Why Communication is a Navy SEAL’s Greatest Asset

Doug Downs (00:05):

It was a moonless night in May, 2011. Deep inside the borders of Pakistan, two black helicopters flew low and fast, skimming the rugged terrain with pinpoint precision on board. A team of elite Navy SEALs sat in silence. Their minds focused on the mission ahead. They trained for this moment. Over and over, each movement choreographed. Each contingency planned the objective, a heavily fortified compound in a Abatabod, the target most wanted man of the world, Osama bin Laden. But then something happened as the first helicopter hovered over the compound preparing to insert the team. An unforeseen vortex of hot air caused the aircraft to lose lift in an instant, it crashed into the courtyard, sending a shockwave through the team and alerting the compounds inhabitants. Now imagine yourself in that moment, a critical mission. Years in the making and in the blink of an eye everything had changed.

(01:17):

Panic? Not for these SEALs. Through years of discipline training and an unshakeable reliance on one another, the SEALs adopted instantly. They switched to their contingency plan quickly, silently with hand signals and clipped radio transmissions. Their calms discipline was unwavered. Within moments, they were back on track, pressing into the compound, clearing each room with lethal efficiency upstairs behind a locked door. They found it in seconds. The man responsible for countless lives lost was neutralized, and just as quickly the SEALs secured their evidence prepared their exfil and destroyed the down helicopter to prevent sensitive technology from falling into the wrong hands. The mission though compromised was a success. And how did they pull it off? Not just through strength, not just through skill, but through communication. Clear, concise and disciplined communication today on stories and strategies in the fog of uncertainty, in the chaos of combat, communication is your greatest weapon without it stories and differently.

(02:45):

My name is Doug Downs. My guest this week is William Branum who joined me at a conference we were both at in Salt Lake City, Utah. Very recently, William was a Navy SEAL who served 26 years in the Navy, 23 of those years with the SEALs and cultivated a powerful mindset. He has extensive experience in high pressure situations as a sniper instructor and leading teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. I literally cornered William in the lobby after hearing him speak, and I asked him if he would do an interview for this podcast with me right then and there with my phone. Here's why I see Navy SEALs as the toughest, most physically capable individuals on the planet. I mean pushing the limits through raw strength and endurance grit, but William quite bluntly said, those are the SEAL candidates that don't make it through the training and wow, did that catch my attention? William really spoke about how effective communication can be. The difference between success and failure in the highest stakes situations. At the highest level, communication is number one. That's from a Navy SEAL. Enjoy this episode. So you were William a Navy SEAL for how many years?

William Branum (04:11):

Yes, sir. I was in the Navy for 26 years and 23 of those 26 years I was in the SEAL teams.

Doug Downs (04:16):

Navy SEALs underwater, holding your breath, pushing physical to the limit mind over matter. Comms can't count for very much.

William Branum (04:26):

Oh, comms is probably the most important thing that you can do. Yesterday when I gave my presentation, I showed you that SEAL delivery vehicle, and I didn't really talk about how we communicate in the back of the boat. You have two guys in the front underwater, four guys in the back. Well, how do we communicate back and forth? We're in the water. We have to use nonverbal communications to communicate with one another. What we found is nonverbal communications are oftentimes much better than verbal communications.

Doug Downs (04:53):

You're not talking body language there. You're talking deliberate signals.

William Branum (04:58):

Yeah, deliberate signals. So I can give you so many different examples of nonverbal communications. Whether I'm clearing a house with other teammates or I'm underwater or I'm in a gunfight, daytime, nighttime, we're much more effective when we communicate non-verbally versus verbally, and the reason for that is we simplify the communication. Most people, what I've found is most leaders in any organization, they become very verbose and they try to overexplain something rather than just getting straight to the point and telling people exactly what they want. Instead, they try to tell people how smart they are with all the words that they're using. I tell people, if you can explain your message in seven words or less, you're going to be very effective.

Doug Downs (05:48):

That's the narrative. Absolutely. That's about staying in contact and in communication. To what extent would a Navy SEAL different ways of communicating how to make a message resonate with people? You just touched on it, shorten it, make it seven words or less and it has a higher likelihood of sticking. I mean Navy SEALs, again, I think about working out. I think about pushing the physicality to the limit. I think about fighting bad guys and bad women to some extent. Do you study human communication? How the brain remembers a message?

William Branum (06:27):

I study it now, but I don't think that we are really studying communication. Back then. We just studied what was effective on the battlefield

(06:36):

And what we found. High stress. When you're talking about a high stress environment, life or death scenarios underwater, no matter what it is, the more simple and clean you can make it, the less probability there is of any sort of miscommunication happening. If you give me a hand and arm signal or you do something with your laser or wave your gun a certain way or squeeze me a certain number of times, I know exactly what that means. There is no question in my mind. I know what my next move is, but those are SOPs that we have to build in. So you have to figure out how you want to communicate what you want your message to be so that you can then break it down and make it extremely simple. Yes, you do have to study what is effective communication and what the effective words are, what the effective methods of communication are. They have to be very deliberate and very direct. What percentage of candidates for Navy SEAL actually make it 25 to 30%? Actually make it through training. Right,

Doug Downs (07:34):

Okay.

