This week on Acta Non Verba LTC (Ret) JC Glick shares his military experience and how it has impacted his ability to be vulnerable and embrace Adversity. Listen in as we discuss a military exercise that transformed his thinking and allowed him to see the value of mistakes. He also shares why sometimes quitting is the right thing to do.
LTC (Ret) JC Glick is a leadership consultant who advises at the strategic, operational, team and individual levels. He has a strong background in leadership development, executive personnel assessment and selection, strategy, coaching, counseling and developing innovative solutions to complex problems.
You can connect with him via his website: https://vetsandplayers.org/
Episode Transcript:
00:32
Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions and not words. If you wanna know what somebody truly believes, don’t listen to their words, instead observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson and my guest today truly embodies that phrase.
00:58
Lieutenant Colonel Retired J.C. Glick is a partner and leadership advisor at MVP Development Group who advises at the strategic, operational, team and individual levels. He has a strong background in leadership to say the least, executive personal assessment and selection, strategy, coaching, counseling and developing innovative solutions to complex problems. He is also the National Director for Merging Veterans and Players, a nonprofit whose mission is to match up combat veterans and former professional athletes together.
01:27
after the uniform comes off to give them a new team to tackle the transition together. MVP shows them that they are not alone. JC is a TEDx speaker and a bestselling co-author of A Light in the Darkness, Leadership Development for the Unknown, and Meditations of an Army Ranger, a Warrior Philosophy for Everyone, which both of those books I highly recommend. He’s also a spokesperson for GNC’s new Unbreakable campaign. Unbreakable is a philosophy of making yourself better so you can make the world around you better.
01:57
It’s about harnessing what is inside of you already and bringing it out. It’s about being unbreakable. JC, I know that that’s a long intro and I put a long string on that kind, but thank you so much for being here again. My friend, always an honor to speak with you and to learn from you. Well, thank you for having me. And, and I wanted to hit two things. MVP development group. We rebranded actually to Pedro almost leadership. It’s a new rebranding, but we’re now Pedro almost leadership. And I can talk about why we did that. And it’s funny.
02:25
actions, not words. I truly believe that, though I’m not always sure that I do embody that. I would love to think that I did. Sometimes I’d like to be able to listen to my own advice at times, but I think that there are times we all lack the courage that it takes. You have those actions. So, you know, what I wanna tell people is that’s aspirational, right? To be viewed and to make sure that you’re.
02:52
actions speak for you, not necessarily your words. I think that is a very high aspiration, and I think that most of us would say we fall short of that frequently. I’ve fallen short of that many, many times, many, many times, and do daily. And sometimes it’s a lack of courage, sometimes it’s a lack of effort. I certainly recognize it, and I don’t make apologies for it. I know that it’s wrong, but I do think that we sometimes believe that there are these people who
03:23
And I think some people portray themselves as these givers of knowledge They’re the ones with the wisdom and they can and who they are is what look It’s just not the human experience the human experience You’re gonna fail. You’re gonna screw that up. You’re gonna make bad decisions You’re going to say one thing and do another and I don’t know anybody You don’t know anybody who at some point in their life wasn’t a hippo
03:52
And some of us just acknowledge it sooner than others that, you know what, sometimes I’m a hypocrite when it comes to this, the healthy eating or larger issues, certainly. But I think that’s, you know, I appreciate the thought, but one thing that I’d want people to know who are listening to you is that’s aspirational for me too. I don’t always live what I say. And I’ll try to be honest about when I don’t think I did, but it’s okay not to.
04:21
Like it’s part of the human condition. It’s part of development. It is. And everyone, what you just heard was one of the things that’s really attracted me to JC is the humility. On my other podcasts, we talked about that and, and I’ve been a leader. I’ve been around leadership in multiple capacities and the military, especially. And there were very few people that I knew, you know, even as NCOs that were fantastic, that there were very few that actually had the humility to even
04:51
maybe this was incorrect, maybe this is not the best way, maybe we should try to flank, whatever the case may be. And so what you’re hearing is a person who is self-aware, a person who has fallen down, a person who understands that that is the hero’s journey. And frankly, the hero’s journey doesn’t end. We don’t get to a point where, okay, we get through this hard spot and now everything is just sunshine and roses. That’s not the case. And frankly, to be in that place shows me that
05:21
they’re not evolving or they’re not pressing forward. Because as we continue forward, that is the inevitability. You know, adversity is always there. And that’s why I love your message and your books and your teachings and your TEDx, you talk about that too, because you have to have that humility to acknowledge that there is fear. You have to have that humility to put your people first. There’s a beautiful story that I love about this, putting your people first with them. And even McChrystal seemed to agree with you in this situation. Can you tell us the story of when you were leading?
