Ownership vs Victim-ship in your Divorce Recovery - David Nordel CMSgt, USAF (ret), RN, BSN, MS|| DPTSP#050 || David M. Webb

[00:00:00] Welcome to Don't Pick the Scout Podcast, the podcast that helps men over 40 in their divorce recovery struggles.

[00:00:05] We are welcoming David Nordel to the show. David's superpowers are military transitions through his

[00:00:12] Vet Ready program, which is very interesting when talking about that too, and leadership development.

[00:00:17] He has had a distinguished Air Force career with experiences in emergency management, big time

[00:00:23] better transitions, PTSD and mental health challenges. He has written two books giving back

[00:00:31] life and leadership from the farm to combat zone because he used the milk cows back in the day

[00:00:36] and beyond. And when the cows lie down, so you've got two farm theories going on with the books.

[00:00:42] That's interesting too. The reason why I quit you, they're their leader. So I contacted David

[00:00:48] because I felt he could help my men struggling with their divorce recovery.

[00:00:53] And because I think divorce is a type of battle or war so to speak. So

[00:01:12] Welcome to the Don't Pick the Scout Podcast with the premise of connecting men over 40

[00:01:17] with the tools and community to thrive in their divorce recovery either before, during

[00:01:23] or after a divorce. Check it out. Go ahead and introduce yourself David and I got

[00:01:28] questions from there. Yeah, you bet. Hey, thanks. Thanks, Dave. It'll be Dave and David or

[00:01:32] however we have a reroll, but we'll be the Dave and Dave show today. That's awesome. Yeah. So

[00:01:37] you know, the magic to tell the audience the magic sometimes to this is the 10 minutes that

[00:01:42] we talked before we go on the air. And so you want to talk about bonding and dentistry

[00:01:47] and medicine and then and all and all and all of our corollaries, you know, and I'm

[00:01:52] an emergency shock trauma nurse, but that all started as a medic in the Air Force back

[00:01:56] in 1984. And I did 30 or six months and 24 days of military service. And in there, I was,

[00:02:02] I was, you know, fortunate enough to lead at an executive level three times, you know, and command

[00:02:08] leadership positions. So that takes you through a lot of things. I like to tell people, you know,

[00:02:13] that I went on, you know, I've been on four combat tours. But if I told you the four people

[00:02:17] to go, I don't even know that some of those places exist. We don't need to go there. But

[00:02:21] they're all relevant to this. And obviously, you know, my last my last combat tour was as the

[00:02:26] senior enlisted leader for all the medical operations in the in the theater of operations

[00:02:30] in Iraq. And that's a whole, a whole different experience. Along with that comes a lot of

[00:02:37] experience, a lot of, you know, life and leadership is that's in the book. Most of the book is

[00:02:43] written on based on my failures and how you recover from those and some tidbits on how to

[00:02:48] move forward. But the biggest piece of that is that that when you when you start in a journey,

[00:02:56] you're going to pick stuff up. And sometimes that's roses. And sometimes that's something that

[00:03:01] smells bad. And sometimes that stuff can be can be shaken off and just put it in the background

[00:03:09] as a memory. And sometimes it's permanent. Right? So if I throw a rock really hard and hit you

[00:03:13] in the head, you might bleed a little bit. And then four to six weeks, nobody would know it's there.

[00:03:18] If I threw the rock really, really hard, you'd have a scar and then you have a story to tell.

[00:03:22] And so, you know, we're going to get into this. But, you know, trauma is trauma is trauma.

[00:03:28] And anytime we have an insult to ourselves, especially as men, there's reactions. And

[00:03:34] they're standard. They're standard physiological and emotional and mental reactions that we have

[00:03:39] that your therapist will tell you, yes, you're acting very normal. However,

[00:03:43] there's a better way to navigate it. Because as men, I just got back from Bible study this morning.

