The Real Source of Confidence | AJ Pasciuti

Sometimes the most powerful tool, the most powerful phrase that you can say to a group of people that you're trying to lead is say, I don't know how to solve this problem. And if you bring them into the fold and say, can we solve this together? There is this moment where we all come together and now we solve this collective problem as a team.

And when you do that, you get collective buy-in. Every single person is working to solve that same problem. There's ideas of self efficacy. There's ideas of people coming together. There's an idea of When people feel they're part of a solution and not just a cog in a wheel, they work harder, they love what they do, and there's this passion that comes from that.

All right, welcome back to the show. Today we're talking with AJ Pescioti, former Marine Force Recon Scout Sniper and author of Dark Horse, Harnessing Hidden Potential in War and Life. AJ grew up as a small kid who wrote off military service as impossible until others believed in him before he believed in himself. He shares why self-doubt does not disqualify you from success, how relationships shape you before self-belief even kicks in.

The real power of visualizing what you want and why fear requires movement, not confidence first. AJ famously engaged in a sniper versus sniper battle that's gone down in US history as one of the most incredible events ever. And today he joins us to share success is not predetermined. It's not a straight line.

AJ shows you why people need to carry your weight until you can carry it yourself, how looking in the rearview mirror builds courage for the next leap, and why keeping your feet moving when scared separates success from failure. Welcome to the show, AJ. It's great to have you. Yeah, thank you so much, AJ. Great to be here. I'd love to get started just hearing a little bit about the backstory. Did you always know you wanted to be a sniper in the military?

Um no, not uh not a hundred percent. So I'm from uh Northern California. I'm from Silicon Valley. Um so San Jose, Sunnyvale uh area. Uh you know, and I grew up as a I was kind of a small kid, right? You know, um I was uh an only child. I had immigrant parents.

Um and so there was a yeah, I struggled with a little bit of self efficacy when I was growing up. Um and I had the idea in my mind, you know, I saw uh I played with G. I. Joes, right? You know, and I I enjoyed that kind of stuff and I I really liked that kind of mindset or that model of of what I wanted to be in the future but

I immediately wrote that off as something that I didn't think I could ever do because of my size, because of an idea of self-efficacy. Um and then eventually what happened was um I joined the Boy Scouts and kind of carried up through that kind of process, which gave me a little bit more of that. And then really nine eleven happened and that was the the catalyst for me that was like, I need to do something. I need to kind of try to, you know, serve my country at some point.

Well let's talk a little bit about that mindset piece, the self e efficacy, because I think most listeners imagining a sniper think of coming in with a self assured, overwhelming sense of self confidence. So do you feel that was trained into you or how did you develop that? Because obviously being isolated, being on the battlefield, you have to have a a level of self efficacy to do all your jobs.

You know, I think what you're you're hundred percent correct. You know, and I wasn't, you know, running around as a sniper, you know, w running with self-doubt. Eventually what happened was I think what people I think the reason why I wrote Dark Horse, right, was the idea of a Dark Horse is somebody that you don't see coming, right?

um a or somebody who wasn't supposed to be successful in this place. I was extremely vulnerable and I wrote a lot about my failures of coming up through the service and things that I had, you know, fear or s you know, messed up along the way. What I valued in Dark Horse and what I wanted to write was it's kind of a a love letter a or a thank you, right, to the Marines you know and sailors that helped shape my life and turn me into what I am.

So what they did was they helped me carry the weight, right? Or see something in myself before I ever saw it. And they helped bring me to that place. What I think what I wanted to do at the end of that was when I achieved my own individual success. The thing that I was taught by them was to turn around and help the next generation, to help somebody else out.

through the breach, through their own, you know, their own struggles, to make them better than me. Because they did that for me. And if we continue down that pathway of making the next generation, the next person, whatever it is, better than you, then we're all going to benefit from that.

You're bringing up a great point that I I just wanna touch upon and it's something that We have been seeing as a recurring theme with a lot of the other researchers and authors uh that we've had on, but also uh we're seeing it in just how uh the technology is now working and programmed to work with other human beings, which is People are continually being being more and more isolated.

But that's not the the the main point. The main point is that that now technology is our friend and AI is our friend and AI is gonna validate us. And a AI makes us feel good and our relationship with AI is is cushy because of of how it's programmed to deal with us. And everything you just mentioned there is you wouldn't be the man that you are today or have done the things that uh you have done and accomplished and became.

through constant validation, pampering, and coddling. It happened through going through a grinder with other people trying to be their best. Challenging each other, pushing each other around, iron sharpens iron, uh, and getting the best out of you. And that can only be done through relationships with human beings because they're messy, because they force you to be better, they force you to evolve.

And then as a person who's growing, you don't you're not always there with the same friends for the rest of your life. You have to move through different groups. Uh as well as your ideas. And moving to those different groups in order to continue That evolution is not easy and it's not comfortable. And a lot of times you don't want to do Do it. Yeah.

You know, I've seen I I completely agree the relationships that I've had through my entire life. So as a sniper, I believe in trajectory and trajectory affected early has exponential results over time. I wrote and I was very personal. Um I don't have any real secrets anymore. I've written about all my failures for all of the world to to know. But I think that there's strength in failure.

The idea is that uh what when we I think failure as is a is a part of success. You have to have multiple failures. The challenge that I have here is, you know, we're all probably around the same age, right? I'm forty one. We kind of grew up with technology at some level and it's and it has, you know, morphed into where where it is now.

The challenge that I face with a lot of social media, um, you know, and I'm not trying to act like an old guy who's like, ah, you know, okay, but the challenge that I face with a lot of social media stuff is that young kids, young adults, see uh you know instagram or tick tock reels of people who are super successful

But those are only highlight reels, right? They don't see a mundane Tuesday, right, or any time that this person has failed. So if somebody were to look at my if they were look to meet me in the street and they're gonna be

you know, a force recon, scout sniper, infantry weapons officer, whatever it is, the first thing that they would say to me was like, Well, I thought one, I get this a lot. They're like, I thought you'd be bigger. And I'm like, Well, thanks for that, right? Um, but then two is they would think that success I was predetermined for success. And that couldn't be further from the truth. I have failed more times than I have succeeded, and other people believed in me until I believed in t in myself.