05:50
and you had been dropped into some pretty difficult terrain and you were leading your men. And it had been about 20 hours on that mission. And you, even in the heat of battle, were smart enough to step back and realize something was happening and that something wasn’t happening because there was some insufficiency, so to speak, in the warrior. Could you tell us about that? Yeah. So this happened when I was a young ranger. So this happened actually before the war. This was an emergency readiness exercise. Yeah.
06:20
You know, so nine hours launched, we got inserted into anybody who’s been in Fort Benning, understands the deep wood kudzu in Fort Benning, Georgia. And we got inserted like directly into it. And we were supposed to go, I want to say it was probably only about 12 clicks. And we were not, I mean, it had been hours and hours and we hadn’t gone like two clicks.
06:49
Finally, we got out onto the road. And you know, when you’re doing this evaluation exercise, you get senior leaders and McChrystal was the regimental commander and Dan Allen, who wound up being vice chief of staff. He was the battalion commander at third ranger battalion. And so finally we got out onto the road because we’re like, okay, we just can’t get through this. We have to make our hit time. And we still were just moving, just, oh, it was like pond water, you know, it was just horrible.
07:18
And so, okay, we’re going to one third security and everybody get off the road and sleep. And we slept for 45 minutes. Everybody slept except, you know, they rotated one third security. They woke up and we moved faster than you could ever imagine. We got to our objective rally point. So three platoons were moving at three different locations.
07:45
We were ahead by like six hours of everyone else. We then got into our ORP and were able to go into a rest plan because it had to be coordinated. And we got there and we’re setting up and McCristle comes up to me and he goes, it came up to me and my patoos are, and he goes, whose decision was it to just go to sleep while you’re on your movement? And I’m like, Oh, well, this was a very short-lived career. I’m getting fired right now.
08:14
And I said, sir, I did. We just weren’t moving. And I thought that would be the best way to move. He goes, I think you made a good decision. They walked away. And we didn’t talk about it after that. I mean, it was just, that was, to me, the beginning of looking at something and recognizing, just beating your head against a wall isn’t always the right way to do something. And sometimes you have to look at something a little bit differently. To me, it’s…
08:42
I don’t know that I realized the risk it was when I made it. I just realized that what we were doing wasn’t working. Seeing that again, takes humility, it takes courage. It takes the ability to say I was wrong or whatever’s going on with this plan is not correct. You know, the whole Occam’s razor strategy, if all these things are not working, then this thing that may seem completely insane has to be the solution. And to have the courage to do that, the humility to do that, and…
09:10
They probably didn’t even acknowledge it in the AAR because there was so much other stuff going on. But again, to have a person from the Crystal’s caliber come up and say, yeah, good call on that. And I also want to say how Rangers, Ranger battalion, these are not just like a bunch of boot privates that don’t know what’s going on. These are like some of the most, the highest echelon soldiers out there. So conditioned, so courted, so driven. And yet even they were having a hard time trying to push through this rush. And.
09:38
So the ability to take that step back, so that you could go literally six hours forward to drop 45 minutes, to be six hours ahead, to give your men that capacity to trust them, to show them it’s like, even if we are the ones that are six hours behind, and somebody’s like, hey, you guys were taking a nap, that’s why we’re behind. That took a lot of wherewithal, again, humility, and to make the call, because chances are, were you thinking that that was the solution?
10:06
for a little while before you’d pull the trigger? Yeah, absolutely. I could see that everybody was exhausted. I mean, and it was almost like we were, you know, after beating brush for so long and then getting out on the road, that would kind of spur them on. And it didn’t, it was like, okay, that didn’t work. So now we’ve got to do something that’s completely different. And, you know, a lot of that was luck. I mean, I guess, you know.
