where you don't ACC Lish your mission and sometimes that means you suffer casualties people who are killed or wounded on on our side and so failure carries a price and so you have to figure out how you want to deal with that and the tradition the cultural Habit in our unit when I took over was to avoid risk and at first I thought they're avoiding risk because they don't have the nerve or the courage and that was absolutely unfair that wasn't the case what they didn't want to do was fail in a mission they didn't want to have to get in front of me or other leaders and say you gave us a mission we failed so they would try to mitigate risk to zero and when you try to mitigate risk to zero and you try to get a backup to the backup and all what it means is you don't do very much if anything and so slow yeah right yeah become incapacitated in so many ways so I had to push the organization to a higher level of failure rate I said if you're not out there doing a lot and failing a good percentage of the time it means we're not doing enough which then means that how the command digests failure is important we had a daily video teleconference with the whole command and so every if you were a subordinate leader and you failed last night and you're reporting that you failed you're looking at me on video and you're saying well boss we went out we did this and we failed now how I respond matters to you but we had about 7500 people on that video teleconference every day it really matters to those other 7499 because if I get angry if I look disappointed if I if I respond badly they are not going to want to take a chance tomorrow because they don't want to be you tomorrow and so I love I I I love this right now because this is the mark of a great leader in sport I think there's a window after an athlete makes a mistake that we have about three to six seconds maybe where we make or break the relationship between coach and athlete where we set the stage and the tone for the tolerance for going for it or playing it safe and it's a simple little IR roll or head nod and it it happens that fast hopefully they don't look over to the sidelines right that's that's the hope that they're just task focused but so your response I love that you're talking about this that your response actually is um setting the culture for Innovation for creativity for risk-taking or for low tolerance for mistake making and so many organizations have been part of like fail fast fail forward fail often and it's total BS yeah right they're saying that because it's popular and they the spirit of it is right but the tolerance is like so marginalized that it actually never really takes place and people are are terrified that's right and when you describe between a coach and a player sometimes that can be very personal the coach can put their arm on the shoulder but we're now in a distributed environment most of my command was distributed so I would get these reports virtually and over a video teleconference link and my response was over a video teleconference link so I couldn't put my hand on their shoulder and say I had to learn to respond in a way that communicated to them my continued confidence in them I love that so so let's dig right underneath the surface um it sounds like you recognize that we need to work more horizontally that's the teams team of teams right there's a horizontal shared information um the the the Consciousness that is shared there okay and then you also recognize that we need to go for it a bit more that we have to raise the um the threshold for mistakes and failures which in the military consequence or in the consequential environment of military um in the theater of war is a radical position that you're taking and and so those are the two variables that you're working from how would you work from the inside out because you don't want failures and mistakes right like no nobody really wants them but you're encour encouraging to go for it so how would you work from the inside how would you work on your psychology your emotional regulation your arousal regulation so that when you got information that was unfortunate let's say that you are able to stay the course for the um philosophical mission that you are on which is to enable people to go for it were there any best practices that you are using so that you could be calm and clear and regulate your emotions yeah I I think the first is understand that we use the term that we lead by example and people say well I'm going to go out and lead by example well the reality is you are always leading by example 247 people are watching everything you do and so not just those moments when you brushed your hair and stood straight and tried to be as charismatic as you can but they're watching you when you're acting like a fool as well and so so I had to learn that at the core of leadership is self-discipline and in the modern environment where we are so distributed and doing so many things virtually it's even got some additional nuances because if you are briefing me about something whether it's a failure or not and I am multitasking while you do it or am I my mic is off but I'm turning talking to somebody I'm signaling not only to you but to everybody else on there that what you're doing is that important to me if if I get visibly angry when you do something again it creates this uh Ripple and in a big organization where people see you but they don't see you a lot a single action like that is exaggerated you know you may not you think well I just got mad for 30 seconds that's no big deal but for people who don't know you or more Junior in the organization they remember that and they they ratchet its importance up so I learned that tremendous self-discipline particularly on camera but also in person when you're out moving around because a four-star general meets a private and you may meet 250 privates a day they meet one fourstar General in their entire career and so they will right home that night I met General X and there either going to say he's a great guy or he's not and so every one of those