And so getting to a point, I have to be open, I have to be honest, I have to be transparent with people and say failure is an absolute necessary step of success. And so I wrote about it and I told everybody all of my secrets, right? To be able to make sure that Some kid out there, man or woman, doesn't matter, right? Military, non military, can see this person growing through service, failing along the way, becoming successful, and also see that success is not a straight line.

Well what I want to point out in that story is Is basically you admitting that early on, you know, you were labeled the runt. You didn't have this belief that you would go on to succeed, and you had to develop that through relationships with other people. And we found in our experience a lot of our clients have built this lone wolf personality.

where they have bought into the social media myth of the self made man that all they have to do is have high agency and they can achieve and they've put relationships on the back burner to their detriment. And what you're spelling out for us is there's a lot of relationships along the way that allowed you to build trust in yourself, not just trust in other people, but yourself.

So, walk us through some of those early relationships and how that trust in yourself developed because many in our audience have. Cast that aside to focus on skill building and being incredibly accurate with their rifle, like you, so to speak, metaphorically, but not thinking about the trust component and all of this. Huge. Absolutely huge. So I had a gentleman early in my career. I was I was

eighteen when I first met him, right? You know, I mean absolute baby, right? I had just gone through my first deployment as an infantry rifleman in OIF one in two thousand three in the invasion. And I had been brought back to a position in the infantry

you know, world, I was I So a very long story short, um the infantry still has administrative capabilities and functions that they need to handle. They saw that I was from Silicon Valley and they assumed that I could type and that I was good with computer.

So I had what we call a fate worse than death in the infantry as I was made a non-infantry marine and I was called a company clerk, right? So it was like my first like uh you know, failure. Not failure, but my first kind of, you know, gut punch. I met a gentleman by the name of Gunnery Sergeant Ricky Jackson. Ricky Jackson is a Marines Marine. He was probably six feet tall. Now again, everyone's tall to me, right? Uh but he was like six feet tall.

traps he didn't have a neck, right? Just big giant traps, right? I joke that I I always said he looked like cheeseburger Eddie, right? You know, just like bald, just jacked huge black guy. And he was the company gunnery sergeant, so he was probably fifteen years my senior in the service.

And so uh you know, I saw a a flyer for what's called a sniper indock. And a sniper indock is to take the first step to become a sniper in the Marine Corps, and you have to go through this like week long kind of arduous, you know, uh, you know, journey through that. And he saw that I was interested in that and he was the first person in my life to not laugh in my face when I told him I wanted to become a sniper.

And through a series of events, he had trained me up for six months to be able to get me ready, running, sprinting, lifting weights. You know, I lifted lighter weights than Gunny Jackson, but I still lifted weights with him, right? And then came this moment where I had to step into the breach.

And he asked me and he says or he he sat me down and he and I had to uh eventually kind of like violate a direct order. I was told that I couldn't take the sniper in doc and Gunny Jackson gave me permission and what he said was he said he sat me down knee to knee, right? So kneecap to kneecap, we were facing each other and he told me not to talk. He put his hands up and he says don't don't speak'cause he was giving me an order he couldn't technically give. He says that

Peshuti, he says every man is in charge of his own destiny. If you're not here on Monday morning, I'll know where you're at. And so he gave me, you know, an underhanded kind of version of saying, Y go chase your dreams. Go follow this thing. We've prepared you for this. So Monday morning I was at the pool uh with the sniper platoon going through their sniper indock for the next week.

And eventually what happens was I was successful in that endeavor. And now again, I was the runt as I went through this, but his belief in me, eventually what I said was he carried the weight for me, not physically, but metaphorically, carried the weight for me. until I could carry it myself. When I was in my deepest, darkest moments of the sniper end doc and I wanted to quit, and in fact tried to quit, he was there. And he was the person that said, No, f you asked for this.

Finish what you're s finish what you started and go back out there and become what you want to be. And that man continued to be a mainstay through my career is I would check in with him over and over and over again through my career. Anytime that I wanted to go and take a leap and to do something scary that I thought that there was a shirt a cer a sure chance of of failure.

He was there to remind me that every man was in charge of his own destiny and to be able to kind of take my dreams and and then run with that. He gave me permission to believe in myself before I ever did. If I had to hire a new editor tomorrow, I wouldn't say must edit audio. I'd want someone who's worked on conversational podcasts, knows our software, understands our style, someone who could jump in and handle the chaos. This is a job for sponsored jobs.

Indeed, sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Reach candidates that meet your specific criteria. Skills, certifications, location. Sponsored job boosts your posts and search results so you can reach people who can help your business thrive, and you only pay for results. Sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are ninety five percent more likely to report a hire than non sponsored jobs.

3.3 million employers worldwide use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Spend less time searching and more time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for indeed sponsored jobs.

Listeners of this show get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash charm. Just go to indeed.com slash charm right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash charm. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsor job. What I think is confounding in that advice is that many take that and go, Okay, I can just do this all myself. I'm in charge of my own destiny.

But then once you get out there, even as a sniper, you are relying on the trust of your team members to give you accurate information, to understand the environment, to actually be able to do what appears to those outsiders, those civilians listening is a very solo job, a very isolating and a very, okay, man of bravery, own destiny. But that trust through training and then with your team members

was so vital to you actually being in combat. So how do you juggle those two things where the listener's like, okay, I'm in charge of my own destiny, but at the same time you have to rely on other people to actually be able to achieve your destiny. Absolutely. So as a as a sniper, right, we talk about trajectory. We also believe in math. One of my sniper instructors uh was a gentleman by the name of Wesley Payne.

