Speaking and Communicating Podcast

You've just been the recipient of this massive amount of investment into leadership and communications and discipline, the ability to learn.

That's a team person.

They're going to focus on the project, the team's well-being, not just be self-serving.

You've got all these things that it would take years to try to train somebody to have.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Ndlela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And speaking of leadership, this exciting month of April, we have a special leadership series where every single guest will be a leadership coach, a leader in their own organization, and they will be helping us become better leaders ourselves.

And to top it off, we have three episodes per week instead of the usual two.

We will be publishing three episodes per week– Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays– instead of the usual two episodes a week in this special leadership series in April.

So stay tuned, become a better leader, and log on to Apple and Spotify to give us a rating and a review.

And let's get communicating.

Now let's get communicating with Marty Strong.

He is a retired Navy SEAL officer and combat veteran.

He is a novelist with so many books that he has authored, a practicing CEO and Chief Strategy Officer.

Marty's Navy SEAL background, 20 years in business, winning teams, and being a speaker, a consultant, as I mentioned, and author.

He is here to talk to us about how the skills that he learned during his service have helped him in the business arena.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Marty.

Hi, Roberta.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you for being here.

My pleasure.

Welcome.

Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well, you hit on a lot of the high points.

I was born and raised in Nebraska, for the most part, traveled a little bit in my teens because my father worked for the Department of the Army, so I was in Japan and Hawaii.

Before at 17, I joined the Navy.

And so I did 20 years in the Navy SEALs.

And when I got out, I started managing money for the United Bank of Switzerland, did that for about eight years, and then started getting into business leadership and corporations.

And that's kind of what I'm still doing today.

Speaking of that, a lot of the time, we hear stories of those who were in the service of the country that sometimes it's challenging to adapt back into civilian life and finding work.

It's almost like they feel unprepared for the corporate world.

How did you make that transition?

When it comes to communications, actually not much of a transition from a special operations professional with the SEAL Green Beret to civilian life, corporate and commercial world.

Because the special operations units are very, very intimate.

They're like little families, they're small groups of people, they're all selected for creativity and intelligence, and they spend a lot of time doing problem solving, trying to figure out things that are unconventional.

I mean, that's the missions they get.

They don't get the standard mission set with a lot of information.

They get something really odd or weird in a strange place with not a whole lot of assumptions baked in.

So you end up communicating just as a way of being in special operations.

You're in a constant state of interacting and in the regular military, and obviously TV shows, movies, et cetera.

You have the stilted kind of communication.

It's orders, people yelling short little things, you know, get over here, do this, do that.

That's what we know, yes.

Yeah, and I think if you were in an infantry unit in the Marines or the Army, and that's the kind of environment you were in, you might have a little bit more difficulty, especially if you were a leader, because if that's the way you communicated as an infantry leader, you would have to learn a whole new way of communicating when you got out of the service.

But for SEALs, I'll tell you, I went through seven interviews for my first job in financial services, and when I finished, the vice president of training for this corporation said, I never got the impression all day long through all these interviews, and none of the other interviewers did, that you were ever in the military.

That was after 20 years of being in the military.

I mean, I was still in the military when I was doing the interviews, because it's a different form of communication.

It's very personal.

It's very much packed with information and insights because you're trying to get the other person to see your point of view or they're trying to get you to see their point of view.

So there's a lot of influencing going on because we're all trying to figure out the right way to do something until there's not enough time and we have to stop, set the plan in motion and go out and see how it turns out.

Right.

It's amazing you touched on a few points that we always talk about.

First one is there's no straightforward path.

It sounds uncertain.

And that's why you always have to communicate.

Yeah, you're right.

Given all the time in the world, that can become nauseous if all you did was sit there and kind of prattle on in Yammer and all that with no end state, no deadlines, no deliverables, right?

No accountability for an outcome.

But in the framework of being in the military, especially in the SEALs, there's usually a limited amount of time.

You're brought into a room and said, okay, you've got three days to plan, prepare, brief, rehearse and go.

So it's compressed.

It's intense without being mean-spirited.

It's intense because the energy is, we've got to get something accomplished.

We've got to figure this out.

We only have about five or six hours to figure it out.

Another four or five hours to put the plan together based on what we figured out.

And then we've got to go out and rehearse it and prepare to leave.

There's a deadline.

So it forces you to collaborate.

It forces you to communicate because there's a deadline, because there's a short period of time.