[00:03:50] So it's kind of funny because this this Bible group is growing and it's full of veterans

[00:03:55] and it's growing and growing and growing. And I have not sat in that room with those men

[00:04:00] and not had them all walk this back to their pride and where they're at is they're working

[00:04:09] in cows. I think, I think everything you need to know in life starts on the farm because

[00:04:12] as soon as you think you got it figured out and all the fences are fixed and all the cows are

[00:04:16] really healthy and everything's working perfectly, you know, mother nature intervenes or the cows

[00:04:20] run through the fence or or the tractor breaks down or you know, the hay pile tips over

[00:04:25] something there's always some sort of adversity. And if if farmers got into farming and couldn't

[00:04:33] handle adversity well with the right mindset, they'd all quit farming in the first year

[00:04:37] because these curveballs keep coming and they keep coming and they keep coming.

[00:04:43] You know, Carol Lawson, she's the basketball coach for Duke University, the women's basketball

[00:04:48] coach. And then she does about a two minute 50 second clip that was just taken ad hoc. She

[00:04:53] was talking to the team about handling hard better. So hopefully we can get to talking about some

[00:04:58] of that stuff there. And you know, and you can ask any question you want. I'll take you

[00:05:01] down the journey whichever way you want to go with PTSD and moral injury. And I really

[00:05:05] want to talk about moral injury in conjunction with PTSD. It's it's lesser known. It's being

[00:05:11] studied now. My story was published on top of PhD, all the work out of ARI University.

[00:05:18] And I can share a little bit of that too because divorce and moral injury run congruent.

[00:05:23] And when you understand what you have, then you can make you can make friends with it

[00:05:28] and maybe even use it to the positive. Yeah, one of my biggest questions,

[00:05:32] my first question is, when do you have to quit in the face of adversity? That sounds so backwards.

[00:05:40] Yeah. So, you know, the second book is about quitting. And, you know, and I talked, I talked

[00:05:47] to a sports psychologist. In fact, he lives in Colorado Springs, as a matter of fact. And

[00:05:54] I talked to him and I said, I said, you know, we perceive quitting as bad. And if you

[00:05:59] think about it, especially you and I were from the same generation. When we were on the playground,

[00:06:03] right? And you had, you know, five guys on this team and five guys on that team and you had to go

[00:06:08] home for dinner. The kids didn't say, okay, we'll go home for dinner and we'll figure it out.

[00:06:12] They yelled quitter, right? You're a quitter. And that, that evoked an emotion. Right.

[00:06:19] And so I don't think that we have taken enough time to define in our lives and then

[00:06:24] collectively, especially as men, what is the equivalent of good and quitting? And when it's

[00:06:29] okay to walk away. And how do you set the stage for when you quit to have him be a healthy quit?

[00:06:37] And how do you walk away from that? So, you know, you're focused on divorce, especially over

[00:06:44] 40. I would challenge all of the men out there that are listening to this looking for a tidbit

[00:06:50] to walk themselves back to the moment that they, they had that conversation where they said,

[00:06:54] we're going to get divorced or, you know, their wife walked in and said, I've had it, whatever it is,

[00:06:58] the 10,000 reasons why all of a sudden you're less, you're less, you're less of a person than

[00:07:02] they are. And they dump it all in there and they run out the door or vice versa, whatever

[00:07:06] that is, whatever that I would challenge them to say that that was the moment of reality.

[00:07:12] I would challenge them to say that they knew that the reality was coming months or even years

[00:07:17] before. And so what kept them from putting themselves in a situation where they could quit

[00:07:23] in a healthy manner so that they could move forward in a healthy way instead of having struggles

[00:07:27] afterwards? And I like it with some surprise. And, you know, a lot of this comes with the pride

[00:07:32] or how we grew up on a playground. When somebody puts the QIT word, it's a four letter word,

[00:07:37] right? Quit's a four letter word. When somebody puts that in front of you,

[00:07:43] your internal survivalistic, especially men, survivalistic piece is I can't quit. I'm not

[00:07:50] allowed to quit. My gender doesn't align with quitting. So therefore I have to pick another

[00:07:56] alternative and actually quitting in the potpourri of things that you can do to stay healthy.

[00:08:03] One of your things you talk about hidden potential, how do you evoke that hidden

[00:08:07] potential in order to pick yourself by the bootstraps and make that journey toward healing?

[00:08:15] What's some of the ways men can do that? Well, first of all, you gotta hear it.