And he was a six foot three West Virginian, square jaw, right? I called him like the black Terminator, right? So what he told us when he taught me in sniper school was he says that snipers are not

there there is a a little bit of humility and like forced humility because there's a there's a a a definite, you know, potential for people to kind of you know, get high on their own supply or to feel that they are the, you know, God's gift to the infantry or whatever it is. And he told us that a sniper is at the end of a very long math equation.

Every single person, low justician to administrator to you know uh you know, j judge advocates to whatever it may be, had worked to be able to get you into that position that so you could have the most amount of effect with the least amount of of you know um of chaos outside of it, you're the end of a long equation. You are here because of them. Do not forget that. You are just part of this larger equation itself.

And so why I wrote so if people were to you know As you guys introduced, you know or some people talk about it. Yes, I was the sniper that eventually pulled the trigger on um America's you know greatest adversary at the time, a sniper by the name of Juba. And it was a sniper versus sniper duel that we had.

You know, Hollywood may want something like if Hollywood were to take that, they would show this image of him and I, you know, having a picture of each other and like facing off of one a against one another. That couldn't be further from the truth. What really happened was he showed us who he was by or what his tactics and techniques were. And it was our team that sat down together and we watched every single one of his videos. We watched Americans suffer in their finer moments of life.

And what we did was we had to analyze that. And we analyzed that as a unit. Not just my four man sniper team. Not just our individual platoon, but the entire infantry or in the entire Marine Corps as a whole. We worked together. I happened to be the end of that equation. I was in the moment and at the place in time where I could action on that information. But it was this entire team organization that made that happen.

So why I never took credit for the kill, why I never took credit for that? Because it never felt like mine to claim. I was just the person at the end of the equation. Everyone else had made that possible and and paying homage to that. The Marine Corps's very, very big. on teamwork, on team mentality, on giving everything back to the collective. Because we also have another saying that says, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, you go together.

Yeah, I think that social contract of trust is such an e essential part of not only your training, but then being in the environment. And for many of us, when we're trying to achieve our goals, it can be a difficult bridge to cross because we might feel others are gunning for that role to be the sniper at the end of that math equation. You're also in competition with others. So the military is a hierarchy. It rewards

skill and competition to put the best person in the role. So as you're building this team trust, how did you deal with the competition that's also baked into that to be at the end of that equation? Very great, very great question. Um you know you bring up a very good term that we use a lot in the Marine Corps, um the social contract. The social contract that we have with one another. So this is interesting.

You know, and I part of what we wrote and why I wrote Dark Horse is because of the social contract. I've read a lot of books, a lot of leadership books, a lot of, you know, how to manage personnel and people and personalities as you go through that. There is a sometimes there is a difference between academia, right, that or or or literature that writes on um leading for organizations that are built to make profit.

Well, our social contract, our currency in the military is not profit. Our currency is sacrifice. And so when we work for one another, when that social contract says I am willing to lay my life down so that you can have an opportunity for a better one or that I can give my life to give you a chance at success in the future, whatever that may be, whether it be literally giving your life.

or giving everything about you to make you another person successful, that social contract, it's a two-way street. It has to be paid into by the person that is receiving the, you know, the contract earlier on, but then they have to be able to give that. As we wrote this book, what I wanted to do is I wanted to tell people and I wanted to give people an idea of what to me leadership is.

Leadership isn't standing on a a soapbox telling people what to do or yelling at people about how they need to be better. It's about working if the social contract I had with my team later on in my career, they knew that my entire existence in life was to try to make them better than me, to put them in situations, in examples and successes so that they could become better than I was, because somebody did that to me.

Gunny Jackson did that to me. Corporal Wesley Payne did that to me. They gave everything about who they were to give me a chance at success. So part of that is to go through that to what we call being the one man through the door. When we're clearing a house, we throw a flashbang in or a grenade and that thing detonates and a one man's gotta go in that room.

But he knows he can go in that room because he's got a person right on his shoulder. And I know that I can go in and cover my corner because I've got someone coming in with me. And then what we do is we gain a foothold, we clear the space, and we make the place a little bit safer so that the next group can come in.

When you achieve success as a leader, when you make somebody better than you, you tell them the next their the way that they pay you back is by making the next generation or doing the same thing and making the next generation better than you. If we can do that.

And we could then we're on this collective glide slope. Yes, there's a natural competition. Yes, sometimes there's a dog eat dog world out there. But you know, I had a good friend of mine say one time, he says there's enough sun to shine on all of this. And if we all work together to be able to make this thing and not in competition with one another, we can achieve these collective goals together.

Well, I think many of us aren't on the battlefield, but emotions cloud our judgment. And we talk to a lot of experts and professors on the show about the impact of emotions on our logical thinking. And it's so interesting when you talk about that sniper versus sniper battle.

you are feeling lost. Like there's casualties, there's grief involved. How do you manage those emotions that are leading you, charging you in to just fire back, seek revenge, to harm the other side based on the damage that they've caused us?

to set that aside, to stick to the mission, to stick to the plan, to stick to the teamwork that's gonna get to that ultimate goal. Because for many of us listening, we're struggling with those emotions. The f the fear the fr the pain, the frustration with where we sit currently in our career and those emotions can obviously take us off course, can take us off the mission.

I can't even imagine what those heavy emotions of grief and loss and being in the battlefield are doing to you in those moments of decision making. Yes. Yes. Th we feel emotions just like, you know, anybody else. It's not like the movies where, you know, we're like just sitting there cleaning our gun all day or whatever it is, right? You know, like we are human too, right? Um

So there is a moment in the book, right? In two thousand and six, I'm a sniper team leader and I am covering a position, um, you know, and I'm trying to protect the infantry marines. And these infantry marines are my brothers. I've kind of grown up with them, but now I have a different skill set.