I think in an average organization, if there's no measurable outcome, nobody's really holding you accountable as a group or as an individual, you don't really have the same kind of catalyst to communicate to an end state, to a purpose, to a conclusion on a regular basis.

And then test it to see whether what you figured out is actually going to work or not.

That's what I've seen now, you know, 20 years being out of uniform.

If I ask people to think about something, I don't give them a deadline or I don't give them some kind of an end state, you know, solve this problem and define it very well.

They'll talk, they'll meet, they'll have a committee, whatever, but they'll kind of just talk around it.

They won't actually get in there and bang ideas off each other intensely so they can get something accomplished.

It's not really communications to exchange information and influence, it's more communications just to kind of talk.

Which is not very effective, is it?

No, it looks like it's happening, but like you said, if it doesn't have a deadline to accomplish something, it's just talk.

Unless you're training, but outside of the training paradigm, yeah, it's probably just talking.

And then you touched on something else as well, which is you try to communicate in the way that the other person will understand where you're coming from with the idea.

Would you like to expand more of that?

Because we are always exploring that idea, that scenario of how do I do that?

Yes.

So, you know, they will seek first to understand and then to inform.

So part of that is it's good tactics.

So if I'm going to talk to somebody, doesn't matter what age they are, if they're kind of stuck in the mud thinkers, what they know and what they've done is the only way to do it.

It's the only way to think about it.

And I'm trying to get them to change.

I'm trying to get them to do something, to embrace something that's different than they're used to.

If I just go at them, or if I use positional authority and say, you're going to think this way because I'm in charge of you, I'm senior to you, so now you're going to think this way and I'll go do the thing I told you to do.

They're going to be in resistance mode.

They're going to be sabotaging it.

They're going to be dragging their feet because they don't believe it.

They don't actually believe what you told them is valid and it's going to work.

Because in their mind, the way they've done it for the last five years is the only way to do it.

It's the only proven way because they saw it done.

And anything else that they haven't seen done, they're kind of the, I'll see when I believe it crowd.

So you have to approach them if you're going to influence them and get them to embrace something new and different.

You've got to approach them a little bit differently.

You almost have to spend more time with those people because they're valuable.

Sometimes they're the leaders of the project, so you don't want them to come back in a week with basically just a rubber stamp of the way we've always done it because they just follow the same football play.

But when you ask them to think differently, they didn't.

So you have to spend more time with them.

You have to kind of walk them through verbally how they would plan this thing out, how they would solve this problem, and they'll lay it out for you.

And then you have to start talking about the elements of their solution and show how some of this has been disproven over time or some of this is on shaky ground or some of this has been completely flipped on its end by new information we've received recently.

And that's why we've got to rethink this.

Then they start to open up a little bit and they realize why you're asking them to do something differently.

Now, if you've got people that love change and love to just throw out ideas and see what sticks to the wall, you've got another obligation, and that is to kind of rein them in, contain them with some parameters.

Because those people, they'll be happy to do whatever you said in a different way, but they won't put any framework around it.

So there's no practical, mechanical way to execute it.

It's just like crazy ideas and thoughts kind of half-baked.

So you've got those two extremes.

You've got the people that don't want to change, you have the people that love to change, just let us do it.

And you have to kind of work with each crowd in a different way and address each of their psychology a little bit differently.

You know what you just described, Marty?

You've just described the fact that you create your own work culture.

Because you can have both scenarios, they can both work, but the way that you just described how you can control the situation and have the parameters.

At the end of the day, there's no one hard and fast rule on what kind of culture the workplace can be and what kind of leader you can be as long as you and your team create parameters that work.

I think you made a very good point there.

Yeah, you have to think of the context too.

So I'll give you three.

The first one that whatever is happening is important.

The second one that whatever is happening is urgent.

And the third one is whatever is happening is an emergency.

So if we were trying to get out of a room that was on fire, I wouldn't stop and spend a bunch of whiteboard time with the stick in the mud type.

I wouldn't try to convince them and explain to them.

Because the context, the context is you, you, you, that door out now.

It's simple, much more like the standard military set of orders, which is why in the military you have to get to that point because sometimes especially in the movies, you see that, right?

They're getting shot at.

And they're trying to get from point A to point B.

They're trying to get from point A away from point A.

And so leaders talk in very strict, simple ways so that everybody understands without any miscommunication because it's an emergency.

The next level, if it's urgent, there might be a little bit more information, but not that much more information because you want them to act.

There's not very much time to act.

And then if it's important and you've got time, well, then you can go back kind of what I said before.