just snapshot moment interactions becomes very very important to that individual but also important to your ability to communicate with the organization so as a leader what you learn first is the core of it is self-discipline and that is deciding what you are trying to communicate to people because part of it is through your your body language and verbiage um and part of it is through other ways the example of your behaviors Stan so self-discipline let's let's see if we can unpack this a little bit is it the discipline to stay true to the first principles that you're operating from or is that is that how you're thinking about discipline to stay committed to the first principles like going for it um clear communication uh creating space for honest dialogue those would be a hand the first um principles that I'm hearing and of course shared Consciousness and that we spoke about earlier so is that what the discipline is well at the core it is it is accepting cander and being candid being absolutely truthful Integrity all the things that you think are important and we all list them and we say we believe in them it is do you really do it how do you treat people in a constant basis that's the discipline to KN to know what we should do but don't uniformly do it how much of you would and I'm going to bristle even when I ask you this question because I I'll explain my uh context to to the bristling in just a moment but you're human and there are consequences in your environment and somebody says I failed and you're in front of the the thousands of people that you just mentioned did you have to fake it did you have to fake your self-discipline were you boiling inside and if that's the case um how would people trust you if they knew that you were faking it and if that's the case how would you manage that later yeah I mean every leader is off a certain percentage of the time and right a certain percentage of every day you don't act the way you'd like to act you treat somebody wrong you do something you lose your temper the key is that that doesn't become The New Normal one of the most famous generals of all time had this volcanic temper and it would just explode but we don't associate George Washington with temper tantrums but in reality he was this seething personality that held it in check most of the time and when people saw him and I think those that gave me credit um maybe more than I deserved would say that yeah I know you were mad but you you maintained your self-control in that moment they used to there were several things like if I get angry I will clinch my jaw and people who know me well will see it or when we do this big video teleconference if somebody's briefing and I took my glasses off and I would wipe my face the chat rooms that were of everybody on would just go wild they'd say uhoh the old man's unhappy boom boom boom sometimes I just to Wi my face it's your poker tail right yeah of course yeah but but the reality is they know that that's not being deceptive that's controlling because it's not helpful to throw a tantum almost people can know when you're disappointed or angry you don't have to to scream at them to do that the most powerful leaders I've ever seen and and dealt with would just look at me and then go St I'm disappointed and that would crush me if they had screamed at me I'd kind of discount them um and and so I think it's the the issue is self-control and it's never perfect okay so let's say somebody wants to cry and they're really feeling something you know and it's a really hard conversation that they're having and their their body temperature heats up their chest uh and breathing changes a little bit they feel the tension in their neck muscles they feel it behind their jaw have you ever cried by the way Stan I have okay and then they feel it behind their eyes yeah and then they're just doing everything they can to hold it in to look a certain way to not look whatever fill in the blank okay that psychic and emotional tension is so costly that it's not it it's not the letting go and actually being in a vulnerable state where later that night people talk about being exhausted it's not the letting go it's the holding back to look a certain way and present a certain way that has such a cost to our Energy System so I'm I'm wondering how would how did you manage your emotional self in a vuka environment with real consequences sometimes having a bad day and getting information that is difficult to hear how how did you manage yourself after how did you take care of yourself yeah let let me start first with last time I cried I was hos in a beer party at my house and The Keg went dry and that that broke me up pretty bad um God but your question is is absolutely true and I'm going to give it both ways okay because there are times when you are very emotional either you are hearing something you don't want to hear from people or you're in that moment and you try to control it and I don't run off when I'm by myself and soab it's just it's not my release mechanism my release mechanism usually was to go work out and I would go to a gym or I'd go out and run the worst moments of my life when I got really crushing things as quickly as I could I would go out to run because to me that was a chance I I run alone and it allowed me to burn off some of that energy you can you can think and and do it now but I switch it because often particularly when you're a leader you'll be talking to somebody and you will be creating that feeling in them and you know you are and you are doing it intentionally because you are just looking them in the eye and you're you know maybe you're firing them maybe you are correcting them for something and in the military environment where stoicism is is surprised what I found is you don't encourage them to break down and cry you don't say it's okay and then hug them because they will never uh forgive you that moment what I mean is you've let them you've caused them to be vulnerable in front of you their Superior uh and if you suddenly you know do the hug thing their their sense