Well what happens is um the Mujahideen or the organization that we were fighting at the time had kind of gotten in under our nose and they had implanted a couple of different IEDs and IEDs that hurt um other Marines that I was supposed to be protecting. I felt like a failure. I felt like a fraud. I felt like I had let my other Marines down. And I was beside myself. I mean literally

standing, you know, screaming into the void because they had they were toying with us, right? And I'm I remember literally like screaming like this guttural like they're toying with us, right? And there was nothing that we can do.

And Juba and the the Mujahideen and these IED emplacers, they felt like ghosts and we couldn't track them down. We couldn't find them. Well, what I had to do is I had to go and separate emotion from decision. We realized and there's a saying that says snipers don't believe in ghosts. We believe in patterns.

And so what we wanted to do is we now had to say, okay, we've had to separate the emotion, don't let that cloud your judgment. Let's work this thing back. Let's look for patterns in this person's, you know, modus operandi. How how do they uh how are they fighting us? One of the terms we use is turn the map around. How would I, if I were this enemy sniper, how would I attack us?

And that clarity, that moment of saying, Let's take the emotion out of this, let's be objective, right, in our analysis of this, that allowed us to be able to get into a position and eventually establish a mission set and and Effectively set up a trap for this person to set into. I am human just like anybody else. I feel loss, doubt, grief, fear, rage, right? I feel all of these things. But those...

can be they can be very powerful motivators to try to solve a problem. But if you let your emotions get too far ahead of you, then you start willing yourself and you're leading with emotion into a situation. And when lives are on the line. Emotion may not be the thing you need to lead with because that can have you make some, you know, poor choices or lead you into a scenario that you don't want to be.

I'd love to unpack the turn the map around even further because there's a degree of tactical empathy being deployed here where you actually now have to put yourself in the enemy's shoes and think like they would be thinking in a scenario where they're shooting at you and us. Totally. Okay. So I love you guys, right? You're using all the words. Like I love it, right? Like I live in a world that is like hyper masculine, right?

And I use words like empathy, like love, like respect, like accountability. I use those those terms because they're real and they're tangible. I get asked a lot about what masculinity is. And to me, masculinity isn't l yelling louder, right? Or beating your chest more. Masculinity to me in a lot of ways has to do with empathy, has to do with understanding.

So when we're trying to turn the map around, I have to take my ego completely out of the equation. I have to take all my loss, all my anger, all the regret, whatever it may be, self-doubt, take that out of the equation. It just becomes a math problem. How would I solve this problem if I were given the same tools and the same resources that this person was?

And when you can sit and you can dissect that and you can do that objectively, then you can create a pathway. And sometimes as a leader, and I've led You know, I joke, right? I'm only five foot nine. I used to be five ten, but the Taliban got me in Afghanistan, so I lost an inch of my spine, right? I got compressed. So I'm not like the biggest dude in the world. And so I was with my partner Sarah. We were at a dinner last night with a bunch of reconnaissance Marines.

And these guys are huge. Like generally reconnaissance marines come in all shapes and sizes, but there's like this really great like leadership, you know, kind of lesson that I give to people is. I i there's there's the the leadership says well, you know, some types of things that were taught in the services like do what I say or I'll punch you in the mouth. Well

I'm five foot nine, I'm a hundred and sixty pounds, these guys could eat me as a snack. That will only get me so far inside of the military. And I can't just go around punching everybody, right? Especially people that are bigger than me. That doesn't really work. Or I can lead with do what I say because I'm a higher rank than you.

All right. So that gets limited returns. What happens is technically, yes, they will accomplish whatever I tell them to do because I am their superior. But what happens is you don't get a lot of buy-in with that. If you are working within an organization, sometimes the most powerful tool, the most powerful phrase that you can say to a group of people that you're trying to lead is say, I don't know how to solve this problem.

Right. And if you bring them into the fold and say, Can we solve this together? When we turn the map around as snipers, it wasn't s I didn't tell my team, I've got this guys, you wait for the plan that I give you. It was saying Well shit. I don't know how to do this. What do you guys think? There is this moment where we all come together and now we solve this collective problem as a team. And when you do that, you get collective buy-in.

Every single person is working to solve that same problem. There's ideas of self efficacy. There's ideas of people coming together. There's an idea of when people feel they're part of a solution and not just a cog in a wheel, right, or in this entire system. They work harder, they, they, they, they they love what they do and there's this passion that comes from that. And also a recognition that the best ideas rarely come from the top.

And so when we're open, when we're humble, when we're modest, and we listen to people who have their, you know, nose to the ground, if you will, right, we get a lot of really good answers uh from them. And then being able to listen to them when they when they speak up, providing that space for them.

Well, I think many of us civilians who haven't experienced that culture and you know, Johnny and I have been fortunate enough to to train in that culture, recognize it as okay, there's rank There's authority that's granted to rank, and then you follow based on rank. And that's just pounded into us from what we see in in culture. But what you're talking about is everyone coming together, the lowest rank contributing, and sometimes the highest rank not being the final word on things.

And we find ourselves very similarly now in our career looking at it hierarchically. Like, okay, I've reached this title, so that means the people below me have to just follow my orders. They just have to follow my leadership and I lead based on title. not by what you're talking and discussing. So how does that match up with not only our thought around the military, but then also how often we feel gratitude and uh gravitas given to us by the titles that we get in our career.

Yeah, right. You know, n uh never fall in love with with your rank, right, is a big thing. At the end of the day I used to tell people that rank on your collar is just a piece of tin. It doesn't make you who you are. It is just granting you the constitutional authority to be a commander. And so I would oftentimes remind commanders of that.