You can break out the different people.

You can spend more time with certain types and less time with others and work it that way.

Always adapting.

You said at the interview they said you were not what they were expecting when you were interviewing for your job after you left the Navy SEAL.

Did you understand why they said that and what exactly that meant?

What they were looking for?

Well, what they were looking for from the aspect of having a military officer was discipline, integrity, some level of intelligence and kind of proven academic abilities because you have to learn a lot in that job.

Those are kind of prerequisites that they figured you already checked all those boxes and you had risen to a certain level in the military.

It was kind of the equivalent of getting somebody with a master's or a doctorate in the door.

It gave you kind of a leg up on people that didn't have pedigree.

However, there was another person in my training class who was an A-10 Warhawk.

It's an anti-tank aircraft that goes and shoots tanks and armored vehicles with huge bullets and he was much more of your standard military personality.

I guess straight laced in his posture and the way he talked.

So he was in the same group being interviewed within a couple of days of me.

I think part of that is they saw the difference between the two and they thought I was an anomaly because they didn't have that much of a reference.

They had a student that ended up in my class that they were interviewing who was kind of your classic military personality and then they had me and then they had all the movies and TV shows they ever watched.

I didn't fit.

I understood it because I also know being in the service for 20 years when we dealt with all the other services, we were not formal enough most of the time.

We were called out of.

Much more like a civilian group of problem solvers than we were a military unit marching around and following orders.

It irritated some people.

So I already knew that was an issue with SEALs.

I asked that just a quick joke.

I had a previous guest who was in the military and now actually is a professor of leadership at one of the Western universities and he said when he applied for a corporate job, they said, this is a leadership position and there's no leadership in the military.

Somebody actually said that out loud.

Sometimes people have that movie scenario in their heads of what the military is like.

Usually, based on your experience, at least what you've told us is that it's a little misinformed.

Yeah, and I've also defined leadership in a lot of my books differently than some people do.

There's a distinction between leadership and management.

So they might have been right in telling him that there's no leadership in the military because in their mind, leadership was management.

In the military, you manage things and you lead people.

If you got to a point where you were managing a budget or you were managing a motor pool or a big warehouse of inventory and all that, you got actual chops in managing just like in the civilian world, just like in the business.

But the main job for officers and senior listed people in the military is to lead people.

And as I mentioned before, sometimes you're leading them through an important context, sometimes it's an urgent context, and then at some point in your career, you end up leading them in an emergency context, something like combat.

So you have to lead in all those different scenarios calmly with lots of time, not a big concern, but also when there's an emergency.

So it's a very sophisticated type of leader, except for maybe firefighters, police officers, emergency responders.

Everybody else out there, there's really no reason for them to learn how to do that.

And they don't teach that kind of leadership in college.

They don't teach that kind of leadership in most of the corporations.

You may have a knack for being the person who steps up when everything's falling apart.

That's fine, but if you're not in the right rank position or whatever, everybody will say, well, he stepped up there, but you're not going to get promoted because of it.

They don't see that that leadership trait that you just expressed has great value for the company.

They just wait until you get to a certain point in your career where you've worked your way up.

Then they say, now it's time for you to lead.

And you're like, all you've been doing is managing for the last 10 years.

So it's an interesting paradigm.

But it's funny you mentioned that we always encourage people to step up and say, they're going to notice and they're going to promote you.

Especially you mentioned problem solving twice, which is one of the very key components we're leading, especially in the last three to four years now of the pandemic.

Everything being so uncertain, not knowing what's going to happen tomorrow, but then you're running a team, you're running an organization.

How does your background, the principles you've learned, how do they help an organization in such uncertain times?

So the premise of SEAL mission planning, which is the most creative element in my SEAL experience, was to be intellectually humble.

And what that meant was to not assume that you knew everything about the problem.

Not even that you knew everything about the enemy, that you knew everything about the geography or the threat or the weather or anything.

You had to start clean.

You had to completely clean your mind of any of that, even exactly how you thought you were going to execute.

If you had those assumptions already baked in when you started to look at the problem, you were ignoring the facts the way they're being presented to you.

So the reality was very critical for you to understand the reality as reality and not mix in a bunch of old memories or other ways of doing things or other information.

Hey, I was in that country once.

Well, so what?

Things have changed.

People have changed.

You're not going in there to be a tourist, not going to go in there and do something else.

Intellectual humility, I found– and we didn't call it that.