of self-respect will will be damaged forever so what I found is you create that meeting in them you know it they know it the best thing to do is to to limit the length of that and say okay I'll talk we'll talk later move out and it allows them to move out keep a measure of self-control and self-restraint you know that they're crushed when they walk out but it's almost an Unwritten thing that I am not going to to cause or let you uh put yourself in the situation in front of your your boss or your boss's boss that will embarrass you later you know I'm I I I think at first pass I would say okay there's two things that are happening for me right now because I I want to get to your vision of empathetic leadership and empathetic um culture setting and so at fir if I didn't know that you valued empathy I would say oo like okay let me let's let's double click here and and listen at work whether it's military sport business it's not therapy th this is not the place for Psychotherapy that's not how this works the relationship between two people um The Invisible handshake or sometimes explicit handshake is we have a shared Mission and you have a role and I have a role one is not more important than the other we need each other and we need to also be there for each other and and so I think that what I just heard you do the the approach is actually highly empathetic is that you're understanding and embracing the internal condition and what and the downstream consequence of Letting Go in front of a superior could be one of the worst things that happen in the structure of the military might be in the moment incredibly healing wonderfully freeing um create great space for a person to know that they're okay but you're saying because of the context of that decision and the context of I'm sorry the context of the environment that you both are operating in it's not the right call and that is would you say that's empathy I do because I think I understand the wider view of how they want to have their relationship with me how their Persona their pride over time and so we both know that they are hurting but we both know that if they suddenly show this tremendous vulnerability that that goes well on talk shows that it changes it changes view of themselves it undermines it now it doesn't mean that I don't know that if they go through something they're going to be upset I got that we both know that we don't have to say that and so what we don't have to do is put them in a uncharacteristic situation because if I'm sobbing in my boss's arms you know after one bad situation the next day when he looks at me and he asks me if I can do a tough Mission Etc the relationship is impacted by that previous interaction what if you flipped it what what if you flipped it and you said that there is incredible courage to be honest with emotions and we know like as a psychologist okay we know that when you can name an emotion and you can express an emotion you actually um relieve it you you you don't have to keep it you know bottled up and there's no Downstream like naming it and expressing it is actually a way to decrease the intensity of it so is okay that's just good science but you're saying contextually that could never really work it would be difficult particularly in the part of the military that I was in where a person's pride in Persona and the the group Norms were such similarly let's say we're about to go out on an operation and I would go out on operations you know pretty frequently with the guys and if somebody looked at me and they go hey boss you scared now I can look at him I can I can joke and I can smile and say oh yeah terrified and that's fine if I look at him and I got that quivering lip and I go yeah that's not fine because that undermines their confidence that undermines this shared agreement we're all scared but the shared agreement is we're not going to all break down into a quivering you know puddle on the floor because it requires you to to stand up so you have to understand the moment the culture yeah I totally get that and you've been in the Ampitheater both politically um both of war and so I do not say this with disrespect um but if you were to do a self Scout and you were to look at yourself and do an analysis do you feel like because you've operated in these um stoic environments U which isn't quite exactly accurate it's like um non-emotional non-reactive uh environments maybe is a way to think about it that you've that you've numbed or haven't exploited the the the the range of your emotional health or would you say no I feel like I'm really in touch Mike like I I know how to work with my emotions really well yeah it's a fair question um and the answer is I don't know um I certainly feel emotions um I feel you know Joy I feel fear I feel you know love sadness all those kinds of things um I don't demonstrate them as openly as some people do uh and sometimes I do I mean you know but but the reality is I am more apt to control my emotions if I can I I try to control my emotions at least the expression of them because I don't think it's always helpful to be overly expressive particularly when you become in leadership positions and more senior leadership positions what you think is a small expression of your emotion again is exaggerated it's the dinosaurs tail you turn your head but your tail turns around and it creates all kinds of uh reaction so I do think that leaders have got to be cognizant of the impact of what they do how they act what they say now does that make me the marble man like Robert El Le or somebody who's you know so controlled that I'm not effective sometimes it may do that uh but but I wouldn't claim that uh I don't think it's all the time okay so so let's let's slight pivot and stay with this discipline idea because I I love where you're going with this when you are acting in a disciplined way and you are very disciplined so you're you're not having to act a certain way but when you're in the action of of having or demonstrating self-discipline um how do you speak to yourself because if I have