[00:00:00] Christine: CS Lewis once said, you can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. This episode is all about what’s possible. We’re gonna be talking about learning to dream again, to open your mind to new possibilities and how to convert your new vision into a plan of action.

[00:00:27] So often it’s easy to think that it’s too late for us to dream or to create the life we really. But this conversation is all about inspiring you to start dreaming again and considering just what is possible for you. And your future. Today’s conversation is with Marty Strong, a retired Navy SEAL creator of multiple businesses and a 10 time author.

[00:00:54] We discuss what it was like for him to pivot to a new career after Levy military service, what it took for him to build a new business. These skills that he learned from his time as a Navy SEAL that truly helped him in business. How to play to your strengths, what to do with your weaknesses, and we really get into why we struggle to dream and what to do about it.

[00:01:21] And he gives us a framework for figuring out what’s possible for you in your future, regardless of where you find yourself today.

[00:02:34] So today we’re really gonna be talking about dreaming and creating a plan of action out of that dream. But here’s what I know about you. Sometimes it’s so easy to put our dreams on the back burner and then we lose sight of who we are, what we have to offer, what we really want. And that first step so often comes with needing that clarity before we can take action. And if you are struggling with that clarity piece either.

[00:02:58] To know what your dream is, to know how to actually begin to take steps towards a dream or how to find the time to actually pursue that dream, then I am here to help you. Did you know that I am offering a limited number of free Get Unstuck Sessions to help you get the clarity you need to take back control of your life.

[00:03:27] In this call together we dig into what it is that is keeping you stuck right now. How to start designing a life with purpose and help you get crystal clear on what your next action step needs to be so that you can walk away from this call knowing that it is absolutely possible for you to live a meaningful life and feel empowered to make it happen, so that you stop living in see a frustration and self-doubt and find more.

[00:04:02] Clarity, confidence, and purpose in your daily life. What I ultimately want for you is to realize that you don’t have to wait for some future season to chase your dreams. There is a way to pursue purpose in your current season of life, and I wanna help you step into that. So, like I said, I have just a few.

[00:04:26] UNSUCK Sessions available, but I would love to offer those to you. You can access that in the show notes below, or just by going to our website, milspouse mastermind.com and click on the Work with me tab at the top of the page. It is my hope that when you listen to this conversation today, You will be inspired to start dreaming again.

[00:04:49] And if you need some help getting that clarity, knowing what that step needs to be, I am here to help you. So like I said, today’s guest is Marty Strong. He is a retired Navy SEAL officer and combat veteran, a consultant. Speaker, the author of nine novels and a practicing c e o. He is also the author of now two Business Books, be Nimble, how The Creative Navy Seal Mindset Wins on the Battlefield and in Business.

[00:05:21] And his newest book is Be Visionary Strategic Leadership in the Age of Optimiz. Marty Strong. Welcome to the MilSpouse Mastermind Show. We are so excited that you are here with us today. I know I kind of briefly gave your bio, but would you just give us an introduction to who you are and what you do?

[00:05:43] Marty: Hi. Well, let’s see. I am a retired Navy seal. I was enlisted for 10 years as a seal and then an officer for 10 years as a seal, and then I went into the financial services industry, managing money at United Bank of Switzer. And after about seven and a half years, I shifted out into counter and anti-terrorism consulting before I ended up in business.

[00:06:04] So now I’m A C E O and have been for the last 13 years. Of, of a corporation. So, and I’m, I’m an author,

[00:06:10] Christine: which we’re gonna get into today. Take us back a little bit into your early journey. What led you into the military in the first place, and, and what was that journey like

[00:06:20] Marty: for you? All right, so I was 17 years old.

[00:06:23] I was born and raised for the most part in Nebraska, and I wanted to get outta Nebraska. I. Divorced family situation. I was just living with my mom. We weren’t getting along too well. So at 16 years old I ended up signing up for the Navy. The only thing I knew, cuz my father was in the Navy during the Korean War, and I went in right after graduation from high school.

[00:06:46] And entered into the SEAL program eventually, and the rest, as they say, is my bio . So

[00:06:53] Christine: when you left the service, was that a tough transition? Did you know what you wanted to do after the service or was that kind of a process?

[00:07:02] Marty: Yeah, I wish I had a really great story there except that I, I thought I wanted to be a.

[00:07:08] By that time I had a, a master’s degree in management and I thought, well, I’m not sure if I wanna do business, but I kinda like the idea of being a lawyer. I could work in a big corporation, I could work a small law practice, I could create my own practice and just put a shingle up. And there seemed like there was a lot of flexibility and I wanted to move to northern Maryland where my brother.