[00:08:21] Self-talk is the most powerful thing. You can listen to a lot of people.

[00:08:25] Misery loves company. They're probably hanging out with people that have been recently divorced.

[00:08:29] Do you join a group of adorices? And they've got a thousand stories and there's some things

[00:08:36] that assuage you a little bit because Misery loves company. That's cliche, but there's truth in that.

[00:08:44] And it's actually self-talk. And so internally you have got to understand that you may be in a

[00:08:52] situation where you feel like your worth has been challenged or you don't feel like you lived up

[00:08:58] to the expectation. Once this goes back to your inner child and how your father treated you,

[00:09:02] if you had one, all of these things and it goes back to your inner child. And you have to make

[00:09:07] peace with the fact that the inertia is forward. And quite frankly, you have these things inside

[00:09:18] of you that are exceptional qualities that may not have had a chance to mature in the situation

[00:09:22] that you're coming out of. So you need to re-identify yourself. And once you re-identify

[00:09:26] yourself and kind of get foundational, then you can start moving forward and you can grow those

[00:09:33] things and really recreate yourself from the inside out. And it's not something you have to say to

[00:09:38] anybody. You just have to understand that as a creature, you're going to move forward.

[00:09:48] And what we do is we take all of our effort and energy, especially our emotional energy,

[00:09:52] and we dwell on the past, and we do these evaluations, continuous report cards. And odds are 99 times out

[00:10:01] of 100, we're going to give ourselves a D minus and an F. And that's not true because if you look at

[00:10:06] the totality of your existence, most men at the age of 40, unless they have had crazy adversity,

[00:10:13] most men at the age of 40, if they're truly honest with themselves, can be pretty proud

[00:10:17] of the things that they've accomplished and the lives that they've affected. And you need

[00:10:20] to focus on that because are we going to trip and fall and stumble and have adversity and

[00:10:26] quote unquote screw up? Absolutely. So it's more about how you handle that, how you handle the hard

[00:10:32] because it's going to keep coming, how you handle that. And then Dave, where I'm really

[00:10:37] going to take this in the end, especially with PTSD and moral injury is most of us feel like

[00:10:42] we're victims and we get mired in that. And it may take years and years and years if you

[00:10:49] don't get the right help and you don't talk to yourself the right way that you can stay in a victim

[00:10:52] mentality. And everything that you translate based on your situation is almost as well as me type

[00:10:58] thing versus I spoke what does that I spoke yesterday morning to a group of public health

[00:11:05] professionals in the state of South Dakota. Now, that conversation was about leadership,

[00:11:11] but I opened it up with I'm the proud owner of PTSD and moral injury. And I'm willing to

[00:11:16] talk to anybody about that because I'm giving people an opportunity to have a conversation

[00:11:21] about ownership versus victim ship. Yeah, you just said the title of the damn podcast.

[00:11:30] Thank you very much. Yeah. No, that's I mean, it's really about ownership.

[00:11:37] Yeah. So you talk about a deeper awareness of our surroundings.

[00:11:41] How do you obtain that? And why do you need it?

[00:11:47] The things you can't see in life are pressed firmly against your face.

[00:11:51] You know, as a dentist, Dave, you when you're doing certain procedures, you put your loops on,

[00:11:57] right? And loops don't actually make you closer. Actually, you've got to get a little bit

[00:12:03] farther away for your loops to focus properly. Get the focal point. But you but you can

[00:12:07] see everything better, right? And so the reason that we can't see things is the

[00:12:13] press firmly against their face. And the reason is because we're moving so fast,

[00:12:17] you know, we don't slow down. You got to slow down to go faster.

[00:12:21] If you said if you said, Hey, Dave, I was just up in Montana and I said, What did you see?

[00:12:25] And you said, Well, you know, I was enamored with the mountains and I could see the hills

[00:12:29] and that type of stuff. And I said, Well, did you see any deer? Did you see any antelope?

[00:12:33] Did you see any turtles? Did you see any rabbits? He said, No, no, no, I didn't see any of that.

[00:12:37] Well, it's because you drove through Montana at 90 miles an hour.