William Branum (07:35):

And is it always the biggest, the strongest, the most physically fit? It's almost never the biggest, strongest and most physically fit. It's like guys like me that are just average, mediocre, just guys with a ton of grit that just don't want to quit ever.

Doug Downs (07:53):

You had two of your main messages in your presentation to the group we're seeing in Salt Lake City. First one was never quit. The second was accept failure. Those two don't seem to agree with each other. What do you mean about the difference between the two?

William Branum (08:08):

Well, never quitting. You're going to run into obstacles. You're going to have hard times. You're going to hit roadblocks, and you're going to achieve failure over and over and over, and that's okay. As long as you learn the lessons from that failure and you keep going. Most people, they'll try something and they'll fail and they'll quit. If you try something and you fail and you try it again and you fail and you try it again, and then you just keep going until you actually get to the end result that you're looking for, you're going to be successful. It doesn't matter what you're doing. I mean, we could just use examples. What's the guy's name? Holy crap. I used to talk about him in my presentation. The guy who created the incandescent light bulb, Thomas Edison. Thank you. He learned more than 10,000 ways to not create the incandescent light bulb. What if he stopped at like 9,000, 9,999? Oh, there's no way to create this light bulb. Then he never would've done it. He accepted failure and he never quit.

Doug Downs (09:10):

If three out of four candidates for Navy SEAL end up quitting because they've accepted failure, is there a form of communication that is used or could be used to help those candidates last longer? And I guess supplemental to that, tell me about communication in theater of war, because I know you've been to Iraq, Afghanistan, to what extent does communication play a role, not just amongst each other, but sometimes with those you're at war with those individual people that you're in battle with?

William Branum (09:47):

So communication. There was a two part question. There was one in about training or guys going through training to become a Navy SEAL, and if there was some sort of communication that could help them actually make it to the end of training, and I don't know that there is. It's really actually there is. It's the communication that they're having with their self. Whatever that story is they're telling themselves, that's the communication that needs to be fixed. So if they can fix themselves and fix the story they're telling themselves, fix the narrative and communicate with themselves in like, okay, so what we failed. We learned something, let's go and keep going. Oftentimes they're like, this is too hard. I don't want to do it. It's not worth it at the end, the end result isn't really what I'm looking for. When they tell themselves this is what I'm going to do and no matter what I'm going to make it to the end, then they're going to make it.

(10:33):

The second part of your question was communication in combat. In those sort of scenarios, I will tell you we've probably lost more people in training and in combat due to poor communication, lack of communication, because we were relying on maybe old ways of doing stuff, or we got lazy in the way that we communicated, or the other party wasn't listening to what we were saying. I mean, we've dropped bombs on our own people. We've shot our own people, we've killed our own people. And I'm not talking just in the SEAL teams. I guarantee you what's happened to us in the SEAL teams in training, but it has happened where we've killed our partner force also, or they've shot at us because things get chaotic. Things get crazy and stressful, and our rational thoughts sometimes goes out the window and we just get emotional and we just like, oh my God, we're scared.

(11:26):

Fear is a very, very powerful player out on the battlefield. And so when you're in those extremely stressful environments, communication is critical, even if it's oftentimes we've been very successful on the battlefield because we have the ability to sometimes listen to the communication that the enemy is having with one another. And I'll say that sometimes we don't shoot the guy with a gun. Sometimes we shoot the guy with a cell phone or the guy with the radio because he's out there, he's in his track suit on his cell phone, coordinating all the attacks that are going on and me in a sniper position. Once I see that and I recognize what's happening, I read the battlefield and I know that that guy that's communicating with all the other forces coordinating what's happening, I shoot him, I take him out of the picture, all the opposition force, they stop fighting because they don't know what to do because they don't have eyes on the inside anymore.

(12:24):

So communication, and that was something that we had to learn. Also, we go into combat and we write after action reports and we pass them out to our teams and the other forces in theater so that we know that the enemy's TTPs tactic techniques and procedures, well, you know what? The enemy's doing the same thing to us. We've had to change our TTPs time and time again because we go overseas, we use these techniques to go in houses or fight the enemy. The enemy learns our techniques, they start sharing them. We go in, we try to use the same thing. They counter us. So we have to change the way that we're doing business. So communication in everything that we do, it is the most important thing that we can do in combat or in training.