Yes, people will do what you say because you have that piece of tin on your collar. Um, but what how effective you are as a leader has to do with here and has to do with how you treat people. So I mean I guess going through uh you know to be vulnerable, I will tell you about one of my failures. So I was a force recon team leader, which is the pinnacle of the Marine Corps, you know, there's eight hundred reconnaissance Marines

in a two hundred and ten thousand org man organ or uh marine organization. So there's not a lot of us, right? And so yeah, there's a natural like, you know I I call people sometimes like fart sniffers, right? Like get to this point where they keep sniffing their own farts and they think their shit don't stink, right? Is this moment, right, of of like, yeah, there's a gravitas that comes with that.

I was in a place called Aqaba Jordan and I was on a what's called a Mew, a marine expeditionary unit. The Marine Corps is America's nine one one force. And the way that we we are the nine one one force, and we can be anywhere in the world within twenty four hours, is by being constantly forward deployed. And so we have these things called MUS that go out and are constantly forward deployed. We were the special operations team on that deployment.

So to backtrack just a second, I had been a reconnaissance team leader in Afghanistan. Um and it through a a terrible turn of events, and I write about it in the book, in the chapter of the worst day of my life, I write about losing my best friend in Afghanistan.

And part of that was um a lack of control on my part. A a a terrible situation happened where Matt Ingham, my my closest friend, was placed in a no-win scenario and what he chose to do was to give his life, his last full measure of devotion, to be able to allow the you know, to bring resources in, to bring airstrikes in, to be able to help his team give them a chance for success. But in that

And after that moment I was lost. I had lost my closest friend and I and and through that I became a fearful leader. And leading with fear is never a good place to be. Because what I thought I could do was control I could be an effective leader by trying to control every variable and be a micromanager, so to speak. So I spoke speed of trust. I spoke speed of truth.

But what I did in practice was completely different. So fast forward to two thousand and twelve, I'm a force recon team leader. I'm at the pinnacle of my career, right? Um we know people would you know would would would kill to be in that position. And I had my assistant team leader, a man by the name of Aaron Titus.

He came up to me. We're sitting in this, you know, this this this desert region. We're about to go out on a two-week mission, you know, uh uh you know, through uh you know, training mission through Jordan, and he comes up and everyone called me P, right? Uh'cause nobody can pronounce my last name and I kinda got over that a long time ago, right? So he says, Hey P you know, like can we have a family meeting?

And I went, Oh, okay, you know, and and he's like he's got this like boisey kind of twang and he tries to lift it at the end to make it like not sting as much. A family meeting to us was a knights of the round table moment. where I as a leader would have an a moment with my six man or eight man reconnaissance team at the time where we would take our ranks off.

And we would sit down and we would flush out anything that was going wrong. It was a moment for us to say, let's put pause on this, let's take our egos, let's take our piece of tin out of here and let's have a conversation. Well, I wasn't actually walking to a family meeting. I was walking to an intervention. My team

sat me down and they were in like a horseshoe around me and I'm sitting there, you know, crisscross applesauce, right? Like sitting there, you know, with my feet in the dirt, right, in the in the Jordanian desert. And I and I listened to my teammates. Every single one of them went around and told me a moment of where I had micromanaged them, where I had taken their own idea of who they were, their own professional expertise.

The junior man in my team was an eight-year force reconnaissance marine. So I wasn't leading new Marines. I was leading the best of the best of the best. And each one of them had told me a moment where I had t I had taken something from them, whether it be my sharp tongue, whether it be micromanagement, whether it be second guessing them. And I sat for two hours.

While these Marines sat around and told me that they loved me, right? But they loved me enough to tell me I was failing them as a leader. I hadn't earned that position or I was I was losing that. I felt That by gripping tighter onto control I could control every single variable and that couldn't be furthers further from the truth. I had to let them fly, as Aaron told me. I had to give them autonomy, and I had to give them trust.

If is if I didn't trust who they were at that moment, it would be an abdication of all of our training continuum, of all of our schools, of who they were as individuals. I was I had to learn to be able to let go. And some of the hardest things to do as leaders when they're again, I was responsible for everything the team did and failed to do, I was their leader.

But by holding so tightly onto control, I didn't let them or I wasn't letting them be as effective as they could be. So I had to learn to let go. And we started reading books. So we had this moment, I listened to them, and I said, I'm sorry. I owe you an apology. Now remember, this is a Force Recon team leader telling other Force Recon Marines, I'm sorry. I owe you an apology. I'll be better. And I said, Aaron, you've got the team for the next two days. I need to go get my head repped.

Sometimes the strongest thing you can do as a leader is is is tell your, you know, the people that work for you, right, I don't know. I'm gonna have to go get better on this. And so we did. And so for the next few months, we worked as a collective. We read every single book we could, everything from like the five levels of leadership to, you know, the Mission, the Men and Me by a gentleman by the name of Pete Blaber.

And we learned about uh you know a ton of lessons through there. One of the lessons that Pete Blaber, who is a Delta Force commander in in Iraq, he had a term that he said trust the guy on the ground. This is a a poignant lesson, I think, for leaders in any organization.

The further you go up the chain of the command of command, the less fidelity, the less understanding you have of ground truth. How many organizations as a CEO says, we are seeing this, we're gonna go this direction, and people at the ground level are going, That's not true at all. That's not how any of this works. The same thing happens in the United States military.

So what I learned to do was trust the guy on the ground. If Aaron was at a specific position, you know, five hundred meters or a a you know, ten kilometers away from me and he said, This is happening right now and this is what I see.