[00:12:42] Because it's Montana. Right. But but if you parked your car and went for a two mile walk,

[00:12:48] the things that you see would be incredible. And so you've got to really slow yourself down

[00:12:54] and push back so that you can take in the totality of things because there's so much good.

[00:13:00] And when we're moving fast, alls we see is adversity and onto the next challenge.

[00:13:04] People say it all the time. Well, I'm just I'm onto the next thing on to the next challenge.

[00:13:08] What challenge? Why do you have a challenge? You should be embracing what you're doing enjoying

[00:13:13] that and then moving on to the next whatever it is. But we have to look at things like

[00:13:18] everything's a challenge. What are some of the tools we can use to embrace personal growth?

[00:13:28] Well, here's number one in Davis book took me a long time ago.

[00:13:32] And here, Dave, your life team matters. And your life team is not static.

[00:13:41] And you have to run your life like a CEO. And CEOs do a lot of things. They set

[00:13:48] they set culture. They set vision. They set priorities. And they adjust their rudder

[00:13:56] to put the ship in the right direction. And they communicate clearly.

[00:14:00] And you have to have people around you that can help you do that, right? So you hire a chief

[00:14:07] operating officer chief financial officer, you hire those people. But you know what CEOs also do?

[00:14:12] They fire people, Dave. And as we grow, not everybody belongs on your life team.

[00:14:19] And that includes your kids, your cousins, your parents.

[00:14:25] And talk maybe my oldest, my oldest son this year. And it's and we've cleared it up because

[00:14:32] I had to reground him because he knows my journey and where I'm at. And he wasn't contributing

[00:14:37] to it. And I called him on the phone and I said, you know, I love you, but you're off my life team.

[00:14:41] And here's the rules of being off my life team. And here's where I don't want you

[00:14:44] to contribute because you're not helping me move forward in a healthy fashion.

[00:14:49] And he called me back about two weeks later and he says, I was so mad at you for three days.

[00:14:55] Until I finally sat back and thought, this is not about me. This is about my dad

[00:15:01] taking care of himself and how I'm contributing to that. And so the only way to do that is, is

[00:15:10] collectively you've got to have your vision, your strategy, your mission statement, your

[00:15:15] culture, your guidance, and you own the rudder. And you need to surround yourself with around

[00:15:22] just you can surround yourself with people that contribute to wherever your destination is,

[00:15:27] whatever your goal is, where you want to be. And far too often we cling on to life suckers,

[00:15:33] man. They're like leeches and they just take and take and take fire them. They got to go.

[00:15:41] Wow. So a two part question. How can we prepare for change? You know, when change comes,

[00:15:49] sometimes it comes so fast that it surprises us. And why is listening so important with those two?

[00:15:59] Tooth. Is that right? Well, I'm going to do them backwards because I think listening is the

[00:16:07] preparatory command to initiate the change. There's hearing, right? So if I clapped or

[00:16:18] morris code, you would listen to it because you would have to understand the differences in it so

[00:16:24] that you could actually interpret it. Most people here, not very many people listen.

[00:16:32] And listening, listening requires you to shut off your mind and be in the receive mode and not

[00:16:38] be formulating questions, opinions, bias and assumptions. So you have to be prepared for

[00:16:45] change, right? Because change requires two things. There's the physical, the action of change, right?

[00:16:52] That's just putting the couch on the other side of the living room. That's change. That's

[00:16:56] the physical action of that. But also you also have to be able to imagine the change

[00:17:02] and see the and see value in that. And only through listening can you do that because

[00:17:07] the person who ever is facilitating the change is responsible for giving you at least enough

[00:17:12] of a why so that you see the value in that. Right? It's like squirrels, dad. You ever watch squirrels?

[00:17:20] What do they do all day? Run around, chase each other. Get the nut, go in the tree. Get the

[00:17:27] nut, go in the tree. That's the most mundane, boring, absolutely ridiculous thing. Have you

[00:17:31] ever seen an, have you ever seen an unhappy squirrel? Nope. Happy is, happy is a lot.