It was just kind of the way we went into a room and tried to be as objective as possible in looking at the new set of issues.

When I got out and especially when I started writing books, business books, I decided to add two more elements to it.

The second element, and they have to be progressive, is intellectual curiosity.

It's very difficult for you to be honestly curious if you already think you know it all.

And if you think you know it all in another context, like you know exactly where to go for the information.

You know what TV station to watch, what paper to read, what person to ask.

What you've done is you've basically channeled your input of information down to like a straw.

And you do it because you think it's simple and it's what you're used to and it's a pattern of behavior.

But what you really need to do to truly be creative is to open up your mind, look 360 degrees and start talking to people and accessing sources of information that you don't normally access.

Because that's where you get all the wild card kind of aha moments.

It also tests all the theories and the thesis of everything that you've known up to that point.

You're going to start finding maybe things have changed, people have changed, the competition's changed.

You know, that curiosity sets you for the third step, which is intellectual creativity.

Like assign problem solving the end state of solving the problem with the creativity part of it because if you've done the first two steps, now you are fully prepared to do the best you can to put down an innovative and effective answer to whatever the problem is and then go out and execute.

When you talk about being curious especially, we always say ask questions, ask quality questions.

You want to find out more information, which means you ask questions instead of having the assumptions as you just described.

What would you suggest is like a strategy or a formula to ask really good questions, to be intellectually curious and find those aha moments.

I'd probably focus more on the why questions and a continuum of why's.

If I came to you and I thought you knew something about bird watching and I'd say so how long have you been doing this?

Whatever you say and I'd say well so why have you been doing it so long and then where did you get your information?

Well, why do you go there?

What happens is when you ask a why question, it's open ended.

It allows the other person to talk in that lane.

In this case, it was why did you get into it and then where do you get your information?

You can kind of work your way around categories of information flow on one subject with one person by constantly asking that why question.

Sometimes you can get deeper and deeper and deeper down in a category if that's a category that you really want to learn about.

You'll find out a lot more asking those questions.

Now, the why tells you a lot of emotion, a lot of energy and a lot of insights because human beings respond that way to why questions.

If you really want to know the how part of it, you have to ask the how at some point, but I always start with the why questions and then when I think I'm smart enough or aligned enough to ask a good how question, then I'll ask a how question.

Now, what you basically got to do is stop, sit back and listen to them tell you how they bake the bread.

And it may be different than the last person you talked to.

It may be different than what you Googled or the book you just read.

But you just have to take it all in because there's so many different ways to do things and so many different ways to approach the world, the universe, that if you channel yourself or you cut yourself off with that one person, I got my answer and you go back, that wasn't intellectually curious.

You were just going out there for that one answer and you're going to go right back and plug it in.

So you need to really challenge all the assumptions that you have and challenge all the different information sources out there.

I talk to people who have nothing to do with my business.

And it's amazing, you know, for example, if your job is to deal with, let's say, moving oil through a pipeline, you know a lot of things similar to somebody who's moving widgets through a supply chain.

A lot of the same things.

Where's the source of the raw materials?

Where are the holdups?

Where's stuff getting staged?

Where are their choke points?

You know, and on and on and on.

What are delivery problems?

And how does the cost of anything go up or down based on how that's managed?

And you can talk to people from five or six different industries and if they're doing a linear delivery part in their industry, it's almost exactly the same thing, but not quite.

And you can pick up stuff from other industries that you can apply to your own.

Don't channel yourself.

Don't focus on just people that look like you, act like you, been to the same school, same state, or even do the same job.

The beauty of active listening and having diverse views.

Because it teaches you more.

So speaking of books, you have authored nine novels in three business books.

Wow.

And let's talk about the three business books.

First of all, please tell us the three titles and what your latest book is and what it is that you share there with the readers.

All right.

So the first book is called Be Nimble– How the Creative Navy SEAL Mindset Wins on the Battlefield and in Business.

It's a lot about what we've been talking about.

That's mostly focused on pure leadership, challenges of scaling, kind of the internal and external dynamics of companies and organizations, talent management, how to source talent, how to groom, mentor, coach, and tutor talent.

The second book is called Be Visionary– Strategic Leadership in the Age of Optimization.

That is a book that's all about how to learn the art of strategy.

And I don't mean the method to get to your strategic goal, but how do you create a strategic goal?

How do you look at the horizon?

How do you push your horizon out?

Looking for opportunities and threats.

And eventually in the book, it teaches you how to then create an operational plan to achieve those aims, working your way back from that horizon.