it right you're you're working with information that's difficult maybe it's like not what you wanted but you're staying the course on your first princi principles and you're going to be disciplined in not which means to not be emotionally volatile so how do you speak to yourself during those moments generally I coach myself pretty well uh on if you said on a daily basis because at a certain time late in the day I literally critique myself in my mind on all those points in the day when I wasn't the person I should have been and I've got a wife who reminds me when I'm I'm not the person I should have been which is more often than I'd like um but the reality is I do I get introspective about that and I I beat myself up pretty hard about not being and I'm always comparing it to the person that I have decided that I want to be you know the values the first principles and whatnot the level of self-discipline the execution and whatnot so I think that when I am in a situ sitation where you've got options to be very emotional and Petty or or something that I don't want to be or be something different if my mind's working right it's constantly reminding say say wait a minute think long term think the big picture think what you are and what you want to be where I fail is in the moment where something in inside of me just ignores that and and says nope I'm going to lose my temper with this person or about this thing and and that's typically when I fail my self-discipline it is not with what I do in my life about lying cheating stealing or something it is about my reaction to somebody who frustrates me and when I take the high road and I bottle it up and I walk away or or or I say less I'm happy when I don't then I typically I walk away and I go wow I didn't do that very well so so uh let's just play with a ratio um speaking to yourself well meaning like you've got your back it's a there's a positive productive nature in the way you're coaching yourself as opposed to the critical judgmental harsh how would you fet that out in a percentage throughout a normal day is it like an 8020 80 on the productive side or is it more like flipped around the other way well I would challenge that I would say it's all productive if it makes me act better and so whether I chiding myself or whether I'm I don't spend a lot of time patting myself on the back saying what a great guy I am I mean I like myself don't get me wrong but but I don't walk around going Stan good one well done I spent I spend more time going he you know you didn't do that very well but but I don't have self-loathing over that I just have this absolute belief that I can be better than that you know that's almost the refrain in my mind I'll do something that that doesn't I'll go I I can be better than that so you work from high standards or Clarity of Standards meaning the person that you want to be that that is clear to you is that correct yes and then you're constantly working to to get as close as you possibly can to that but it's doesn't sound like you're you're you're like getting in it where you feel small it's like no no no you can do better now come on now like yeah okay so all this happens for all of us when we are fatigued it's really hard to be our very best and so I always think about positions of leadership like yours that the old model that people were getting four hours of sleep and they're like I'm the one come on you know harden up let's go you don't need sleep that's for whatever what do you mean you need water you don't need water you know like that type of old school way of thinking about internal resources how do how do you this a two-parter how do you think about sleep and recovery and um how good are you at at Living aligned with like best practices for Recovery yeah now I'm pretty good during the War I had a period of years where I slept four hours a night because that was our routine my routine and but what works for me is a as much of a discipline routine as possible and if they seem like small things but I work out every day if I don't work out I am not as nice a person as if I do I mean you could you could track it and the data would support it if I don't work out then I am just more difficult with myself and with others if I don't eat the way that works for me I eat one meal day but if I eat early in the day then I'm not comfortable I don't perform well I eat only dinner at night and if I stick to that routine I am a better person I'm more centered or whatever we want to call it um I I sleep much more now than I used to I go to bed as early as I can you know sometimes shamefully early but um because I found that as you described I am not at my best when I'm tired I am shorter with people I am less precise on things and so what I try to do is pres prevent myself from getting in that location or that position and that's why the routine is so important to me the you know getting a certain amount of sleep eating in my rhythm working out those all keep me within a the best range for me yeah so we call we think about that front loading training like getting ahead of it so that you are resourcer as opposed to operating you know depleted um if we could just maybe think about how you articulate what it feels like when you're at your best what is you unique to you uniquely your understanding of what it's like when you're at your best how do you describe that yeah I think when I'm at my best I am thinking long term and so everything I am doing I am thinking about something how it will play out over time whether an organization that I'm leading and I'm giving guidance I'm thinking about what the impact of everything I say is going to be overtime um I think that I am uh Resolute in my commitment to decisions and directions that I'm going and I don't mean inflexible here but I mean once I've got the way I want to go I don't waver on that I've made a decision I am going to do this and we are going to go to that and I stick to that and I think I met my best I don't revisit I don't keep going back and say should I be doing this no if I've decided to do