[00:17:39] Because one is they understand the value of their work. So if you told them that they had to go to a

[00:17:45] different tree because it had more nuts, they would just go. There would be no revolt. Nobody

[00:17:51] would go on strike. Nobody would have a sit in. Nobody would, you know, whatever, start chaos.

[00:17:57] Nobody would do that. They would just go because they understand the value of that. So

[00:18:01] you have to listen to the point of comprehension so that you can initiate the change.

[00:18:07] You know, the three core steps of change are, are unfreezing the change, instituting the change and

[00:18:13] re-freezing the change. Where the resistance point is in change is fear and pain. So we never get to

[00:18:21] step one because what we imagine in our mind is things that are either scarce, you know, I might

[00:18:27] lose my job. Do I still have my office? Do, you know, do I have to drive? Do I have to

[00:18:31] commute? Do I, you know, I want to tell you all these things, right? You can imagine

[00:18:35] all these bad things that are going to happen. So fear, be it real or perceived, is a reality and

[00:18:41] it drives our, it drives our actions. And sometimes fear is so large in our minds that it drives total

[00:18:47] inaction. So you don't even start the change. And then there's pain, right? Things that are

[00:18:51] painful. So you and I could say we want to climb a 14, a 14 or there in Colorado, you and I

[00:18:56] want to climb a 14. We could probably come up with 10 reasons why we can't do that. Just

[00:19:02] immediately. And within five minutes instead of even starting the change, even if that meant

[00:19:07] we had to change our physical fitness program or whatever it was, before we'd even do that in 10

[00:19:12] minutes, we will have talked ourselves out of it and missed the opportunity altogether.

[00:19:16] So the unfreezing of change takes court courage and you have to have moral and

[00:19:20] professional and personal courage to take the step forward. And that comes back

[00:19:25] to self talk. You have to have the self confidence to do those kind of things. So

[00:19:31] how you talk to yourself sets you up for change. And in this case, when you get divorced,

[00:19:38] that is forced change. That is bam. And you're in the change mode. So you can set yourself up

[00:19:45] to get into the situation where okay, I'm unfreezing change. There's going to be a new me.

[00:19:51] Right? Then you do the change. Whatever that is in a business, it might be a policy,

[00:19:56] it might be a procedure, it might be pay structure, those kind of things. In life, it can be

[00:20:05] taking care of my spiritual self, taking care of my physical self, changing my habits,

[00:20:14] right sizing my lifestyle to fit my new economic status, those type of things. You can take that

[00:20:19] on, own it, take that on and use your time and effort and energy as you're going through this

[00:20:25] trauma. And you know, I to move forward, this is how I, this is, I've, I've harnessed the energy of

[00:20:30] PTSD and moral injury, which used to drive negative polarity. And I flipped the polarity on it to

[00:20:36] make a positive polarity so that when it drives energy, I use that energy in a fashion to put

[00:20:41] myself in a healthier place. And that comes with the transition between ownership and victim.

[00:20:49] So I have another double question since you like those double questions.

[00:20:52] So let's talk about the value of time and savoring each moment.

[00:21:00] I love it. I love it. I talked a little bit about this yesterday,

[00:21:04] Mr. Oh, yesterday morning. Yeah, I think yesterday morning, Tuesday evening, whatever was,

[00:21:11] I think that, you know, I'm going to hedge here, but I hope that your audience smiles when

[00:21:17] I say this people that are actually out there working in the corporate world, you may feel

[00:21:21] as a dentist, I'm sure you feel this constant. The most stressful part of the day for a lot of

[00:21:27] people is when they open up their calendar and they don't stress over how many appointments they

[00:21:32] have, they stress over the white space. So if you walked into your clinic tomorrow and you'll

[00:21:38] open up your appointment calendar, you wouldn't, you wouldn't go, Oh, I have back to back to

[00:21:41] back to back to backs. You would look at that one to three o'clock block where there was nothing

[00:21:46] in there and you'd go, what are we doing here? I challenge people to take that time and do

[00:21:51] the right thing with that. Instead of filling it up because, because for some reason it gives us value

[00:21:58] and worth men are terrible at this, but you fill this all up and then, and then you're out and

[00:22:02] you're having lunch and a buddy comes in, maybe he's a lawyer or he's a plumber, it doesn't matter.

