Retired Navy SEAL Garrett Unclebach has taken the lessons he learned defending our country as a SEAL and now devotes his life to helping others find their purpose, develop boldness, and live beyond themselves. In this conversation, we talk about his SEAL training, what true leadership looks like, and how he spends each day paying his good fortune forward. His story is inspirational, powerful, and is sure to motivate you.

Teamwork is essential to success:

“There are some businesses that focus on building a castle. What’s a castle do? It protects the king and the king’s gold. And if you want to build a castle as an organization you’ll have to pay for every single brick that gets put into that wall, because the castle’s not for them, it’s for the king. On the other side of building a castle is killing a dragon. And dragons hurt and destroy many people. So, when you start to talk about, ‘Hey, I’m going after this dragon,’ what’ll happen is you’ll find people who will say, ‘That dragon hurt me too. I’m coming with you.’ And it’s not so much about getting free labor; it’s about getting people joined to a common cause.”

A fundamental attribute of a leader:

“Think about if you were going to create a leader. If you were going to choose a leader, if you could make them in a video game, wouldn’t you pick someone who cared about you more than you cared about themselves?”

No Man Left Behind – and it’s real-world applications:

“It’s a really interesting thought process in the military. People look at the military and they hear, ‘No man left behind.’ And I actually tell people that’s kind of a misunderstanding of the way the military works. In the SEAL team, no man left behind is about someone who died. But think about if I’m on a mission and I have a headache and I say, ‘Hey, Chief, I have a headache, Can we turn around?’ That sounds a little foolish when it comes to a SEAL mission. The mission was more important than I was. It wasn’t about my headache. I was part of something bigger than myself, but that created a love for the guys around me.”

How to be a visionary, and follow through on it:

“It takes a lot of credit to build trust with people. But when people trust you, that’s when they’ll truly follow you. Trust and care go hand in hand. So, I look at vision as kind of like the strength component of leadership, like you can paint a picture of the future and people will believe that you will go there. The care and consistency portion are where people are willing to follow you.”

Purpose equals urgency equals consistency:

“For many people, it’s not so much that you have a discipline problem. You have a purpose problem. But to have consistency, on top of discipline you have to have this thing we talked about often in the military, which is a sense of urgency. Which is understanding that it matters right now. If you want to be inconsistent in your life, say, ‘It will matter tomorrow.’ … SEAL training really screens for this. There is a type of individual that when the pressure is on, they perform at their highest. … And the whole reason they want to perform is to love and to serve other people.”

What making something a priority truly means:

“What my priorities are, are the things I’m least willing to fail at. I would rather die than fail at this thing. It’s the same on the battlefield. I’d rather die than shoot one of my teammates. So, when you understand what priorities are, these are the things that I’ll never fail at. The philosophy of my life is that I’m going to win in those areas.”

What Navy SEAL Hell Week training is like:

“You start on Sunday night and you go until Friday afternoon. You’ll sleep one hour on Wednesday afternoon and one hour on Thursday afternoon. So, from Sunday night until Friday you’ll get two hours of sleep. You’ll run over 200 miles; the majority of that is with an inflatable zodiac boat on your head that weighs over 200 pounds. That’s if you get all the sand and water out of it. You’ll share that load with six other guys. … And what if feels like to run with a boat on your head is just imagine a phone book. If I ran behind you with a phone book or a dictionary and I’m just banging you on the top of your head while you’re running; that’s what It feels like.”