[00:07:26] And my nephews live. So I thought, okay, so that makes sense, and I can kind of decide what I wanna do somewhere in law school. So I took the lsat, got all prepped, and then a friend of mine who had already retired, he was a Navy Commander Seal, he already had a job with a financial services firm in Baltimore.

[00:07:42] The commander I was working in heard a rumor that I was gonna go to law school. He found me, grabbed me and said, let’s go. We’re going to lunch. And he talked me out of it during lunch and he said, you need to get into financial services. You don’t have to go through three more years of school. And when I explained what I was trying to do, he goes, well, you can do that.

[00:07:56] There’s lots of companies that let you kind of set up your own little boutique, your own little shop, whatever. And so that’s what I ended up doing instead of what I’d been preparing for six months to do. I, I mean one lunch all of a sudden I was completely right. Right. Turning into something different.

[00:08:10] and the transition was hard because you go from the military where your, your paycheck just shows up in the bank account, right? I mean, whether you’re sleeping, you’re injured, you know, whether you’re working hard or not working, hardly at all. Doesn’t matter. It shows up like clockwork. In the financial services world, what a lot of people don’t understand is unless you’re an analyst, the people that are actually making the decisions about m moving money and dealing with the clients, almost all of them are working at no.

[00:08:36] so it’s all commissions and fees. So that’s scary for somebody who had a guaranteed paycheck showing up for 20 years, and I had little kids and everything, realizing that I’m gonna have to find clients, build a book, a bi, a business with more and more clients and keep that momentum going, or else I won’t be able to, you know, pay the bills.

[00:08:56] That was, that was the hardest thing for me in the transition. It was plus you’re kind of a, an army of one. I went from being in charge of lots of people. It’s the SEAL teams, right? I mean, it’s the whole point of it. You don’t do anything by yourself. It’s all team focused, team oriented, and team energy.

[00:09:11] And suddenly I’m sitting in a little, little office by myself staring at a phone and a computer when I, where I’m gonna find clients. So it’s very lonely, very scary, and I, I talk myself outta quitting about 10 times in the first six months. And then I got a little bit of traction doing seminars and then, then I got more traction doing seminars.

[00:09:29] So I said, I’m not doing anything but seminars. And I was off to the races, but I had to bang around with cold calling and cold walking and going to conventions with booths. I did everything. I tried everything. See if it would work, and I wasn’t doing too well. They don’t teach sales. and the SEAL teams, and they don’t teach sales in college.

[00:09:47] Well,

[00:09:47] Christine: and I feel like when you’re working for yourself and you are the only person on the team, you’re doing all the things, the things that you already know how to do well, and the things that you don’t really know how to do very well at all

[00:10:00] Marty: yourself. Right. So the only thing I ended up that I realized I could do well was.

[00:10:04] Teach and speak. So the seminar track, once I tried it the first time, I realized, okay, this is something I can do. That’s a better delivery system for me. And it’s also when you’re managing people’s life savings or, you know, they just, they move from one place to another. They get a big four They ask to me, move into an IRA or something.

[00:10:20] They need to trust you. So a seminar really allows people to get kind of a feel for you without, well, you know, they get to see how you respond to questions, you get to see how you interact with other. And then they get to see whether you seem to know what you’re talking about. And so the trust factor, if you can swing, it ends up shooting way, way up there.

[00:10:36] Now if they, if you can’t swing it, then seminars aren’t gonna work for you cuz everybody’s gonna say, I don’t know if I trust this person and they’ll never return your calls. But I was lucky. So that was my strong suit. Direct sales, like closing the sale, you know, closing the deal. That was, that was the hardest thing for me to.

[00:10:52] because I’d never, I’d never been around that before. I mean, I, I didn’t do sales as a teenager, so I talked to a lot of people that were in sales and I got a lot of mentoring from people, and I, you had to kind of figure out what’s your style, what’s your, your method, and so I decided, okay, what you missed, I have to calm down even though I’m not sure if I can pay the bills.

[00:11:10] and I have to look poised and comfortable as if I don’t really need their business. And you know, I had came up with a shtick, you know, to make myself comfortable psychologically while I was doing it. And then of course you have to meet ’em face to face after the seminar. So even if the seminar got ’em into.

[00:11:23] The first appointment, it didn’t mean I was gonna close the appointment, so I had to learn that part of it too before everything really started to click. I

[00:11:29] Christine: mean, it really goes down to before somebody decides to do business with you, they wanna make sure that they can trust you and the way that you were able to tap into what you could do well.