it unless new information comes I'm going to do that and I think that I am a good partner a good friend to people to serve with and someone that they can count on I am dependable and so when I'm at my best all of those things come together and uh that's really cool so when in this Clarity of thinking so when you're thinking long term do you fundamentally operate from a and I'll be binary here an optimistic framework or a pessimistic framework oh I I think I'm an optimist from that standpoint because you know they once said that farmers are the the greatest Optimist because they plant with the expectation they'll be able to Harvest and and I think that way I'm 69 years old and I'm still working full-time and I'm still doing things for the long term because I believe that one I like it but I believe that there's going to be benefit from that and so I think that you know I may worry about certain things but generally I have a very confident optimistic view of where I'm going and and the people I care about and when you when you're using your mind one of your great assets it's obvious um I want I want to understand how you make decisions but I just I'm wondering if like are you an extroverted thinker or are you an introverted thinker do you write and think privately um do you gather information from other people and talk it out and work it out real time like how do you I I know that you said you run so I'm thinking um that that was a good time for you to think but I don't want to make an assumption are you more an extroverted or an introverted thinker yeah I am probably more of an introverted thinker but I don't I'm not very far on that scale because I will do a lot of thinking about something I do like to write things down I like to to uh sort of wrap myself around it but ultimately before I make a decision and I think it's sometimes just to reassure myself I will go and gather the inputs of others now part of that is to get their views so I can make sure that I've got a complete data set before I decide but the other part is I believe if you don't bring people into it you don't get their level of support and so I'm I'm a great believer in that and so I I do spend a lot of time on that I do tend to make decisions quickly though so maybe that's patience that's that's really interesting because decisiveness and inclusion of other people's um ideas and their points of view and what like those can be at odd sometimes as well and so that was one of the questions I have for you is like how do you how do you act with speed but also make sure that you're bringing people along and I don't know if there's an easy answer there or if you have a process that would support that and I think maybe you just hinted at it is that I have an idea of where I want to go and then I go gather some information points of view I start to share my ideas maybe they're informing what I do but I'm sharing my ideas with them and then I move quickly is that is that kind of the formula yeah that that's very accurate from what the way I react and then um you're a great writer so do you do you find that a default of writing ideas down is Meaningful for you um it always helps me uh refine my thinking I will think I think something and I will start to write it out and I will find when I've when I have continued to re shape it that my thinking gets refined in the writing process it's almost like that process causes me to think more um and I find that very valuable yeah it's a forcing function like what word or phrase am I inserting here to make yeah and so now one more level of this thinking bit here considering the interconnected nature of of modern challenges how do you get a big picture about how the landscape is uh currently operating yeah on any single given issue I try to rem or retain as much of a a general understanding of the environment all the time so try to marinate in the general information so that when a decision comes up it's not out of context it's not something completely new and different if I if one of those comes up I've got to take some time educate myself so that I know something about it before I do otherwise if it's it's a decision made within this ecosystem I've been operating in you only probably need a little bit of new information and your intuition gets much much better because you've been operating in there and suddenly something comes up and you start to say what should I do about that you're not going to be far off because you speak the language you've got a cultural understanding of what's occurring and in those situations I'll find I often make very rapid decisions sometimes faster than I should um but I'm a believer that most of those decisions are better made quickly because they're either correctable because they're not you know life or death um but also when you dog paddle in circles agonizing over decision you very rarely improve it um and so I think it's sometimes better just to make one to get moving is it a crisis for you when you have to make a slow decision or um because you don't have enough information is that a crisis state for you or like maybe do you have an example where you you had to make a quick decision you didn't have enough information you couldn't pull people along um and I'm going in two different directions whether it's a slow decision or fast decision but when you weren't able to like use your strength which is introverted thinking for the most part yeah um do you have an example of one of those two well I mean in in war you're always operating with much less information than you would like and so there's this T tendency to keep asking for more intelligence to get more clarity before you make the in information my personality type doesn't agonize over that I get as much information as is available I make the decision and it I don't agonize over it after the fact it it's pretty funny my wife and I are very different in that way in that I will think about a decision before we make it but once I make it I don't worry about it at all even if the decision turns out to be completely wrong I