[00:22:08] And a buddy comes in and he goes, Dave, how are you doing? And you go, man, I'm busy today. I got

[00:22:13] back to back exams and then I put in a bridge and you give him your whole schedule.

[00:22:20] He doesn't care. All that does is make us feel better. That's our worth and our purpose. That's

[00:22:26] where we blend. Use, time is not infinite. Set yourself up to utilize your time to make you

[00:22:37] better because then all of the other things get better on top of it. We don't do it. We don't

[00:22:44] do it. We match things in there that are, that are, that are not, they're not productive and

[00:22:49] they don't help us, they don't help us move forward. So I have inverted that. This is my ownership

[00:22:54] piece. I have inverted that and I've looked at my calendar and I've assessed myself for the day and

[00:22:58] I've said, I need to be in the 70-30 balance and 70% of that is, is me time. So I'm not going to

[00:23:07] do a podcast with you. I'm not, I'm not going to do my own podcast. I'm not going to, to

[00:23:12] engage with a client on, on vet ready. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to move that stuff

[00:23:16] to a different day that fits better. And in here, I'm going to do some work on me because as I move

[00:23:23] two steps farther down the line, I'm going to be more effective and, and, and I don't tell people

[00:23:28] what I'm doing anymore. In fact, sometimes I'll tell people just to get it, just, just to get a

[00:23:32] rise out of them. Do this, try this, Dave. Next time somebody says, Dave, how's it going? Say,

[00:23:37] my life is so uncomplicated. Just say that and just, and just do a pregnant pause.

[00:23:46] Why are there faces? They don't know how it doesn't work. The computer doesn't,

[00:23:51] because they're waiting for this barrage because they're already going, yes, he's going to open

[00:23:57] the door for me to tell them all of this stuff I'm doing. And, and then- Sorry, I don't hear

[00:24:03] it. It does not compute. That's right. That's right. Yep. That's all right. That's it. Yeah.

[00:24:11] I love it. So how do we recognize the value in others? You know, you talked about your tribe or

[00:24:18] the people in your life. Sure. How do you value, find that value in others?

[00:24:25] Well, first of all, I think, you know, men, you gotta check our ego and step back. And then

[00:24:31] you really have to appreciate the opportunity to be uncomfortable. I do, I do a keynote speech called

[00:24:40] Closing the 25-Year Gap. And that's based on being a farm kid from Northern California that grew up

[00:24:47] in a Portuguese Mexican community. And that's about all I knew about the world. And one day,

[00:24:52] I flew to San Antonio, Texas and I was in a barracks filled full of a lot of people that

[00:24:56] didn't look like me from cultures that weren't anywhere near me, near mine. And I was made

[00:25:01] a student leader. I was made a leader in my first week and in United States Air Force,

[00:25:05] and I've got a badge on that says I'm leading something. And the distance from one end of the

[00:25:10] barracks to the other end is about 25 yards. And in that 25 yards, there's a lot of uncomfortableness

[00:25:17] and a lot of challenges. And if I would have stood at my end and left the guy at the far end

[00:25:26] to be led by my assumption and my bias, how I was programmed, nothing bad, just who you are.

[00:25:32] And I didn't close that 25-yard gap. Not only would I not have been effective,

[00:25:36] but I wouldn't have grown. And you can't start growing until you close those gaps. And you

[00:25:41] have to have those conversations. So uncomfortableness, here's the fear and pain thing, right?

[00:25:45] Because it's really scary space. Ideally, societally, as a humanity, if we could find that

[00:25:54] 12.5-yard spot and continue to meet there, I think you clear up a lot of things.

[00:26:02] What are some of the ways to effectively navigate life, family, and friendships? Some of the basic

[00:26:11] things that we can do or men can do that are suffering. They've got that PTSD from divorce,

[00:26:17] things like that. One of the things I did, one of my survival moves was I took,

[00:26:24] and this was wrong, I took the attitude that everybody was stupid until proven otherwise.

[00:26:33] So that allowed me to heal and move on, but eventually I had to let that go.