10:35
Because I don’t know that had I been six hours late because we took a nap. Um, I was thinking and I was like, and I didn’t know who’s, you know, you know, in evaluators with you, but you don’t know who I had no idea. Regimental commander was with me, but I guess, and now, you know, back then I didn’t think this way and I think now as I’m a little bit older, I’m okay with missing shots and being wrong a whole lot more. So I’m.
11:05
more comfortable trying stuff. I think I’ve always been a little bit comfortable trying stuff because I think that I look at people who grew up and they’re very good academically or they don’t make a lot of mistakes. Things are just like they’re good, like they’re on track and they tend to be really afraid of making mistakes because they’re not used to what happens when they make mistakes. I was not a good student in high school and before. I was very used to making mistakes.
11:35
And I think that some of that has stayed with me. And then as I’ve gotten older and I’ve realized that the cost of most of my mistakes is surmountable. It’s not final. Right. So even some of the larger mistakes that I make, I can get through them. They may be, it may be painful. It may be a lot of things, but I can get out the other side. And I think that’s an important thing to remember. And I believe that that’s the foundation because we know as leaders, if we were creating other leaders.
12:05
We’re almost like a parent. We have to step back and we can see, okay, I’m giving this leader, I’m going to let them lead this portion of whatever this is, whether it be a launch or stepping off in on March. And you see that they’re about to make a mistake and they don’t. So as a leader to have that humility, to allow this person who’s under your command, to allow them to fail, knowing that that mistake is an investment in their future leadership, whether it be a leader under you in your company or your organization or.
12:34
your command or when they go off somewhere else as a parent or as a, you know, whatever the case may be. So there’s a whole higher level of that because when you’re, it’s okay for us to get egg on our face, but then when we have other people under us and that may be a reflection on us or people may think, well, why did he allow them to make that very simple mistake? The reality is if we don’t let people make those mistakes, especially as leaders, and we’re trying to create more leaders. So as a business person, that means you can scale and you can trust this person. You can take your hands off the wheel.
13:03
A lot of people have control. How many CEOs that we know they’re like, oh, I’m the only one that can do this job. Well, if nobody else is qualified, then you cannot be promoted or you cannot escalate into a positive capacity to scale the good things. We see so many people that are scaling the wrong things as opposed to the positive things. And I think that that humility is what has given you, even with a story early in your career, I think that gave you a huge advantage. And that humility comes from courage. That humility comes from not being afraid of.
13:33
Okay, yeah, this may look bad. That’s okay. I’m willing to take that risk because like you said, by comparison, that’s a small percentage compared to the huge positive impacts that it will make on others. Yeah. And I think, you know, the worst that would have happened is I would have gotten fired from that job and I would have recovered from that and done something else. And I do think there’s something that we’re struggling with as a society and that’s the fallibility in leaders.
14:00
we place the mantle of leadership upon somebody and I don’t know if there’s an expectation that they know it all or that they’ve done all the things that they’ve needed to do to prepare them to be in that position or whatever it is. But every leadership position I’ve been in, even the ones like I commanded at the company level a number of times, each time it was different, right? And you had different environments and different conditions and different people and
14:29
I wasn’t 100% prepared for that level of command and you figure some stuff out as you go. And I look at, and again, I don’t think of politicians as leaders. That said, I’m always confused by politicians and people who judge politicians by saying like, oh, well, you know, this guy cheated on his wife or this guy did this or this. Hey, wait a second. If you’re learning how to be a human being.
14:58
You’re making mistakes along the way. And those mistakes, quite honestly, probably make you a better leader. It’s the repeated mistakes of, well, I continue to do this and then I do it again and then I do it again and then I do it again. Maybe that tells me you’re not learning. But I’m always shocked where we think, you know, whoever the president, the senator, the governor, right? Like this guy has a squeaky clean record all the way. How is that possible? And I’ll tell you what.
15:28
I don’t want to be led by that person because that person is not going to understand when somebody has a problem in their development and they’re going to deal in absolutes. And I think it’s those mistakes and that ability to kind of have empathy because I’ve kind of been in a similar situation or, ooh, I can see where you could kind of get skewed there. I understand.