[00:11:40] to start building that relationship and then learn the skills that you didn’t currently possess to be able to close that sale and to actually start building your business. So talk about growing a business and as you were building this and starting a team, and what were some of the big differences between being in the military and leading a team and then starting your own business and trying to build.

[00:12:07] Marty: So in the financial services world, if you need. , you have to pay for that help outta your own pocket. Now they get hired as employees of the company, but you get charged out of your paycheck or your proceeds. You get charged for their salary and their benefits. So you really are kind of like a, a solo practitioner.

[00:12:27] If you don’t make any money, then you can’t pay for the secretary or can’t pay for the, the scheduler or whoever, whatever person that you wanna hire, that you think is gonna help facilitate your, the growth of your business. I eventually ended up with. A couple of people that had Series seven licenses so they could help put orders in for me.

[00:12:44] And then I had one lady that did all the scheduling. So that was interesting. I mean, that was the first time I’d been an employer and it was a little bit different relationship than being an officer in, in the SEAL teams. The, the traditions and the culture of a military unit are there. When you show up, it becomes part of what you are.

[00:13:04] and then all of a sudden you’re not there anymore. It’s still part of what you are. So what happens is when you get transplanted into another job or another, another industry, another environment you’re in kind of a culture shock, right? Because those, those three ladies had had lives and when five o’clock hit, they walked out the door and that was it.

[00:13:22] There wasn’t a whole lot of camaraderie that way. I mean, they were nice, but I was still kinda lonely compared to what it was in the teams. and what they were doing for me, they weren’t cross-trained to do exactly what I did, which in the teams ever gets cross-trained. So you have a lot of resiliency and depth, bench strength within that team.

[00:13:40] I couldn’t do this, but these guys, because I couldn’t get them, you know, they were qualified and and certified to do some of this stuff, so they were firewalls in place. It wasn’t until I got into business, outside of financial services where I started building teams and trying to build. To look like and feel more like what I remembered in the SEAL teams.

[00:13:58] Not, not just cuz of nostalgia, but because there’s benefits in having, let’s say, have a five person staff. Or group of employees. If everybody can do everybody else’s job to, to some level of competency, cross train that way, and one person goes on vacation, you’re okay. But if everybody’s stove piped into their one category of competency, whether it’s a skill or knowledge or a combination of of both, and that person goes off vacation, the whole place falls apart.

[00:14:25] It’s a single point of failure. Wildly enough. From what I looked at, most of the companies weren’t doing that. They would just hire extra bodies. They’d experience that single point of failure and they’d say, oh, we’ll just have two of those instead of one of those. And but why don’t you just train the other four people so that they can cover this stuff?

[00:14:44] Why can’t the manager learn a couple of these skills so the manager can be like, the pinch hitter jumps in there as a utility player? Oh, managers don’t do that. Well, that doesn’t make any sense to me. Cuz again, in the military, if you have to, you jump in, you know, you help carry the, the box, the bag, whatever it is you have to do to get the job done.

[00:15:01] That’s another attitude that I wasn’t seeing a whole lot of. . It was a lot harder than I thought it would be, but at least as the, as these groups got bigger and bigger and I became more senior, the organizations that I was responsible for were larger and larger. I could start to really manipulate that. I could really start to force things like cross-training and ways of measuring the cross-training and you know, having the status sheets and everybody’s names and where are they in a whole slew of categories of skills and know, and then I’d pull that up and I said, well, why is, why is Susie still at this level?

[00:15:31] She’s been here for eight months, or why is Joe still at this level? He’s been here for two years and I’m, I’m talking to their, to their boss, you know? And they’re like, well, because they didn’t care, because that’s not their culture. That wasn’t their background. No fault to their own. They don’t teach it in school.

[00:15:46] And probably the first four jobs they had, they weren’t handled that way. And so they, they don’t, they didn’t emulate anything. It sounds like what I’m asking them to do. So training people, grooming, people, mentoring, coaching, all those things. As you mentioned earlier, knowing what your strengths are and then realizing you have weaknesses.

[00:16:02] Own up to those weaknesses, and then try to find somebody to shore your, your weaknesses up. Either find a person to partner with, find a mentor to help you out or go to school. Do webinars, read books, whatever you gotta do to try to try to cover your weak areas. Everybody’s got weak. Every areas, everybody’s human.

[00:16:20] That’s kinda how I did it once I got into bigger organizations.