[00:26:38] So what do you think some of the ways to navigate that?

[00:26:44] Positive ways, rather. Sure. Well, we talked about listening, right? Listening to comprehension.

[00:26:50] I think that's huge. When we're hurting and we have pain, we want to transmit.

[00:26:56] You know, if I smashed your hand, you'd say something, right? Something would come out of your

[00:26:59] mouth. Your facial expressions and stuff are taken in later on. But if I give you physical pain,

[00:27:07] something would come out of your mouth, right? You know what a patient, when you're working

[00:27:11] in a patient's mouth, you know a certain noise that they make when you may not have

[00:27:15] enough. You know that, right? No doubt. And the first thing that you do is stop doing what

[00:27:21] you're doing and then you check on them. Right? So we think that when we're transmitting people

[00:27:26] will check on us and that actually shuts things down. So what you need to do is put yourself in

[00:27:31] a learning mode. You have to learn. You have to relearn. And so you need to put yourself

[00:27:39] in situations around the right people and listening, you know, in a probably 80% intake

[00:27:47] comprehensive process and 20% transmission and the transmission should be in the form of questions,

[00:27:54] clarifying questions. And then you need to put that together in a calm manner

[00:28:00] and start to rebuild foundationally to start to rebuild things. But far too often,

[00:28:05] as in your example, far too often we want to transmit. We want to do things hoping for a desired

[00:28:10] outcome and it's so unsatisfying because we never get that. So all we do is we keep tweaking the

[00:28:15] strategy, hoping to get a desired outcome and you never do. Some people turn to alcohol because

[00:28:21] it distorts their reality long enough that it takes away a little bit of that pain.

[00:28:26] And that's never the right way to go. All right, sir. My men have about a half hour

[00:28:32] retention span. Now, don't we all? I love it. Don't we all?

[00:28:39] But David, man, I appreciate this. I only got through about a third of my questions. So we're

[00:28:44] going to revisit this for sure. This was so much fun and you dropped some knowledge on us. And

[00:28:52] I appreciate that. And I know my men appreciate that. This is going to be tough to write the

[00:28:57] bio on this one for you. You want to make me work for it? But I appreciate your time,

[00:29:03] your service and I'm going to let's talk about your two books and your website. Yeah,

[00:29:10] the website and the two books. Yeah, sure. I mean, you can get the books and kind of just

[00:29:15] get caught up on me and then you don't have to do a long bio. Maxfabconsulting.com,

[00:29:22] maxfabconsulting.com will take it all the magic that's in there and you can read up on me and Max

[00:29:29] Fab is a whole story and a keynote of its own and that comes from the combat zone about

[00:29:35] attitude because it's the one thing we control every day. And if you have a good one, it tends

[00:29:38] to put you in the right place. But the books, you know, Giving Back, Life and Leadership

[00:29:43] from the Farm to the Combat Zone and Beyond is I wrote that book for people that have

[00:29:48] short attention spans. They can only read about three pages and they want to stop so the chapters

[00:29:51] are short. There's there, there, there, there, there power, their power pack chapters, they're

[00:29:58] focused around a thing. And at the end of that is someone liners to make your introspective. So

[00:30:03] a lot of it's about Dave's challenges in life, even from being cut from a high school baseball

[00:30:08] team all the way through, through, you know, a few war stories and some combat stuff.

[00:30:14] And when the cows lie down was around this theory of quitting and there's good quitting, bad quitting

[00:30:20] and quitting with indifference and how you do that. But also maybe to show leaders out there,

[00:30:27] maybe some traits that they exhibit as to why people quit them and they have turnovers in

[00:30:31] their organization or that it's not as healthy as they'd like. Again, introspective, introspective

[00:30:36] work and I think both of them, you know, the two kind of build off of each other. So

[00:30:41] yeah, most people tell me, especially with the first book, but most people tell me

[00:30:44] that once they read the book, once it turns into a workbook and they just keep it around

[00:30:48] for when they have situational issues. There you go. Well, David, thank you again,

[00:30:54] but hold on to the line here and we'll close it out. But I want everybody to thanks for

[00:30:59] listening and have a good night.