15:55
that doesn’t absolve the person from their action, but it is kind of an understanding thing and being able to do that. I don’t know that I wanna be led by somebody who can’t understand those things and why we want people to have this, you know, like, oh, they always have great judgment. Holy cow, I don’t know anybody that always has great judgment. I have made a lot of poor decisions. I hope that it’s made me a better leader and I hope…
16:24
that my bad decisions are outweighed by the number of good decisions I’ve made. But I own my bad decisions. And I think there’s this idea like, don’t look behind the curtain. And I’m like, my curtain’s open. Like, go ahead. I’ll tell you. Yeah, I did that. I did that. That was stupid. I shouldn’t have done it that way. This is what I did here. So I think that those abilities, and I think it’s, you know, the vulnerability thing, and I think we talk about it as part of the Unbreakable brand.
16:53
is having that vulnerability. That’s the next evolution in human development is recognizing that being vulnerable gives you the ability to develop and be that next person. The lack of vulnerability makes you absolutely more vulnerable. I love that statement you were saying that thinking that you’re invulnerable is literally what makes you the most vulnerable. It’s almost as if we have this huge gaping wound on our arm and you’ve put this big bandage on it. And now it’s like,
17:23
well, you know, are we getting better? How does it feel? Oh, it still hurts. But not having the courage to take the bandage off to really look at what’s going on. Is it getting better? Is it infected? Are you going into sepsis? And having those blinders on again, and in anything, whether it be as a leader, as a human being, as a country, we have to be willing to rip that bandage off and look at what’s really going on, had that courage to understand that, yeah, there may be some pain at this moment, but compared to the continued
17:53
slowly agonizing pain that will just go on much longer than it needs to and prolonging it, it’s not going to allow us to get there. And our experience, I think, is that we’re going to have to experience that pain and discomfort and adversity in some way, shape or form anyway. So if it’s inevitable, why not get in front of it? It may not be great, but why not be the person that leans into that in whatever it is, whether it be a relationship or your business or politically, that’s going to be there. So…
18:22
you might as well get it over with and start moving forward in that process. And oftentimes once we’re through it, once we’re on the other side of it, it’s not as bad as we thought it would be. We usually make it up to be much more center minds. And that’s it. And usually when we make a bad decision or we make a bad choice, or we have an error in judgment, there’s usually some reasons behind it. And people will get that confused, right? Well, that’s an excuse. No, at the time it was a reason. Might not have been a good reason, or it might’ve been in the moment, a good reason.
18:53
But it was a reason. And I think that, you know, we’ve, we’ve gotten into this dismissive place where, well, that’s an excuse. To you, you know, I always, we joke in, excuse me, meditations about what’s the difference between a reason and an excuse and who’s getting it and who’s giving it. But I think an excuse is when you lie to yourself or someone else. Otherwise it’s a reason. And in a moment, it can just be a bad reason.
19:22
Like, I can think of some errors in judgment that I’ve had. I know why I did them. If I had to do it again, I don’t know that I’d do it the same way. But I had rationale. I rationalized it myself to say, well, this is what I’m going to do and this is why it’s okay. And to do anything to look at somebody else’s acts and immediately discount their ability to rationalize, I think does a disservice to them as humans.
19:51
Right? So my starting point, and sometimes this is wrong, but this is my starting point is, I believe we’re all trying to make sense and we’re all trying to do something that makes sense to us. That means if you’re doing something that doesn’t make sense to me, I need to ask how it made sense to you. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m not. But I think that we all have to, Barry Jentz is terrific. I wrote a book called Talk Sense.
20:20
And he talks about sense making in other people and how you kind of the real times when we have friction in our life, in our relationships, it’s because of an inability to communicate sense making. And we discount the other individual’s ability for sense making. And what does that do? Like if you tell me that I’m not making sense, directly or indirectly, right? Like, hey, it’s not professional to act that way in a board meeting.
20:49
Well, now what you’re saying is I’m unprofessional. You’re not asking me kind of what are my sense making, hey, why you did this and I’m curious why you did that. That’s showing the value of another person’s sense making. And I think most of the time we live in this world where we discount everybody else’s sense making by their own. And I’m not saying that’s bad, right? Cause when I go and I get my sandwich at the deli.