[00:16:22] Christine: So talk about what led you down the path of also becoming an author. It’s not just that you served as a Navy Seal, you’re not just building these businesses. What led you to say, I wanna become an author as

[00:16:36] Marty: well? So, I’m an avid reader. I, I read probably between 50 and 60 books a year.

[00:16:43] Every format you can think of, I’ve. Tons of audible books that I listen to everywhere I drive. I’ve got a Kindle that carry around with me 24 7. I’ve got, you name it. I’ve figured out a way to consume material and, and I’ve been that way since I was a little kid. I think I got that from both my mom and my dad.

[00:17:01] They were both big readers. My dad more on the nonfiction, serious side, and my mom more on the kind of fiction side. So I did both and I always had in the back of my mind, I could do that. I thought I could write, I thought I could. And I did good in school with just a, you know, one page composition in, you know, eighth grade or something.

[00:17:21] I was clearly able to, to do that. But you know, most people will tell you the more you read, the better you write because then you, you’ve got the voice in your head. You kind of know the what, what’s in tune and out of tune cuz you’ve read so much good writing. It’s hard to put down a bad sentence. Even if you don’t have a history of the grammatical rules.

[00:17:38] It’s hard to put it down there and look at it and go, yeah, that’s good, because there’s something in your back of your mind saying Uhuh. So that had a lot to do with my ability to write and then my desire to write. So when I got in the Navy, eventually that probably about my third year in the SEAL team, somebody figured out I could write.

[00:17:55] I think it was one of my officers, and suddenly now I’m doing intelligence stuff. I’m writing reports, I’m writing intelligence analysis. I’m going to schools to learn how. , different kind of writing, very technical writing, very stilted. But it taught me order structure. It taught me how to proofread. It taught me the more I started writing.

[00:18:12] And as I got more senior, and eventually when I became an officer, I started getting into the politics of writing. You know, what do you put in. You know, what do you, what’s the tone and what is that? What is that presenting to the reader? What is the purpose? What’s the mission of the piece that you’re writing?

[00:18:28] Are you trying to in influence? Are you trying to StrongArm? Are you trying to beg? Are you trying, you know, whatever it is. All these subtleties, all these other senior officers were telling me they weren’t necessarily great writers, but they could re wrote and say, the tone’s wrong, this is what I’m looking for.

[00:18:43] And I go back and I redo it back and redo it, and all that practice. I started to realize there’s different ways to write for different audiences. So I got more flexible even though the, the structure was still technical. And then fast forward when I’m out, you know, in 2017 I read Tim Ferris’s book, the Four Hour Work Week, and there’s an exercise in there about doing an inventory of your week, seven days to see how much time you’re wasting on stuff that doesn’t really have any value.

[00:19:11] So I did that and I. Quite a bit of time cause I was watching a lot of news shows and for no purpose. I, you know, I’m not in the news game. I’m not a politician and I’m not managing money anymore. But I was watching cn b, c and I was listening to other news about the market as I was driving around. And so when I, when I looked at it, I said, okay, what do I wanna do?

[00:19:29] And my bucket list was I wanted to write a novel. I wanted to write a book on business, preferably leadership. So in 2017, I decided to start with the novel and I wrote a time for glory. , which I thought was gonna be my one and only book, you know, it’s a novel. It ended up being four books in the series called The Time Warrior Sagas.

[00:19:50] And somewhere in there I decided I was gonna write my write a different series called the Seal Strike series, which are Seal Books and there’s five of them. The fifth one came out June of this year called Kandahar Moon, and all the proceeds for those, for those books. And I thought this was gonna be one book.

[00:20:08] Now there’s nine. Are all donated to the Seal Veterans Foundation, that there’s a special program that goes and helps military people with ptsd, T S D and traumatic brain injury and things like that. I had no idea it was gonna end up being nine books. So every so often I walk in there and hand ’em a check.

[00:20:21] And so in 2019, I decided that I was going to. Swing at the non-fiction business book, and I decided how I wanted back to the tone and the message and what you’re trying to do. I decided I didn’t want it to be an academic book. I didn’t want it to be stilted and overly formal. I wanted it to feel like a mentoring session.

[00:20:39] So I wanted to, I wanted the communications narrative to be something that was smooth and comfortable to read, but still packed with all kinds of information on that. And I found five or six CEO. That would were willing to do me, my beta readers, and as I wrote each chapter and I gave ’em my outline of what my mission was, what I was trying to achieve, and as I wrote each chapter, I’d send it out to them and then I’d go to the next chapter, and then I’d get the feedback from the, from the prior chapter and they’d point things out.