The third book, which is called Be Different– How Navy SEALs and Entrepreneurs Bend, Break, or Ignore the Rules to Get Results.

It's all about innovation, creativity, the brain science that supports that all of us can learn again how to be as childlike and have a sense of awe just like a six or seven year old.

Unless you have Alzheimer's or dementia, you've got the same brain functions and it's been proven by science.

So it's basically a way to free yourself.

We've talked about some of the elements here.

Free yourself from what you've been told about thinking or how to think or what to think.

And getting yourself more engaged in the creative part of your mind in everyday situations, family or professionally.

It's funny you mentioned that we're all like children.

Especially when we talk about speaking and they say, don't just stand there, deliver the information and leave.

Even grownups would like some joke in between a story, something that makes them excited.

Don't just think they sit there waiting for a lecture.

Yeah.

When I give speeches, there's a technique, and I read about this, I didn't make this up.

There's a technique where you get away from the jokes at the beginning, you know, a funny thing happened to me on the way to the stadium, whatever the joke is, but you go with the more dramatic opening.

So if I give a speech, I got one called The Voices in Your Head.

It's about dealing with adversity and kind of fighting that negative voice in your mind.

I start off with a story from my SEAL background.

I get up there and as soon as the clapping stops, I said, so I was 17 years old the first time I heard The Voices in My Head.

And I go right into the story.

And everybody's like this.

They want to hear the story, right?

And then because it's about adversity, they're thinking, wait, this is Navy SEAL.

They're not supposed to have any problems.

They're supposed to be able to beat everything and all that.

But here you are having a problem, right?

So they connect with you right away and they realize you're a human being, so you have flaws and weaknesses like any human being.

And therefore, you know a little bit about that aspect of humanity, but also you've figured out a way to overcome the negative side and not let it influence you in a negative way and have a positive attitude.

I think that's a good way, even in a corporate environment, if you're going to give a talk, go in there with a short case study story.

It doesn't have to be your company, but try to find an example where somebody else was in the same dilemma that you're about to talk about or brief and just say, you know, in 1967 there was a company, and just tell like a little story because human beings like stories just like jokes.

But I think the stories kind of pull them into the topic.

It pulls them into the subject matter a little bit more.

Takes you on the mind journey.

And like you said, they even sit like this waiting to hear what happened to you when you were 17 years old.

And same thing with writing.

I've talked to a lot of my friends.

I've helped four guys write books.

And I always say put an introduction about yourself in the beginning because you're a human being, and they're going to want to know about you before they get into your lecturing about whatever you're writing about.

But now they know who they're talking to and who they're listening to, and you're a human being instead of just a bunch of words like a textbook.

And it's funny, three of the guys, after they published, all three of them at different times came back to me and said the one element of my book that people comment the most on is the first introductory chapter.

What you suggested they read about themselves.

Right, because it makes you a human and not some plastic expert that's just pumping out a bunch of words.

One of the guys I suggested this to when he wrote it, he asked me to look at proof-read it.

And I had known this guy for 12, 13 years.

Oh my God, his mom died of cancer when he was seven.

His sister was killed in an accident.

His brother ran away from home and never came back.

I mean, I'm reading all this stuff about him that I never knew about.

Just reading that one chapter made me look at him in a whole different light.

So yeah, it's a good way to being human makes you, I guess, acceptable to most people.

And your ideas, it's a way of influencing because nobody likes to know it all or a self-nominated expert or anything like that.

If you come across that way in any venue, even as a parent.

I've got five kids.

If I stood in front of all of them when they were teenagers and said, OK, here's all it's going to be like I'm an expert, that wouldn't go well.

And we both know that teenagers, they know everything.

But yeah, it's so true because what connects us is our shared human experience.

When you tell a story, especially about yourself and there's a parallel in my life of something similar, that's what connects us.

And that's why when you talk about not just your expertise, but about you personally, that's how people are going to connect with you and feel that you are part of them.

You can influence them for the rest of the time.

It opens them up.

It drops the sales resistance, so to speak.

It's not a gimmick.

You know, don't make up a fake story about yourself.

No, we're not saying that.

It's hard to sell that.

People can see through that.

And I found that, interestingly enough, people afterwards will come up to me and tell me it resonated.

And then they'll tell me a little bit about their backstory.

And I'm always amazed that that connection happened because it was my story leading to what I was going to talk about, but it hit the bullseye in a lot of cases.

So that's good.