21:15
maybe I don’t care about that person’s sense making. I just want to get my sandwich and go. But I think that if we just kind of, we’re in a time where we’re always talking about being considerate of others, maybe we should be more curious, which really shows consideration to those other people. I agree. I think that even as we develop as leaders and as people, they always say that what got us here will get us there. And so we kind of construct this armor, so to speak.
21:44
that served us, but we see that it’s heavy, it’s laborious, it’s not gonna get us to the next place because speed of security, et cetera. And so by pulling that armor off, if you can replace it with that true curiosity, you know, what could I do instead of this? What triggered me to feel that I needed this? Can I unpack that? What if I just got to the cause instead of trying to use all these symptoms that I’m trying to overcome with, you know, like putting a bandaid on cancer, it doesn’t really help us. We have to understand that
22:13
Once we get to the root of those things, that allows us to really, truly figure out what’s going on. And again, that requires that humility. And that humility and that vulnerability is really what that unbreakable brand is about. It’s really about being able to say very honestly, hey, I’m looking at myself in the mirror. This stuff’s okay, but this stuff cannot go on or I don’t want this to go on or I’m tired of this going on. And once we get fatigued enough or in enough pain, that’s whenever we’re able to.
22:43
start going the other direction. But until we acknowledge it, until we start seeing it for what it is, we will forever be blinded by it and we’ll feed into that delusion of the process. Well, it’s interesting, you know, being an ambassador for the Unbreakable brand, first of all, you know, obviously I am incredibly appreciative to Jake Lazer, whose brand it is, whose philosophy. It’s amazing, amazing guy, yeah. And the ability for him to trust me with his brand, as well as, you know, Nate Boyer.
23:12
Christianus and Tanya Oxonine, the guy has a huge heart, but also GNC. Okay. So here’s a company that itself has had some struggle and they have come back with this brand that operates on pillars that are associated with nothing but goodness, right? The idea of wellness as a holistic piece, right? So the brand is certified.
23:41
to be free of banned substances, third party certified, right? So that’s amazing in itself that they’re doing that. But this idea that it’s not just about, you know, your physical wellness, it’s about how you see yourself. It’s your mental wellness. It’s about giving back to the community, right? So a percentage of every sale goes to merging vets and players and giving to the community. And being able to, you know, in the gym, we’re usually pretty good at saying,
24:11
I got a breakdown to build up. Like we’re good at that. And they’re just saying, let’s take that to the next step. Because quite honestly, if you want to be, I’m gonna be very transparent. Yesterday, I was doing cleans and I failed at 185. I failed, like I just, I couldn’t get it. So I went back down to 165 and did that for like three and then 175 and.
24:38
didn’t attempt 185 again this time, I’ll do it next week and try to come back up. But as I was kind of recovering, I was like, that is very symbolic of how we have to look at our successes beyond the gym. I was so easy to go, I missed it. Okay. This is what I’m going to do so I can get it next time. How often do we do that in our heads? How often do we fail at something and then go.
25:05
Okay, this is what I’m going to do so I can do it next time. Most of the time we go, all right, well, I guess I’m not going to do that. You know, I can’t do that anymore. Which is, which we would never do in the gym, right? We’d be like, okay, I failed at this lift. So this is what I have to do so I can get it next time. Just transition that over. And that’s what I love about this brand is not only are they doing this, you know, kind of Tom’s model of, you know, we’re giving community when you buy it. And.
25:35
You know, it’s obviously a good product because it’s clean, but hey, being unbreakable doesn’t mean that you haven’t ever broken. It means you’re broken and then you figure out a way to kind of put the pieces together and you go forward again. To be unbreakable is the ability to recognize that just because you’re stopped or you’re temporarily broken, isn’t permanently broken.