[00:21:06] And I lost you on this. I don’t know if you’re trying to get to, it sounded like you were going down a. Down a path and it ended up looking like a rabbit hole. And then I’d call him up when he meet. Okay. Got it. And I’d tweak it. Of course, with that kind of feedback, you start to get in the zone. You start kind of getting in the groove.

[00:21:19] So by the fourth, fifth, sixth chapter, you’re, you’re getting thumbs up from the reader. Right. And the fact that they, they’re in business, they’re leading companies and everything. That meant a lot to me, cuz it was, they thought it was valuable then I figured the, the public would think it would be valuable.

[00:21:33] So that was being nimble, how the Creative Navy seal mindset wins on the battlefield and in business. And it came. January of, of this year of 22, and then one chapter in the book has a focus on strategy. One of my beta readers said that he thought I had more packed in that one chapter about strategy than he’d heard anywhere else.

[00:21:51] Cuz they don’t teach strategy in business school. They don’t teach strategy. Usually managers and leaders don’t get strategy taught to them, and then all of a sudden they show up in the C-suite and they’re supposed to. and they’re like, well, you know, what is that? You know? And there’s a lot more to strategy than just taking a timeline out and putting a dollar figure out there to say, we’re gonna try to get the to X marks the spot.

[00:22:13] So I started studying that and thinking about what I wanted to convey. And so I called the book B visionary cuz it was more about big, big. Ideas and more aspirational goals for organizations, but also it works for individuals. It works for professionals, individually, your personal life, but also for organizations.

[00:22:31] The beginning of it’s like it’s okay to dream. It’s okay, it’s, it’s not funny. It’s not goofy. It’s not strange. It’s okay. It’s a lost art. People don’t do it anymore. Businesses don’t do it anymore. And the subtitles is Strateg Leadership in the Age of Optimization, and I try to juxtapose a lack of strategic vision.

[00:22:49] In American companies and organizations, which has gotten worse and worse over the last 25 years as there’s been more and more focus on short-term gratification, optimizing efficiency. And what that also does is that squeezes out any incentive for investment in the future. So if you’re never thinking about the future and you’re never plotting and planning for a bigger future, you don’t invest for that future.

[00:23:09] And so I said, all right, so that’s a subtitle, that’s, that’s the. , you know that strategy is the enemy of optimization, and optimization is kind of the enemy of strategy. If you’re optimizing and that’s your goal, how can you think big thoughts and take, take risks and experiment? You can’t. You won’t. So that was what, that’s what that book’s about.

[00:23:27] That’s the one’s coming out this January. 2023.

[00:23:30] Christine: Well, I love your story and just how this idea of writing has been with you for so many years and you were able to use where you were at and what you were doing to continue to build those skills, even though it didn’t necessarily feel this is, I’m doing the thing that I wanna do, but you’re using those skills that you have.

[00:23:51] You’re building, you’re using those muscles. over time, you had the space and time to say, okay, now I have my bucket list. This is what I want to do, and I’m gonna start moving towards this idea that I have and use the time that I now have to do that. Why do you think people don’t dream?

[00:24:13] Marty: I think society, which includes every institution you can think of, starting with parents sometimes, siblings, definitely the social structure and.

[00:24:24] Schools before you even get to college, everybody has no problem telling you what you can’t be or what you say you want to be is stupid and don’t go that way. So there’s not a whole lot of positive influence in general. For somebody who says, I’d really like to be this. I’d like to be a rockstar, I’d like to be an archeologist, or I’d like to.

[00:24:44] You know, deep sea fishermen, 80% of the people are gonna give you a thumbs down on the idea, and that ends up being essentially a way of training you to not ask the question out loud for sure. And in time it actually compresses or depresses your, your desire to even bring it up. On your own and you know, rarely you’ve run into somebody that tells you, Hey, I think you could do that, and, and actually gives you a feeling that that’s something that, it’s aspirational.

[00:25:12] It’s tough, but it, it’s kind of cool and go for it. . But then you get into, you know, later into school and you’re trying to get your grades for college, and you get into college and, and every category of, of learning in colleges, they’re all historical, traditional sources of information. So basically they’re teaching you what, what has happened.

[00:25:28] It’s all, they’re all history lessons. I don’t care if it’s engineering, law, medicine, chemistry, you name it, it’s a history lesson. They’re not bringing you in there and say, let’s, let’s all sit here and experiment and explore what, what the world’s gonna be like in 10 years. , it’s not like that at all. It’s the exact opposite.