don't I don't beat myself up I don't anything I said I made a decision and it either worked or it didn't work um my wife will make a decision and then she'll start saying oh I don't know if I made the right decision you know you made it don't worry about it and I think that's just a personality trait in people I think we're all slightly different um yeah there there is there is a healthy bit of uh research around those two types people that require and like a lot of information and those that are more decisive U there's a preference if you will between those two approaches to decision- making it sounds like you're very clearly decisive and you move on and it doesn't sound like you excuse me it doesn't sound like you have um some sort of weird Pride or ego that you don't re-evaluate course correct you know if you're afforded the time and luxury to make a second decision no very rarely I had a decision where I agonized for tremendous amounts of time I've had a couple of big ones in my life where you know I spent time making but it was funny as soon as I made the decision I knew if I'd made the right one for some reason it just it told me it was a time back when I was a lieutenant colonel in the Army and I had two choices I could either stay in the division I was in take a high staff job which was the best for my career or I could go back to serving the Rangers again and I was iing over it because I was getting all this advice on both sides and then this Ranger non-commission officer came to see me and he he congratulated me on my decision to go back to the Rangers and I said well actually I haven't made the decision yet Nick I'm still thinking about it and he looked at me he said sir but what about the boys and I mean instantaneously I go you're right I made the decision and I the second I made it I knew it was completely right for me um and I never you know even if it had turned out everything my career had not worked Etc I just wouldn't second guess it because I knew it was right for me decisions and um points of view you know in small rooms that are let's say non-consequential to a country that that's one thing to have your point of view yeah and and but you you are at the top of the food chain when it comes to decisions and influence about how military was going to um use the might of its full force and so I'm wondering if if it's okay to ask you you know you've had over a decade where you had some controversy this is I'm sure you've had many more controversies than this but but I wanted I wanted to you know the the the one controversy where um I want I want some guidance on maybe what you've learned um from speaking your Your Truth when it is at odds with leadership and so navigating the tensions that can emerge between you know um decision makers and chain of command when you're at odds with it and this was you know going back to 2010 when um you had a point of view that was different or uh conflicting with the um the President and Vice President yeah that is the hardest sing single decision-making process I've been involved in wasn't the hardest decision but the process was and and just to remind uh anyone who may not be aware of it the decision I I was sent to Afghanistan to take over and I was told to do a survey and see what we needed to do and then come back with recommendations on the strategy for the way ahead and the war was already unpopular and we were already losing to the Taliban so there was a lot of problems and I went over there not thinking that we needed more troops I thought we just needed to change the way we operated but I did this big analysis for almost two months 60 days with the uh staff and came to two conclusions one we needed to change the way we were operating fundamentally and we needed to ask for 40,000 more troops and I knew that asking for more troops was going to be supremely unpopular back in DC and I was completely aware of that but we did the analysis we ran computer simulations we did all this kind of stuff and concluded that just changing the way we operated wouldn't do it you had to you had to have a bridging Force for a period of time so made the you know we did the analysis and then I said all right well if that's the answer and I believe that we are right that's what I'm going to do now when we articulated that up our estimation was right it wasn't popular and so we went through this series of video teleconferences from afar as we go through this process with the National Security Council the president the vice president whatnot and there was immense pressure to back off on on the recommendation to to cut it back and whatnot and I knew that that would be very popular um but I was in this position because I knew that the analysis that I believed was that if we wanted to have a significant probability of success we actually needed to do this and so I knew that that was the answer that I believed was the right one but here's the really hard part you're not sure it's the right one I was asking for additional troops but people let me want to look at me and said are you sure this is going to work and i' say no I'm sure that it has a higher probability than the alternative I can't guarantee you it's going to work and so you start to to question yourself you say well if it's not a high enough additional probability should I just kind of go along with what I know I chose not to I chose to push and uh I don't regret that um I it it if I got it right it got you fired is that correct is that too much to say it caused part of the tension what actually uh well when I say got I resigned but yeah that's a way of saying it um was a reporter embedded with us and he wrote a critical article that said that we we were dismissive of the uh the particularly the vice president at the time and so this negative article came out and so I accepted responsibility for that I didn't think the article was fair but I accepted responsibility offered my resignation the president accepted it yeah that's not fired that is like um yeah so I I I take that back to be inflammatory but when I read