In Episode 023 of the Navy SEAL Mindset, I explore the transformative power of focus and how it can be the decisive factor between success and failure in both the military and civilian realms. Drawing upon my extensive experience as a 26-year Navy SEAL veteran and a sniper instructor, I share insights into how focusing on what you want, rather than what you don't want, can guide you through life's challenges and lead you toward achieving your goals.
Key Takeaways:
The story of adapting to protect the interim government of Iraq highlights the importance of focus and learning new skills rapidly under pressure.
Personal anecdotes from my journey to becoming a Navy SEAL demonstrate the critical role of focus in overcoming obstacles and achieving one's dreams.
The concept of "focus" in marksmanship serves as a metaphor for life, emphasizing the need for clarity and concentration on your goals.
Insights from Napoleon Hill's works, including the "Law of Success," reinforce the idea that success is attainable through focused effort and belief in one's abilities.
Remember, focus is not just a skill but a way of life. Embrace it, and watch how it transforms your approach to challenges, opportunities, and ultimately, your success.
Stay awesome, and remember to focus on your path to greatness.
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WANT TO THINK LIKE A NAVY SEAL AND UNLOCK YOUR POTENTIAL?
Discover the 5 SEAL Secrets to Success
A short read with powerful tactical lessons to change your life
In Episode 023 of the Navy SEAL Mindset, I explore the transformative power of focus and how it can be the decisive factor between success and failure in both the military and civilian realms. Drawing upon my extensive experience as a 26-year Navy SEAL veteran and a sniper instructor, I share insights into how focusing on what you want, rather than what you don't want, can guide you through life's challenges and lead you toward achieving your goals.
Key Takeaways:
The story of adapting to protect the interim government of Iraq highlights the importance of focus and learning new skills rapidly under pressure.
Personal anecdotes from my journey to becoming a Navy SEAL demonstrate the critical role of focus in overcoming obstacles and achieving one's dreams.
The concept of "focus" in marksmanship serves as a metaphor for life, emphasizing the need for clarity and concentration on your goals.
Insights from Napoleon Hill's works, including the "Law of Success," reinforce the idea that success is attainable through focused effort and belief in one's abilities.
Remember, focus is not just a skill but a way of life. Embrace it, and watch how it transforms your approach to challenges, opportunities, and ultimately, your success.
Stay awesome, and remember to focus on your path to greatness.
--------------
WANT TO THINK LIKE A NAVY SEAL AND UNLOCK YOUR POTENTIAL?
Discover the 5 SEAL Secrets to Success
A short read with powerful tactical lessons to change your life
https://www.5sealsecrets.com/
William Branum:
Welcome to the Navy SEAL Mindset. This is episode 023. My name is William Branum. I am your host. I am a 26 year Navy SEAL retired. I spent 23 of my 26 years in the SEAL teams. If you're new here, I was also a sniper instructor. I am now a, we'll call it an entrepreneur, where I speak internationally talking about the Navy SEAL mindset. I have a CBD supplements company. which I will talk in other episodes about being sued by another supplements company who claimed that I am infringing on their trademark. The name of my company is Naked Warrior Recovery. The Naked Warrior is the predecessor of today's Navy Seal, so that is my defense. and and I didn't steal any of their trademarks. But anyway, I'm not bitter. I'm excited about sharing a lot of that stuff with you. what else? I do business leadership coaching. we do some off sites where we go to a place called Blacksite Ranch where we run obstacle courses. We run through the kill house. We learn how to fight. We learn how to shoot. We learn how to do a lot of cool stuff. And then I take all of those skills that you learn and apply that to business. I apply it to leadership and things like that. again, it's all about the Navy SEAL mindset and how you can take the lessons that I learned from 26 years serving this country. And apply this all into your daily life. And, what I want to talk about today is to focus on what you want and stop focusing on what you don't want. And, I'll just start off with a story. So there was a time when we were in the SEAL teams, we got tasked about four months out from our six month deployment. And, we were tasked to protect the interim government of Iraq. And because we got that mission, there's a lot of different skill sets that are not regular Navy SEAL skill sets that we had to go and learn. So we went and paid a bunch of money to hire coaches to teach us how to protect the interim government. part of that training was high speed driving. Where we, crashed into one another, we made cars go out of control, we evaded bad guys, we shot paint rounds at one another, it was a lot of fun. But one of the things that they showed us when we first started the high speed driving portion was, and I'll talk a little bit more about some of the fun stuff that we did during that course, or the courses that we went to. The very first one that we went to, they, right away, they showed us a video and they showed us all of these pictures of cars, single car accident where the car lost control for one reason or another. Maybe it was a drunk driver, who knows? And these cars, there were hundreds of them that they showed us. They hit a random Lone tree in the middle of a field that was off the road. So basically the car was driving along. It lost control for one reason or another, and it went into a field and it hit a lone tree. The field was gigantic and there were hundreds of these pictures that they showed us and the moral of the story was. The driver, 100 percent of the time, saw the tree, they focused on the tree, and at some point, they got control of the car again, and then they ended up driving directly into that tree, because that's what they were focusing on. And what they taught us is that, they said, when you see danger, you actually look away from the danger in the direction that you want to go. And I had never really put that together, and then I heard it later on when I was doing some mountain biking, and a guy was talking about when you're going across like these really weird obstacles or, driving across a downed tree, like horizontal, like along the trunk of it or railroad ties, or, a two by four, you focus on where you want to go. You focus on where you want that front tire to go. Same thing on a motorcycle off road. You focus on where you want that front tire to go, and that's where the motorcycle will go. That's where the mountain bike will go. That's where the car will go. That's where you will go in your life. why am I telling you this? Often times in life, and I have been guilty of this as well, we focus on the wrong thing. We focus on what we don't