[00:25:43] In other words, it’s reinforcing rigid structure of conformity and obedience and compliance. And then you go and get your first job and you go through onboarding and what do they do? Rules, policies, procedures, what you can’t do, and so if you’re, if you’re somebody who wants to be a manager or a. You’re going through the same, the same, you know, experience as anybody that just wants to be a technical expert.

[00:26:09] So fast forward 10 years, they’ve got 10 years of that indoctrination and that constant focus on complying and OB obeying the rules, and it starts to become crazy for them to even think about doing something or saying something like wild, like, Hey, why don’t we do this? Why don’t we try this? Because it just doesn’t make any sense cuz now they’re completely indoctrinated into this kind of group, think group, group compliance.

[00:26:34] And anybody that isn’t doing that is considered a little weird, a little out there. Maybe a lot of them end up in music and art because nobody will let ’em apply ideas to practical things. But they would if they could have. But then we was gonna let ’em in an engineering school and try to reinvent, you know, the wheel, so to speak.

[00:26:54] I find that that’s, that’s the biggest restriction and it’s really. To convince anybody at any age that the human brain is fully capable of dreaming and conceiving and coming up with ideas, and from a practical sense, working that idea into a strategy that can be actually executed. I don’t care how old you are, if you’re 65 or 70 years old, you have the same brain.

[00:27:16] You can do the same thing. The only thing that’s that’s holding you back is a mindset that’s been pounded into you. by all the external forces. It’s not because your brain’s not designed to do it. You don’t have to have, have some special d n a to be able to do it. And that’s unfortunate because people have a lot of brain power.

[00:27:31] They don’t apply.

[00:27:32] Christine: So how do you suggest that we start dreaming again?

[00:27:37] Marty: Well, I, I present this a lot in my interviews. I, I encourage people to take 20 minutes a day and. Really try to focus on not focusing on anything that’s a to-do list item, not problem solving. So, and then people will say, well, how do you focus by on not focusing?

[00:27:52] Well, the thing is you have, what you do is you take 20 minutes and you clear your mind of all the things that are normally cluttering your mind, whether it’s personal to-do list. Stuff at work, whatever, where it’s an ongoing problem. It could be a, an HR issue, it could be a, a mechanical process problem, whatever.

[00:28:07] Because what you really need to do is you need to stop all that, all those gears from turning for 20 minutes. And you need to say to yourself, what do I wanna be? What do I wanna look like? What do I wanna feel like in a year? And think about it, envision, visualize, you know, what you, what that would look like.

[00:28:24] You can do the same thing. What do I want to be, what do I wanna look like? How much money would I make? What I wanna make as a profess. And if you’re leading an organization, you, you could do both of those things, but you can also add in there, what should the organization look like in a year? What could it look like in a year?

[00:28:40] What might it look like in a year? And start visualizing that. Now, the first time you do it, it is gonna be awkward. The second time you do it, it’s gonna be awkward. But if you make it a habit seven days a week, only 20 minutes a day, and I’m not, you don’t have to cross your legs and start and close your eyes and make a bunch of humming sounds or anything.

[00:28:56] And you might come up with an idea that you write down, but you don’t have to make it a homework. What you’re doing is you’re letting your mind shut down. All those whizzing gears and everything that are constantly turning long enough to look outside at the horizon. Think of it this way. Most people go through life like they’re staring at the dashboard of their car at 80 miles an hour.

[00:29:17] Now that would sound like insanity, right? Because eventually you’re gonna run into something , and the way you keep from running into something is what you look up out through the windshield at what’s coming at you or what you’re running into, but then their own life and their own professional life, personal life, and, and organizationally.

[00:29:35] for some reason they think optimizing, staring at the dials on the dashboard and figuring how many miles do I have to go or how much, how gas gallons per mile I span or tho all those little key performance indicators and metrics that we collect and we, we talk about and everything, those little details, data points.

[00:29:50] They think that somehow that is the way to lead their life, their professional life or their, or their business. But they wouldn’t drive that way. They wouldn’t even walk that way. So it’s actually something that once you practice it a couple of times, , you realize you already know how to do it. You just gotta stop trying to look at the dashboard all the time and see what’s going on.

[00:30:08] Now, if you do it as a habit, probably within about 20 or 30 days, you’ll be sitting in a room and somebody will come up with, with an issue, challenge or whatever. They’ll throw out the numbers from last month, last week, last quarter, and your mind will start grabbing. Yeah, but what? What’s gonna happen?