That's fulfilling and that makes me feel like I accomplished something.

Right.

Now, any last words of wisdom for corporations who are interviewing retired Navy SEAL fighter pilots, anybody from the Army who think, wait a minute, will you be able to adapt to a corporate environment?

What would you say to them?

Let's say that what you're looking at when you're interviewing somebody from the service is a very unique individual with a lot of individual skills that were paid for in many cases by up to a million dollars in taxpayer money.

And it just walked in and sat down in front of you.

Now, you can decide that that's equal to anybody else that walks in the door, or you can realize that you've just been the recipient of this massive amount of investment into leadership and communications and discipline, the ability to learn because in the military, you have to learn all the time.

Everything's changing, so you're learning technical stuff, you're learning social skills.

And you've got basically a learning machine that's disciplined, it's going to show up on time, work all day.

That's a team person.

They're going to focus on the project and the team, the team's well-being, not just be self-serving.

You've got all these things that it would take years to try to train somebody to have.

So if you bring somebody in like that and you just have to teach them how to do a technical skill or educate them to do something in your business, that's going to be the easiest thing you're ever going to have to do.

It's so much harder.

Anybody that's been a leader in business knows, anyone will say, I'd rather take five really motivated people willing to show up and work hard and learn and get things done and fight for the greater good than five people with great degrees and everything that drive out of the parking lot at 4.30 every single day and don't care whether the project works or not because it's not really on them.

And they're not intellectually curious because they think they know.

Well, no, not at all because why should they be?

Right, right.

They had it all figured out.

For sure, absolutely.

And then Marty, one last piece of wisdom for anybody who's retiring from service and think, how do I adapt?

How do I sell those very soft skills you've talked about?

How do I sell myself and show them that, hey, I've been invested in, you'll be glad you gave me a chance?

I would almost package up what I said and I would use that as my opening remarks.

I mean, Navy SEALs, last quote I heard was around two million dollars.

It takes about three, three and a half years to get fully qualified and trained up to be a SEAL and it's about two million bucks.

Per SEAL.

Every military has got some other price tag associated with that, but I would say that there's been a great investment by this country in me and now you are potentially the recipient of all that investment.

Let me tell you a little bit about what I learned on your dime.

And then I would say I learned how to do this, I was in charge of this many people, I had to do this in logistics, I had to do this in communications and just kind of spread out the categories a little bit and don't be arrogant about it, just say these are all the things I can do and I'm comfortable doing, but the most important thing is I have integrity, I'll work hard and I'll show up on time and I won't walk away until the job's done.

Now, it may resonate with HR people as much as owners, but well, because HR people aren't owners, you know, owners really understand that, you know, they really get it.

They know transferable skills and like you said, I can teach you the technical, but if you come with the right attitude, we can do something here.

Absolutely.

Back in the day, all the SEALs, senior enlisted chiefs, match chiefs, they would be given a choice, you know, if you were given a choice, a whole SEAL platoon of just brand new guys or a SEAL platoon of older guys that had a lot of experience and everything.

And it all looked like this for a second, and I'd go, give me the platoon of the new guys, because they're all attitude and no aptitude.

But if they've got the attitude, I'll deliver the other half of the equation.

If I get the other group, I'm going to get really bad attitude, know it alls and all that.

Yeah, so aptitude in all walks of life.

A great doctor who clinically can do wonders, but is a complete jerk and can't get along with anybody.

Yeah, aptitude versus attitude.

Aptitude versus attitude indeed.

Words of wisdom from Marty Strong, the retired Navy SEAL officer and combat veteran, speaker, consultant, and author of 12 books, 12 books, three of which are leadership books.

Marty, before you go, please give us your online details so that we know where to reach you.

Yeah, you can just go to martystrongbenimble.com.

My books are under Marty Strong, so they're on Amazon, and my novels are under ML.

Strong, but you can also link to that through my Marty Strong Be Nimble site.

martystrongbenimble.com.

Thank you very much for helping us see the real scenario behind the work that you did when you were in the Naval SEAL, and not the movie version.

My pleasure.

Thanks for having me, Roberta.

This was wonderful.

My absolute pleasure indeed.

Thank you for joining us on the Speaking and Communicating Podcast once again.

Please log on to Apple and Spotify, leave us a rating and a review and what you'd like for us to discuss on the show that will be of benefit to you.

We encourage you to continue to get communicating and let us know how communication skills continue to improve your life professionally and personally.

And stay tuned for more episodes to come.