I had to trust him. Because if I didn't trust him, I would slow our chain of command and and the decision matrix and decision authority down. And also I would take his level of autonomy. And the more that I questioned him, the less he ever wanted to be able to make judgment calls. So some of that strength came from letting go. Well, let's go a level deeper there because many of us have team members where

You know, we've gone through performance reviews. We're readily understanding what their strengths and weaknesses are. And I think for many of us, we are happy to give autonomy to the strengths, but we try to pull back that autonomy based on weaknesses that we identify. And oftentimes that does more damage to the team where they can't actually strengthen those weaknesses, or maybe we've even miscalculated those weaknesses based on the perceived impact of past

interactions or past outcomes. And I think as leaders That's the the real struggle with management of like, okay, I hear what you're saying around autonomy, but how are you thinking about that autonomy? Uh of course on the battlefield, which I think many of us are obviously not experiencing, but where those weaknesses could mean life or death. Great question. When people look so first thing I wanna kind of, you know, you know, tackle on this is when people look at the military

Um they they look at it with like this sort of like reverence or this idea that we're all, you know, a bunch of badass heroes or whatever that may be. And honestly, that couldn't be further from the truth. We're just human beings. We're just it's the personnel management is personnel management.

Whether you're at a Fortune five hundred or Fortune one hundred company or you're a force recon team member or you're an infantry rifle squad, you know, fighting through Fallujah. It's just personnel management. Here's what I've learned through my my career is I think I call it my leadership triad, right? The three things I owe my team, I owe them a very clear intent. I have to tell them what I think success looks like.

Then I have to give them autonomy. I have to give them the ability to be able to see my s my intent and work towards that as best as they see possible. But the third part of that is accountability. What do we do when that success isn't met? And what do we do if that success is met?

So I also I mean it's this wasn't like some like, you know, feel good utopia, like when people screwed up, right, we held them accountable. But accountability is something that is integral to leadership, it's integral to any single team. Here are the metrics for success. Did you get them? Like we also say that in which gets measured gets improved. As a leader, you have to give tangible uh intent, right? Not we're we're going to increase our profit margin or we're going to be a better team.

N that's not tangible, right? Like yes, what w we want to know what those metrics are. Get to those metrics. And if we don't get to those metrics, then we have to dissect how did we get there? And there's a very big difference. And I had to be able to gauge this as a leader.

very much through my career. There's a difference between negligence and a mistake. If people make a mistake, I handle that. And mistakes are good. Mistakes are a part of growing just as much as as failure is a part of success. If a person makes a mistake trying to do something to achieve the intent that I laid down, that's okay. There's corrective action that we can learn from and we can work towards. Now negligence.

If there was if they made a conscious decision to do the wrong thing when there was a right option. We handle that a different way and we handle that through accountability and whatever that looks like for your organization needs to be there. One of the things that we saw in this, and the reason why I wrote Dark Horse was There's a lot of theory in leadership writing and there's a lot of, you know, what I you know, there's a lot of great bumper sticker phrases that are out there.

What I saw and what when I was going through my own leadership journey of trying to be able to figure out how to be a good leader you know, through my career. One, it's a constant you know, it's a constant journey, right? I don't like just get to the p the pinnacle and be like, I am a great leader now, right? That doesn't like I have arrived. That doesn't happen, right?

It comes from this idea of when I read a lot of books on leadership, a lot of them were based in theory. And I had lived practice. And sometimes theory and practice didn't commingle. They didn't they didn't work with one another. And so, why I wrote Dark Horse was to be able to say, okay, I understand a lot of this theory, but I also understand the real world. How do we bring them together?

So Dark Horse was written. You're never gonna see prescriptive leader leadership in Dark Horse. I'm never gonna tell you these are my three C's of leadership and this is that that that's fine. And there are plenty of people that do that and I think that those are great books that I've learned from myself. What I did was I I wrote a book that was Leadership Through Allegory.

Humans learn through storytelling. Any you know, you know, sacred texts to you know to anything that was to passing stories on here, they learn through storytelling. So what I did was I tried to immerse the reader in actual stories that I have experienced through my life. Good and bad.

And and had them live through that experience themselves to see what frustration looks like, to see what success in a mission looks like, to see what a leader who is focused on the wrong things does when he cuts down his subordinates in public. what those things look like and having them feel

Because they can feel that, they can empathize with that. And if they can empathize with that, they can say, okay, that's what I want to do or don't want to do. Those become markers for us as we go through our own individual journey itself. I think one of the things for John and I that has been the most surprising in in training, especially the special forces, is how much of their life is either in training or you're deployed.

And if you're not deployed, you're in training. And what we're doing in training is we're trying our best to define the most likely scenarios and variables. move aside from the chaos and then build behaviors and actions that hopefully in the chaos can actually happen. Unfortunately, as we know, the battlefield is chaotic and those best laid plans and even the things you train on are not necessarily what you see when you're actually there.

So I'd love to go deeper on how you're managing the chaos of the team. Cause many of us, hey, we have goals and KPIs and we think this next quarter is going to be X, Y, and Z in terms of outcomes and and we can train to get there. But then things happen, you know, and as we're seeing right now in the macroeconomic environment, things that we did not plan happening are happening that are impacting our role and our career.

So walk us through those moments where you're actually in the battle and you're recognizing that the plan that was given, the things you agreed on in training are not actually what you're encountering. Great. I just you guys are hitting the nail on the head of how to be able to manage through these things. So the first thing I have to say to that is we can come up with the best plan in the world, but the enemy gets a vote.

Right. They get a vote on how the on how they're going to react to our plan. And they can change that at any moment. So we have this term that we use that's called flex on the egg. And it's not an excuse for a lack of planning. Marines are are known for our like nitnoid, like, you know, clinical levels of of planning and attention to detail. We go through an entire process Before we go through any single mission that takes days or to weeks on end for anything.

But what happens is we have also have the understanding that as soon as that helicopter touches on the ground and my boot touches the sand or the dirt wherever I'm at, the enemy gets a vote. And that plan changes. So inside of our our our culture, we understand that adaptability, inj ingenuity, right, and an ability to flex on the X has to be part of that formula for success. We cannot fall in love with our plan. We also can't throw it out the window as soon as we get there.