[00:30:25] you’ll start thinking in a different way. You’ll start saying, that’s great, but can we keep this going for the next six months, the next two years, the next five years? And then you might say, well, what’s our competition doing? Because you’ve been thinking about a 360 degree. Look at your life, your professional career, and your business.

[00:30:40] Is anybody else looking that way? Is anybody else looking into every direction? Is anybody looking to see whether the person across the street’s about to eat our lunch? You know, from from a competitive standpoint? Yeah. So that’s what I suggest. . That’s something I, I know works cuz I’ve had people tell me, gimme feedback that they’ve tried it and it’s worked.

[00:30:57] If you can’t do 20 minutes, do 10 minutes. But that seems like it takes about 10 minutes to clear your mind. So you get about 10 minutes of quality thinking and then ideas start to pop in your head at any time during the day. Once your brains, the muscles kind of your, your dreaming visionary kind of muscles start to get comfortable, you’ll also start to see how weird it sounds when other.

[00:31:17] talk about limiting, limiting, controlling, limiting, cuz it’ll just jump out at you that it’s like half the story because now you’re aware cuz you let your brain do what you were able to do when you were six and eight and 12 years old. It’s really

[00:31:30] Christine: about fostering that awareness. And what I love about what you’re saying is, you know, my audience is so many is military spouses who.

[00:31:42] A lot of times they’ve had to put their dreams on hold because you’re following your service member around you feel like you can’t do your own thing. But in a way, it’s opening up the possibility because everything that I learned about in school about what a career path looks like. is not available, but that opens the door for so many other opportunities.

[00:32:05] If we take this time to start thinking about the future and what is possible, and like you said, taking that time to just think about who you wanna be and how you wanna show up and what you wanna do and what is possible. For life.

[00:32:20] Marty: That’s exactly right. Especially now. I mean, although all the technology and it’s been accelerated by the pandemic, the acceptance of working, studying and getting certifications and, and training.

[00:32:32] I mean, you can do it for free. You can take webinars on a subject and tell you, you get really, really good at it. You can take webinars on how to do Excel spreadsheets, how to almost do anything. Right. 25 years ago that was, that was almost impossible and it was time consuming cuz you had to leave and go.

[00:32:46] Physical place now, you can kind of try to fit it into your day somewhere, two hours here, an hour there, half an hour there, five hours on another day, and you keep kicking the can towards that objective. I do a lot of transitioning mentoring, and I gave a presentation not too long ago at the Seal Heritage Foundation.

[00:33:03] And, and, and also the Naval Academy guy. So I was talking to these Naval Academy alumni and, and I said, well, how many years does it take to get an engineering degree? Show a hands. So somebody says, well, four years. Okay, how many for a law degree? How many for? Did anybody know how much it, how long it takes to get certified as a software designer?

[00:33:18] Somebody writing software took like an 18 months or something. So then I stopped and I said, okay, so how many people in here are about to get out? Johan, there’s like 35 people there. And I pointed at some somebody, I said, sir, you know, how old are you? He says, I’m 39. And when do you get out in six months?

[00:33:35] And how old will you be when you finish your engineering degree? And he goes, well, I’m not trying to get an engineering degree. I said, just, just go along with me here for a second. He goes, well, I’ll be, you know, 44 or whatever. Because all these guys were officers, they already had a degree. And then I said, well, how long would it take for you to become a software writer?

[00:33:52] So he did the math. He told me, told me the how old he’d be. And I said, did you guys get the point? You’ve decided that because you were a fighter pilot or you were this, you were that you’re restricted, you’re in a lane. You can’t change your your life story. You can’t change anything about yourself. You absolutely can.

[00:34:08] The world is wide open for you. In the United States, you can probably, darn you do anything you want to do. And now with all this technology out there, you can get degrees and certifications. You can do all kinds of things without ever leaving your home. And you’ve got so many different avenues to.

[00:34:25] Certification or a process. You wanna be an artist, you wanna be a carpenter, you wanna, so that’s one part. The other part is the apprentice piece. If you really wanna learn the restaurant business, and you wanna own a restaurant, someday go into a restaurant and say, you like to work for free or work for half price, whatever.

[00:34:40] And go in there and do some of the jobs. Watch, take notes. You wanna do the same thing in a, in a boutique shop, a consignment shop, a clothing shop. You can do the same thing. You have to humble yourself. You have to say, I’m gonna go out and I’m just gonna learn. I mean, I get paid. , but it’s, it’s an education for free.