about your story I was like damn I love that whether it you know led to your res or not I I'm looking for counsel and I think a lot of people are on guidance on when you have a position of influence how do you maintain an effective working relationship with senior stakeholders when you are seeing it differently and that's the counsil I'm looking for like and I don't know if there's a there's a oneliner that you can provide but how would you shape that tension yeah I want to throw I think it's very I want to throw a reality on top of that um and that is a little bit of the impostor syndrome we get very senior but at some point even when you get senior you're the new person at that level so I become a four star and suddenly I find myself in the Oval Office in the white house and they people ask you direct questions about something and there is a clear pressure to go along with a consensus to agree with something and I don't know if you're familiar with cs Lewis's famous article or essay the inner ring and it talks about this desire we all have to be in the Inner Circle to be accepted to be in The In Crowd to be you know in the club and we are willing often to laugh at jokes that are at the expense of other people we know we shouldn't or to to do things and I think getting into the halls of power is very much that way you're you're a brand new senior person they suddenly bring you into the coach's office or to the president's office and they say this is this way don't you think and of course the easy thing is to go oh hell yeah and give them a thumbs up but you don't wouldn't you agree that it's that first little half sentence that that you know the setup is coming and so it is that self-awareness and that courage to be able to go wait a minute that's not what I think this is not if I had time to think about it this is not the way I would answer but it's hard and I try to warn everybody who is even though they've been in a job for years and years when they get to a new rarified level they suddenly get in the sea suite and there are new pressures new environment and it is disorienting at first and so it's uh it's a challenge I would imagine that in the Oval Office the president almost never hears no because that's his home turf once you get in there all the forces around you are to say something that is pleasing to the people in that room oh God that is like GH what a problem for for for really leading and you don't get prepared for that we're all taught our business as a psychiatrist or as a soldier or as whatever and we may be a complete expert we're really not schooled in that because it's hard to school someone in that uh phenomenon it's why I so you wouldn't know this I'm going to if you if you'll accept it I'd love to send you a book I just wrote and it squares up with this concept that you just described and I think it's one of the great constrictors of one's potential is this excessive chronic fear we have of the opinions of others and if we're not careful we are living living life um to to fit in and to belong as opposed to be about the first principles and put them into action and I just for fun we I called it fopo fear people's opinions and um I I think that that conforming contorting that um that shape-shifting that takes place in positions of power or with people that have power whatever that might be legitimate power or it might be perceived power that you've given them but that need to fit in and belong is one of the culprits to being authentically you and to knowing what you're capable of and so I'd love to send it to you it's a it's a pretty short read I'd love to read it I I would add on top of that in today's environment things like social media and the spotlight causes people to to do and say things they don't really think just because they're concerned about the reaction 100% so what okay so what keeps you up at night what are the things that bang around in your head and your heart that like you worry about now that you're on the other side of of you know guiding our president um what are some of the things that keep you up at night most of mine centers on one now and that's dysfunction in our nation and when I talk about dysfunction I really talk about two things there's the political polarization which parallels the decades before the Civil War much more closely than I wish it did and then not just the polarization but now the dysfunction of our decision-making bodies Our inability to do those things you know to to pass laws to make decisions to execute things that largely should be in the routine the machine of government ought to operate for most things and big policy issues I I completely understand the political discussions but we we are suffering from those two things and they are interrelated and they worry me because I saw dysfunction in Iraq I saw dysfunction in Afghanistan and when the society isn't functioning you can't have a good ending there's got to be some cataclysmic pay off or payback for that you know moment in which things are called to account and you've got to got to ultimately deal with it and I worry we're not in a good place right now yeah I um I second that yeah I can feel the tension from you know the street level and um I mean if I was to give our country a grade when it comes to this it's it's pretty poor and the Divide is Rich um in in tension and hostility and disagreement and poor listening and um yeah I I I don't don't I have no potential Solutions other than to work with individuals to help an individual be become more aware so that they can have self discipline so they can act in alignment with their first principles and the the self-awareness bit is where I point to and the best practices that I know for self-awareness are meditation journaling and conversations with people of wisdom do you have any type of contemplative meditative mindfulness practice that you've deployed in for you it it probably wouldn't fall in I do two things though I read a lot and I like to sit my wife and I have these two chairs we sit in our living room and we read a lot and