So every single person in the team knows the plan from soup to nuts, right? From the in from the moment that we step off on that mission to the moment we get back on a helicopter somewhere else. However, we have to maintain an adaptability. Where that comes from. And and this is what I would I would implore any leader that has to lead a dynamic organization in a world that is constantly evolving and tumultuous, is you have to give clear intent.

So the difference between um and what I've seen in my growth as as a as an infantry marine moving into special operations is We at in Special Operations what we do is the fundamental difference between us and other organizations is we teach the word why. We tell our young Marines in Special Operations to ask the commander why.

And the and it's not that we're questioning their decision. We want to know the reasons why they made the decision in the first place. Behind your intent, why do you have why do you what are your metrics of success and why did you choose those as the metrics? And again, it's not to question them. It's to seek information and guidance because once the plan changes,

Once we step off that helicopter, I need to know the the overarching goal of what you want accomplished. Because in the gray, everybody in the world wants the world to be black and white. There's the way that you want the world to be, and there's the way that the world is. And the world is gray. The first casualty in combat is clarity. And so when you have an idea, an understanding of what the overarching why is, you as a subordinate, you as an as a as a mobile, actionable arm of intent.

can now move and manipulate and adapt to whatever that mission set now demands, still reaching the hires, you know, commander's intent itself.

So an ability for flexibility and adaptability, we inculcate decision making. We inculcate people to be able to see a stimulus and then create a specific response in that. And on an organization that punishes people for making mistakes when they have a bias for action. strips people of their own autonomy, their own individual self of who they are. And then they become habitually reactive. And a reactive organization cannot be a successful organization. You have to be proactive.

Because the enemy, the market, you know, the a adaptation of technology, it gets a vote. And so your best laid plans will fall apart if you are only reactive. You have to inculcate a society, an organization of people who are looking to be proactive. And part of that is being able to allow mistakes to happen.

promote people when they do make mistakes and say, but you made a mistake in the right direction. You fell forward, right? That's a good thing. Don't be fearful of failure because someone who is of i uh in fear of failure is is doomed. To effectively fail. Change is the only thing you can count on in in this advanced world where, you know, a hundred years ago it wasn't it wasn't the case. And uh for those people who are rigid and certainly with our our clients Uh they get really upset.

w when things don't go their way or things don't happen the way they have planned it. So uh for us it's to keep that healthy mindset of everything's gonna change and and nothing works. Ever. And go from there. Yes. is so we have this principle and I think, you know, so I've been I I went to University of Southern California for a business school, right? Uh I have a masters in public leadership and I'm continuing a PhD in leadership studies at the University of Sam uh San Diego now.

And one of the things that we continue through this through line is this understanding of what I liked what what what was, you know, called Moore's Law, right? And Moore's Law was this idea that uh very early on in the Silicon Valley kind of age was that Every two years uh the size of a microprocessor or of a the uh the size of a microprocessor reduces by fifty percent and the operating capacity increases by one hundred percent.

Well, we're on this exponential curve, right? And we're seeing this now start to happen. And so in business school, we study, you know, organizations like Xerox or Kodak or any of these organizations that refused to accept the world was changing. And then they went the way of the dodo. We have to be a a an an a a I would say an adaptable organization. You have to breathe and live with that. Also, what we do is when we do

Oh, it's one of the most fascinating things. If you have a team and you're trying to solve this really, really big problem, one of the things that we do in the Marine Corps is we break this mission down. So we have our, you know, our our our organization that's trying to I don't know we're we're doing a big mission planning. We take a team of people and we set them aside and we have them plan an evacue. Their job is to be the enemy.

And so they have the same stimulus, the same information that we have, and they are planning as the enemy would, with our technological advantage, with our the way that we see the world, and they're trying to defeat us. And then we have to fight each other when we go through these kind of scenarios. If you have we call it red selling. So it's called a red cell analysis, right? Or red selling. It's turning the map around. It's being the enemy. And if you can have an informed

you know, portion of your team, whatever it is, that's trying to say this, that allows us as an organization to constantly be forward thinking. So when they come up and they're like, we've come up with sharks with lasers and you're like, shit, I didn't think about sharks with lasers, right? How do I solve for that? The idea of any organization is not to teach people to solve a specific problem. It is to teach people to become problem solvers.

And the way that we've adapted in the Marine Corps, I don't know what a young Marine in twenty years is going to see on the battlefield. And if I teach him to solve a templated problem today. He will fail or she will fail when they look for that templated problem and all of a sudden there's sharks with lasers, right? Because we didn't teach them how to solve sharks with lasers. But if I make them a problem solver,

Somebody who has a bias for action, who's okay with making mistakes, not negligence, but okay with making mistakes, we can create these little monsters who are constantly looking at the world and not accepting it for what it is and accepting it for what it could be in the future. Are they even gonna be on the battlefield in twenty years or are we just gonna be sitting playing with joysticks in a command center?

So great question. You know great question. The United States and specifically the United States Marine Corps, our competitive advantage will always will always be a Marine and their rifle. At the end of the day, the last hundred yards will always have to be taken by a young infantry marine. And so our goal in life is to make sure that that Marine has the best chance of success in there. Now, there's gonna be a ton of other stimulus, a ton of other technological things that are there.

But we can't fall in love with that because at the end of the day, a marine and a a marine and their rifle is our competitive advance. Absolutely. I want to touch on one more important lesson that I think a lot of our audience uh is feeling and certainly can create a blind spot and and that's the expert paradox.

So many in our audience are highly analytical, highly trained, certified, great at what they do, and they don't often recognize the blind spot that that creates, and especially when they're in a leadership role, and that often can lead them to dismiss other people's expertise because they're very adept at the one or two things that they've trained on and they've seen success in their career be rewarded because of that expertise. And you share a great story of how you use math

to actually cheat your way through a test and recognize this paradox personally. So I I'd love to unpack that because that is a blind spot that many of our audience members and many of our clients are facing. Well you know, cheat is such a heavy word. So I think that

So remember, so I came from the force recon community, right? Before I became an officer, I was a force recon read. I was taught to adapt. I was taught to not see the world for what it always was and try to be able to look into the future. You know, we we all know the definition of insanity, right? You know, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I was failing at a test.