[00:34:57] I just gotta put some time in, but I’m learning it from the ground up. And you may find out you don’t wanna do it, or you absolutely do wanna do it. And now you know what you don’t wanna do. When you do it, you learn what’s good and what’s bad. So that plus talking to mentors and other people that are in the business or whatever field you want to go into, you can do all that in all the time you make for yourself.

[00:35:18] During any given day. So, and it may take, it may be a five year plan or a two year plan, or a 10 year plan, depending on how much you know, you have out going in your life. But there’s nothing that’s, there’s nothing out there saying you can’t do the plan. ,

[00:35:32] Christine: right. And you can do work and make progress towards that plan regardless of where you’re at.

[00:35:38] You don’t have to be in a one location and having the one thing. There are ways to pursue that regardless of where you’re

[00:35:46] Marty: at. Yeah. Nowadays it’s absolutely true. Like I said, 25 years ago and, and further back, you were kind of in a bad place. You know, you’re in the middle of nowhere Germany, or nowhere, you know, Japan or something, and you weren’t gonna, you weren’t.

[00:36:01] be able to go to culinary school, , you know, so, so it, it is changed and it’s changed for the better and it’s changed universally for everybody. It doesn’t matter really what your status is. If you’re a single mom or you’re an ex-military spouse, or a current military spouse, or you’re a, you’re a, a CEO that wants to retire but not really retire, and so you decide you wanna, you know, work with nonprofits, but you know, whatever it is, you know, there’s so many options.

[00:36:25] Part of it is just thinking it through dreaming. Calling that dream down into a practical strategy and then building back from that point in the future, you know, what do I, what are the steps that I need to, to take to get to that future? And don’t be so tied up about how long it takes to get there, just that you’re moving down that path.

[00:36:46] It doesn’t matter how fast the train’s going, as long as it stays on that track.

[00:36:49] Christine: Yes, yes. So it doesn’t necessarily happen in the timeline that we’d like it to, but as long as we’re making progress, we’re on the right track, headed in the right direction, that’s what really matters.

[00:37:01] Marty: Yeah. And if, and if you mention it to other people and they look at you like you have three heads and say, what do you wanna do that for?

[00:37:07] You know, I thought you were doing this. Why do you wanna go to culinary school? Why do you wanna learn how to be a truck driver? A long haul truck driver? Why do you wanna become an artist? You just look at ’em and say, I’m just gonna do it. You don’t owe anybody an explanation and you don’t, you don’t have to convince anybody, or you don’t, obviously you don’t have to be defensive.

[00:37:22] You just say, look, I’m just gonna do it. That’s my, that’s my plan. You got a plan, what are you doing? You throw it back on them because you’re not gonna, the 80% still out there, right? I don’t care if you’re in high school, college, it’s your parents, whatever. The 80% still hovering out there, waiting for you to expose yourself and say, guess what I wanna do?

[00:37:41] I’ve got this dream. And. Right, right. For sure. So just accept that that’s gonna happen.

[00:37:47] Christine: Yeah. So tell us, where can we find your books? How can my listeners connect with you? Tell us all the things.

[00:37:54] Marty: Yeah. The easiest way is to go to Marty Strong, be nimble.com. All my books are there, all my articles, links to podcasts, et cetera.

[00:38:00] It’s all there. And, and excerpts of things. So you can point of sale, click right through to either my novels or my business books from Marty Strong, be nimble. Do.

[00:38:09] Christine: Okay, perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I love your perspective and just the encouragement that you offer to say, okay. It doesn’t have to be the way that everybody has told you life should look.

[00:38:23] Just get out there and dream big.

[00:38:25] Marty: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me

[00:38:27] Christine: friends. More than anything, I hope this conversation inspires you, inspires you to take action, whether it is going and creating a bucket list, whether it is creating clarity on what you want or whether it is actually going and writing the book, starting the business, doing the thing that is on your heart.

[00:38:46] The only way that you can fail is by not taking action, by staying stuck. If it is your mindset holding you back, if it is a lack of clarity or a lack of how to actually build out the plan and make it work for you in your life, I would love to help you. Like I said, I have a limited number of free unstuck sessions available, and in this session we will walk through.

[00:39:13] What beliefs are really holding you back and how to determine what your next steps need to be so that even if it’s something that doesn’t happen for 10 more years, you are taking steps in the right direction. You are headed down that path to a life with purpose so that you are truly trading your frustration for fulfillment.

[00:39:38] So please do not let this opportunity pass you. I cannot wait to hear from you. Come pop over inside our free Facebook community. Let me know what your biggest takeaways were from this episode. I will see you in there, and then I will be back here with another episode next week. Until then, May you live filled, fueled, and full of joy.