want to happen in our life. We don't want to lose the relationship. We don't want to, lose our job. We don't want to lose whatever it is. We're focusing on the wrong thing. We're not focusing on the thing that we want to achieve. So when I, before I became a Navy SEAL, I ran into a lot of obstacles and that, that prevented me from going to SEAL training right away. And my focus was to become a Navy SEAL. And so it was very, it could have been very demoralizing that every time I made a decision It was the wrong decision, and then I eventually ended up on a ship in Yokosuka, Japan Because I made some tactical errors And I spent two years on that ship and then when it was time for me to leave the ship and go to another duty Station the guy who was in charge of sending me to the next duty And so I found a way to get to SEAL training. And then when I was in SEAL training, I got hurt three times. So that six month block of training took me 13 months to get through. They almost kicked me out, but because of my determination, my, my effort, and the fact that I cried like a little baby with big snot bubbles and the whole thing, begging them to keep me, I got to stay and eventually become a Navy SEAL and serve this country in that capacity. And now I get to share a lot of those lessons. So I was very focused about getting what I wanted in the Navy. I was very focused about becoming a Navy SEAL. Now, when I retired from the SEAL teams, I lost that focus because I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't know what I wanted to become. I felt like I lost my mission, my purpose, and my team overnight. And, so I had to start figuring out what do I want to do. eventually I started Naked Warrior Recovery because our mission is 22 to 0. 22 veterans take their lives every single day. our mission is to eliminate veteran suicide. That is my focus with Naked Warrior Recovery, the end. and help everyone else out. it takes time and money and effort to help end veteran suicide. And, hopefully we get them all one day. But it's a lot of effort, a lot of time, and a lot of focus. I also do speaking all over the world. I do business leadership coaching and I, like I said earlier, I run events, leadership development events at a place in California at a private ranch. And those are the things that I focus on now. It took me a long time to figure out what it was that I wanted to do. But once I finally had that clarity, and I had that focus, or that clarity, I knew how to focus on it. So there's this thing in, in marksmanship. When you're shooting guns, it doesn't matter if you're shooting a pistol, a rifle, if it has iron sights, if it has a scope on it, focus is the most important thing that you have to do. So if you're out of focus, you can't hit the target. If your scope is out of focus, your groups are going to be Spread out. They're not going to be nice and tight, and all the impacts are touching one another. So when you're shooting iron sights, that's where you look down the, the back, sight, and then look at the blade that's in the front, and then you look at the target. And you line those things up, and when you're looking at the target should actually be a little bit blurry. You know what it is, you know where it is, it downrange. and the sight that is closest to your face should also be blurry. And the thing that should be the most clear is that front sight post. That, that, that front sight that you put on the target where you want it to hit. And so that you have to have crystal clear clarity, and you focus on your front sight. They say front sight focus for a reason. The same thing again applies to a scope. If you don't have the scope focused properly and the parallax dialed in, you're not gonna hit the target as effectively as you could. So you have to focus on what you want. Often times, so many times in life, and again, I'm telling you that I'm just as guilty as anyone else, I focused on the things that I didn't want, or I focused on the wrong things. So it's important that we find clarity in what we're doing. when we go on missions in the SEAL teams, we know what the mission is, we know what the objectives are, we know what we're supposed to do when we get there, and how to get there, and how to leave, or how to leave. And, and we have very crystal clear focus on what we're going to do, our actions on the objective. Because we've practiced those things over and over. And then we have a, we figure out what the mission is going to be, we brief the mission, we go, Practice the mission, then we go execute the mission, we come back and we do an after action review. We can't do that if we don't have focus. So I was reading a book recently by Napoleon Hill called, Law of Success. Napoleon Hill, I think he's most known for Think and Grow Rich, but Law of Success is far better than Think and Grow Rich, if you ask me. He also wrote a book called Outwitting the Devil. Phenomenal book, written back in 1910 or something like that. It, if you read it, or if you listen, it's awesome to listen to because it's, Napoleon Hill having an interview with the devil. And the devil's voice is this gruff, sort of voice. And so it's very cool to listen to. But if you listen to that, or read it, however you do it, The things that he talks about drifting through life and all these other things, you would think that it's happening today, that it was written today. Just like it's incredible how things never really change unless you focus your effort. One of the things that he talks about in Outwitting the Devil is people who are drifting in life. The devil says, if they are drifting, I can control them because they have no focus.. So it's important to focus on what you want and put all of your effort into the thing that you want, not into the things that you don't want. So I pulled up another quote from, from Napoleon Hill, from Law of Success, and he says, success comes only when you act on what you know and believe. What your mind can conceive and believe, you can achieve. And I believe that a thousand percent. If you focus on the right things, if you focus your mind on the thing that you want to achieve, you will achieve that successfully. I'm gonna end right here and say, don't look at the tree. Look away from the tree. Look away from danger. Focus your attention on where you want to go, not where you don't want to go. When you focus on where you don't want to go, I don't want to hit that tree, but you keep looking at it, you're going to hit the tree. So look away from the tree. Look where you want to go, and go there. Anyway, hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Don't forget to like and subscribe and all that other stuff. Leave a comment. Give me five stars if you think I deserved it. If you don't, don't. Share the episode. I appreciate you. Again, if you're watching this on YouTube, yes, I have a new background. I got a lot of changes going on in my life. A new move. And I'll talk about some of that stuff later. But anyway, hope you guys. You guys stay awesome. Don't forget to get naked and I'll talk to you soon. Peace.