26:02
I broke yesterday. I missed one 85 and people are going to think I’m like a hundred and nine. I don’t think that, but I broke, but I’m not broken. I broke. I couldn’t get that. So I back up, I do some other stuff and next week I’m going to try it again. And I might break again and not get it. And you know what? That doesn’t mean I’m broken. It means it wasn’t my time to get it that time. So I’m going to do what it takes to get better. So for example, in that
26:31
video that we did for the Unbreakable brand. I boxed, I did a boxing segment with Jay. Jay is a very good fighter. Jay has great hands. Jay is very good at fighting. I didn’t think I was bad at fighting until I fought Jay and I realized I am really, really bad at fighting. And I decided I don’t want to be bad at this. So even though in the video they made it look like I wasn’t as bad as I actually was against Jay who is absolutely…
27:01
really good at this. You know, once a week I work with a guy named Tommy Rodriguez, who’s former Golden Gloves, three time world kickboxing champion, because I want to be better at this. And look, am I a better boxer now? I am. If I fought Jay, would I be good? No, he’s going to break me and I’m going to go get better and I’m going to do it again until I can at least get to a point where I go, yeah, feel good about where I’m at. And I think that that perfectly
27:29
symbolizes everything else that we were talking about. The fact that you, with the Ranger Battalion, when you were leading, you said, this is not working. I need to capitulate to this and just say, we’re just gonna kind of reset. We’re gonna reboot, taking that nap. Even people that, like Albert Einstein, for 10 years he worked on the law of relativity, trying to create it. And he literally just got to a point where he says, I give up and just completely put it to bed and went to sleep. And the next morning is when he had his breakthrough.
27:57
So there is something to be said about, and again, I’m in this environment as well, where everybody’s got a meme and they’re like, you know, you just push harder. And the answer to failure is to not act like you, you know, whatever it is, and it’s, it’s counterproductive and it’s insanity. You have to be at that place where you say, okay, I am broken, but once I rebuild, I can be stronger. We understand the scar tissue is a stronger material than anything else in our body. Once we’ve been injured. And.
28:26
That’s where we truly learn about ourselves. And with you, even with you had some suicidal ideology, me with my adversity, in those places, we have to have the courage to sit with it and really examine it because until we do that, we’re bound to repeat that mistake somewhere down the line. And frankly, as leaders, as parents, if I don’t look at that myself, even if I don’t experience that again,
28:55
I may not be able to recognize it in someone else if I haven’t really taken a look behind the curtain as you said, and truly see what is the motivation, what is the causation, what is the fear, what is the rationalized that we have, or like I say, the rational lies where we rationalize the lies that we’re telling ourselves, the excuses. And until we have that, until we’re able to really do that, and it’s not comfortable, and it’s never comfortable. And just like the hero’s journey.
29:21
It’s ongoing all the time, whether it be writing a book, whether it be having a conversation, whether it be leading somebody that’s always going to be there. And the sooner that we acknowledge that failure is part of the game, the sooner that we can grow stronger from it in every capacity. And I think that that’s, I think we have to have that self-reflection. I think that a temporary pause, a tactical pause is not surrender. Right. It’s a regroup. It’s a reorienting on the problem.
29:51
It’s not surrender. And sometimes doing that tactical pause, you know, like there’s this idea that I’m working on for another book, quitting, right? Never quit, never quit. No, that’s stupid. That’s an absolute and that’s you can’t have absolutes. And there’s times when you quit stuff. There’s times when quitting is actually better for you than staying. And this idea of, well, you can’t quit. Of course you can. And sometimes it’s the right thing to do to quit.
30:21
And, you know, by creating this absolute creates this conflict that, you know, quite honestly, I didn’t even think about until I was in my late 40s and then had to struggle and realize, oh my God, no, there’s times when you quit. And I got to tell my kids, sometimes quitting is okay. It’s how you quit. It’s the way in which you quit. And you know, I mean, the Latin and you’ll appreciate this. The Latin.
30:50
is to set free. So think about that. The word comes from this beautiful idea of to set free. There’s times when you have to set yourself free from something. The difficult piece is to take that technical pause and evaluate, you know, like the cost benefit, like what’s the plus and what’s the negative. And quite honestly, sometimes it’s kind of feeling uncomfortable. And I think you’ve got to get to that point where you recognize it’s okay to be uncomfortable.
31:20
That was part one of my interview with TEDx speaker, bestselling author, and retired army ranger, Lieutenant Colonel J.C. Glick, a partner and leadership advisor at MVP development group and pro dromos leadership. You can hear part two of the interview on the next episode of Bokto Namberba, where we talk about why sometimes quitting is the right thing to do. J.C. also talks about understanding what resilience truly is, his attraction to Buddhism, and how we need to realize our commonalities.
31:49
more than our differences. You can find out more about JC Glick at prod Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