I I that allows me just sort of read a lot of history non-fiction not a lot of fiction and I take that in and then I I write and um I've written four books and I'm working on another now and I find that that doing that is both a relief and a uh a form of counseling for me yeah you know yeah it's a feedback loop there you go yeah that's really for clarity it's a forcing function it sounds like for clarity and the second thing I I keeps me up at night is um people are tired like the the speed um of the world is legit but the internal resources to be able to manage that speed and complexity is wanting we where do we learn how to build a sense of calm how to manage our emotions how to speak to ourselves well you know those are all psychological skills and people are exhausted right now they're not replenishing and they're not training themselves to deal with high stress environments which we're operating in um can you can you paint what you would imagine the future of uh leadership and then we'll we'll we'll turn home base here and and and I'll thank you again for your time but can you paint the future of leadership not with confidence um because if I think of the environment I can't see it slowing down I can't see it getting less complex um I do think some tools like AI may help you do a lot of things more easily but most of those won't take you away from the core tasks that that the leader has to do I worry that the environment will become so unforgiving both in a business sense and in a political sense and in a um a calling for you know take the leader's head off because you know this didn't happen that it will cause leaders to to be almost fatalistic they will take a job and they will think well nobody can possibly succeed so I will just try to do this for a little while and then you know I will go off into the sunset either with a severance package or or whatever um that's not the kind of leadership that I think we really want I think people we want people to enter leadership jobs with an idea that they are going to stay long enough to reap what they sow that they will be building something for the for the Long Haul and it's difficult to see that many examples now or in the near future at least so I'm afraid that it's just going to get it'll be like hockey lines you know they go out and they play two or three minutes cuz going hard and then the leader you'll throw a leader in and we'll keep them for a little while and boom get me another leader and I I don't think that that's optimal yeah I think we're moving clearly from the extraction model from the next person up model to the unlocking and um the untapped resource that people have within them is uh has been left unexamined for the most part we apply stress and pressure and we say next person up figure fed out or we're moving on uh it feels to me like the next you know I thought where maybe you would point would be the empathetic Gardener um of of of approach of leadership that you might go to um and I think that that tone of empathetic gardening feels right to me there's an organic nature there's a cultivation there's an understanding of the conditions for thriving both external and internal and um yeah I I I love the idea that you you point to about the gardening and I know that's an old idea for you you wrote it back in 2015 um to me it feels even more relevant now I think it is I think it's more correct but I struggle to get people to adopt it and so there are some who have but but it takes a bit of U it takes a bit of self-confidence can you explain for folks that aren't familiar with the gardener metaphor that you've outlined can you can you explain that for folks yeah I I think traditionally um we've trained people to be Chess Masters and that is you want the CEO or the leader of an organization to micromanage the chess pieces and if they are competent enough they will do it well enough to succeed against an enemy or a challenge I don't think that works anymore because I think things are too fast too complex and therefore no single person can do that even though we like to maintain the illusion that you can and instead what I think the leader got to do is step back and take what I call a gardening approach and I got this from watching my mother who was an avid Gardener and really what the gardener does is the gardener creates an ecosystem or an an environment in which plants do which plants do and they can do something that we can't do uh and so the gardener really it's less egocentric The Gardener is less focused on making each decision but the gardener is completely engaged because the gardener is creating that environment in which that can happen we talked at the beginning of the conversation about shared Consciousness and empowered execution The Gardener creates that environment but then the actual execution is done by people inside the organization that now have been given the opportunity to leverage their potential it takes um it takes some time to create and it takes discipline to maintain that but the reality is it it is much more adaptable in my mind it's much more effective even in the very near term and and although people sometimes worry if I don't have my hand on every chest piece that we're going to lose I would argue if you have your hand on every chest piece you will lose I love it General mccrystal Stan thank you for sharing your insights and um your hard-earned understanding of what it takes to lead from the front to lead horizontally to be able to be part of um teams that are agile and dynamic and you know painting the the idea of where we might be able to become better uh when it comes to organizational structure just a little bit more of a gardener less of a Chessmaster uh bit more empathy you know and so and thank you for bringing me and us inside of how you work from the inside out um that takes courage to do and great clarity and you pass through both of those Gates eloquently so I just want to say thank you uh for sharing both in writing form and in this conversation well it was a real pleasure Mike thank you so much