Now part of that comes from education, right? The test didn't actually match the skill set. What they were trying to do was was was it just it was a it was a poor example of of of of a test matching the skill set. And I was frustrated by that. And I had a little bit of, you know, backing in my own career, enough enough autonomy, enough like, you know, self-efficacy to say like, okay, I know what this is actually getting at. How do we how do we find a different way through that?

So that story specifically is saying, you know, what is the goal of this test? Is it to be able to master land navigation and show a mastery of land navigation, or is it to walk in a straight line for a certain number of meters in the middle of the night?

I had to be able to think at a higher level and say, okay, here what they really want us to do is show a mastery of this thing. And so yeah, we we took this moment where I I basically turned it into a math problem. And, you know, and I'm happy to go into the a little bit more detail on that if you'd like. Um but you know basically it was just a little bit more than a little bit.

It was I was frustrated, right? There was definitely emotion in there, right? So I'm on the precipice of failure for something that I was like, This doesn't make any sense. Why are you making me do this? Right. And I'm like yelling into the void, right, on this thing.

You know, I could get frustrated or I I I could get working, right? And so I chose to get working and do this math problem and and and say, Okay, you know, we can get through this process uh you know, with a little different you know, a little different measure. When we see a lot of challenges in the world, there are places where we can be blinded by our own success. I tell people two things as they're, you know, as they come to me for advice.

First, I tell people when they're like, I don't know that I could, you know, I don't know that I can accomplish this next objective, right? One of the things I was walking with a young Marine recently, right. um who had achieved a ton of things in his career and he was looking to take the next step and he was in fear of whether or not he could make that next leap. The first thing I did was I told him, hey dude, do me a favor.

Look in the rearview mirror of your life for just a moment, right? Let's let's be nostalgic for just a moment. Did you ever think that you would accomplish these things? One of the things I like to say is your ten year old self, right? Would your ten year old self meet you right now? What would he think?

And he was like, My ten year old self would be pretty stoked on where I'm at. I'm like, Okay, cool. You're a force recon marine or you're a sniper, you're whatever it is. Your ten year old self would be pretty happy. So let's give ourselves a little bit of credit, right, when we take this moment. And then let's look into the future.

I if did you think that ten years old that you would be where you're at? No, I didn't. Okay, well let's continue that trajectory. Let's be proud of ourselves for a moment. Know that we've achieved things that we didn't think we'd ever accomplish and take that into the next, you know, adventure of where they're going.

And the second part of that really comes down to this idea of kind of being hungry. One of the things that I do tell Marines that people told me very early, like that I was directed very early in my career was to write what I wanted to be the most in the world on my mirror.

So every single day when I was shaving my face or brushing my teeth, I was visualizing what I wanted. Now I know that's kind of bumper stickery at some point and I totally get it. But visualization is a very key part of that because in our world

We have so many examples of people that are more successful than us all the time. People that are doing the things that we want to do. And all of a sudden for me, and I wanted to be extremely vulnerable and extremely honest, I suffer from self-doubt just as much as anybody else. And I still do. Writing a book, this thing could flop, right? I could I could this thing could sell two copies, right? Or people could read this and be like, this guy's suck.

What a you know pansy, right? You know, I can't believe whatever it may be. Those are real. I'm scared too. But the difference between success and failure is when you are scared, you keep your feet moving, right? And you keep pressing on and trying to accomplish that next objective. And I'm empowered by looking back in the rear view mirror of my life and being like, Yeah, I was scared a lot. in my life but I kept going and and I've ended up in a pretty cool place.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom and your service. Where can our audience find out about the book and the work you do? Well s thank you very much. Um so Yes. So Dark Horse Harnessing Hidden Potential in War and Life comes out on May nineteenth. It's available anywhere uh books are sold. I also get to do the audio book uh myself. The publisher was kind enough to allow me to do that.

So you get to listen to me, you know, laugh at myself. I mean I literally like laugh at myself, like, oh my God, I can't believe I wrote this. Right, you know, like no one's gonna ever think I'm cool because I you know wrote about this stuff. Um also my website it's uh ajpesciotti.com. You can find out anything that you want about me on that.

And then also I host the combat story uh podcast where I interview um uh you know military service members or service uh uh uh veterans of service organizations writ large. We don't always talk about combat. We talk about leadership. Uh we talk about stressors. We talk about kind of coming through these things uh under the lens of service. At the end of the day, what I want people to take from this book is that I didn't believe in myself either.

I followed people. People believed in me before I did my own self. And I followed them through uh and they gave me the courage to be able to, you know, walk my own path. But the best part about success is ensuring that once you achieve that own individual success, you turn around. You follow that social contract that you mentioned earlier. You turn around and you make the next generation better than you.

So if a young man or woman or a you know leader of a company or a middle manager of a company um is is you know looking for their own next level of success or how to walk through that, they can find that in this book. You know, I'm looking to do some of my my dissertation work on on my PhD is looking at leadership from the middle. How do you be how how how do leaders in the middle uh action intent that they did not create themselves? Because there's a polarity.

between leaders in the middle. They have to be loyal to the organization above and accomplish intent that they did not create. But they also have to be loyal to the people below them and making sure that they are are are responsible with their own lives themselves. So I look forward to being able to go through that, having more conversations with you guys in the future, um, and trying to be able to at the end of the day

Make the world a little bit better place because if we are there's enough sun to shine on all of us and if we have this organization and you can build an organization where people are working for one another and not against one another, there's no telling what we can accomplish.

Well, we're excited to welcome you back as doctor to share all those lessons from your dissertation. Well thank you so much. John, AJ, it has been fantastic.