Doug Downs (13:03):

Okay. Last question. You talked a bit about fear, and what I loved about your presentation was you have to accept fear. Fear is going to be a part of it, giving into it, that's a whole other thing. Rather than tell me your theories on fear and overcoming fear, I want you to tell me a story, and I'm asking this of the Navy SEAL, a time that you experienced sincere fear, maybe the most you've ever experienced, and how you communicated with yourself to overcome that fear and to do what needed to be done.

William Branum (13:38):

Wow. I have to think about this really quickly. The first story that pops into my head, I told it yesterday, and it was about the guy that I didn't shoot that maybe I should have, because right after that, I saw this Iraq police police officer. Where were you in Iraq? I was in Iraq. I saw there was a gunfight going on on our right side as we're going to go find someone else. And we come around the corner where driving very fast at night, blacked out night vision goggles, the whole thing, and an Iraqi police officer sees us as we come under the streetlights and he gets on the phone and starts calling some people. And I was like, something about that's not right. I feel like I should shoot that guy. But I didn't really have a good reason to yet. About two minutes later, an IED went off, I was in the back of the Humvee and it went off about 10 feet away from us, and I was like, oh, that's not good.

(14:27):

And then people started shooting at us and we're just hanging out in the back of a pickup truck. And then about a minute later, and again, we're hauling the mail at night, and the next IED goes off. And the only reason that we live, I'm here to talk to you about it, is because we were driving so fast that IED barely missed us. And like I said yesterday, the number one rule of being an Navy SEAL is you have to look cool. It's a joke, but we have some ego and we're like, ah, indestructible or whatever, we die all the time. I am like, oh, this is number one. Something I didn't share yesterday is when I was 15, I was shot hunting, so I've already been shot one time. And so my thought process and what I share with everyone in combat, I'm like, I've been shot before.

(15:17):

What are the odds of me getting shot again? They're pretty low, I think. So anytime it was in a gunfight, it was like, no big deal. Still a little scared, but I've never been blown up before. So now I've got two bombs have gone off and I'm like, oh my God, this is not good. But all four of us that were in the back of that truck, we were like, Hmm. We were scared, but we weren't saying anything. And it was actually the new guy, the guy with only his tube deployments under his belt. This was the second deployment was like, Hey, what do you guys think about maybe getting a little lower in the truck and being less visible to the enemy of smaller target? And we were all immediately like, yep, we're going to get down and hunker down and try not to die on this tonight, because that was two very close calls. When we got back from that mission, the whole side of the Humvee was just littered with bullet holes where the rounds had bounced off. And I was like, how are we alive right now? This is crazy. So yeah, that was probably the most scared on a combat mission. Actually. I have some other stories about being scared, but yeah, you just have to hunker down and move forward.

Doug Downs (16:26):

The thing I pull from that is you listen to the new guy with the good idea. So I pull from that in crisis, crisis communications, listen to the new ideas, follow process, follow procedure, follow your training. That's what that exists for. But be flexible enough to listen to the new stuff. The other thing I got from what you said, because you talked about the Iraqi police officer with the cell phone. Sorry to add humor here, but I got shoot the messenger.

William Branum (16:56):

Yeah, that's exactly right. I never thought of it like that, but yeah, a hundred percent. Shoot the messenger. Never be the messenger. Yeah, that's right.

Doug Downs (17:03):

I really appreciate your time. I loved your presentation. I love that a Navy SEAL, who I am obviously physically so far removed from that and mentally probably quite far removed from that. But in your presentation, I got that maybe somewhere in my head there's a Navy SEAL within me, somebody that follows their training faces up to their fears and addresses things and gets things done. I hope that's the message that you wanted to get across.

William Branum (17:28):

That's a hundred percent. I mean, I want people to start thinking more like Navy SEALs and the thing that we do sets us apart from other people that just think about things differently. We tried to not have this conventional mindset, and I think that's what you're doing with the Mastermind. That's how you run your programs, how you run your business. You just do it differently than everyone else. That's the thing that sets you apart. And I think that the more people that can start thinking about things differently, less conventional, more unconventional thinking, the better the world will be and the more innovation that we will have. That's a beautiful wrap.

Doug Downs (18:00):

Thanks for your

William Branum (18:00):

Time. Yes, sir. Thank you.

Doug Downs (18:04):

So here are the top three things I got from former Navy SEAL William Braham. In this episode. Number one, simplicity is key. Effective communication is about keeping messages clear and concise. Seven words or less, William says, can often be the most powerful, most impactful way to convey critical information. Number two, nonverbal communication is also powerful. In high stress environments, hand signals, gestures and other nonverbal cues are often more reliable and effective than spoken words. And number three, mindset drives success. Success in any challenging situation comes down to mental resilience and the internal dialogue we have with ourselves whether to push forward or give up. If you'd like to send a message to my guest, William Branham, we've got his contact information in the show notes, stories and strategies as a co-production of JGR Communications and Stories and Strategies, podcasts. If you liked this episode, please leave a rating and possibly a review. Thank you to our producer Emily Page. And lastly, do us a favor forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening.