How Committed Are You?

"Hey, dad. I know you're upset, but look, here's the thing. It's just going to give me a chance to get better." That is what my son Cooper said to me in November of 2016 when he tore his ACL and his MCL playing his third game of varsity basketball. I was so upset. I was just devastated for him. He had worked so hard to make the team at a 9A school and play basketball at a level that he had always dreamed of playing. And here in the third game, man, everything was changed. He was laying on the floor, torn ACL, out for the season, massive surgery, recovery, all that in front of him.

I was trying to find the strength to just basically shore my son up and trying to figure out what I was going to say to him. Before I even got a chance to say anything, that's what he said to me. "It's just going to give me a chance to get better."

All three of my boys, Cody, Cooper, and Brayden, have always been resilient boys growing up. I think in a special forces family, with team sergeants, and military guys, MCO's, in the house all the time, that they learn at a very young age about resilience, and the importance of mindset, and how important that is to achieve your goals.

We've talked about vision, we've talked about purpose, which you need as a meaning-seeking creature. You need the vision to know where you're going and to see it before it happens. It has to be tied to your purpose and then you have to leave tracks. You have to know what it is that you're leaving behind. That tangible thing, or things, that will guide your future actions.

Well, all of that's great, but what is it that separates your vision, your purpose, and the real potential of it occurring? What separates it from a resolution that you give up on in 96 hours? Commitment. It's commitment. It's the same thing that Cooper showed when he said to me, "Dad, it's okay. It's just going to give me time to get better." I knew in that moment right there, Cooper was committed to his dream of playing basketball, and a torn ACL, months of recovery and rehab, were not going to get in the way of that dream. He had already made up his mind on commitment. It was another obstacle, another struggle, but the commitment was there.

It was a real teaching point for me, as a grown man, to reevaluate how I see commitment. I love it when things happen like that in life, especially when my children teach me something like that. Because the fact of the matter is, the enemy is going to put herself between you and your vision. The enemy is going to place itself squarely between you and your higher purpose. On the outside, the enemy is going to be distraction, mediocrity, the media.

Some of our politicians, corporate leaders, and people who claim to be leaders, will really turn out to be narcissists, amateurs, and transactional thinkers only. Not purpose based thinkers. They're going to place themselves between you and your dreams. It could be loved ones who are worried about you changing, or being left behind that will say, "Don't do this, you're going to get hurt, and you're going to get your heart broken. Just stay in the middle, don't color outside the lines." You know what I'm talking about. Every time we try to pursue something bigger than ourselves, something or someone on the outside tries to jam us up.

The enemy will also work from the inside. The enemy is an insurgent. Steven Pressfield in his book, "War of Art," calls it resistance. It's self sabotage. It's the things that will try to hold you back and keep you from moving forward. If there's a light force inside of us, there's also a dark force inside of us as well. That light, that is your higher purpose, your vision, the tracks you want to leave behind. It is met by a powerful dark force that says, "No, you are not capable of doing that. Who are you to do that? Who do you think you are? You don't have the money to do that, you don't have the training to do that, you don't have the courage to do that. People will laugh at you, people will ridicule you." You know what I'm talking about? That's resistance.

The enemy will place itself on the outside and the inside, to try to keep you from where you're going for this higher purpose. And that's going to happen, it is 100% predictable. So, what is our commitment to this vision? What is our commitment to our purpose? What is our commitment to our tracks? I don't believe you can really have a solid mindset without commitment. I learned this, the value of commitment, on the road to becoming a Green Beret.

I was that scrawny kid coming from a little logging town, who was told by everybody that I couldn't make it. I was nicknamed, "Rambo." I was made fun of. I was told, "There's no way in the world you're going to make it." And I failed. I failed almost every school I tried to go to. I failed special forces training a couple of times, and got recycled. And each time it was like a kick in the stomach. I had people telling me, "just dropout, it's not for you." And each time I wondered what I was doing. Why was I here? Am I even capable of this? Who am I kidding?

But I didn't listen to that, and ultimately, I made it through. It was that struggle, and overcoming that struggle, that allowed me to teach those lessons to my kids, that allowed me to lead from that place in combat, and train thousands of other leaders to approach their life this way. I've spent my life in the realm of high performance. From commercial bankers, to Navy Seals, to Green Berets, to entrepreneurs talking about mindset, heart set, and commitment to achieve what they were put on this earth to do.

If you want to stand out from everybody else, it is the commitment that you have to achieving those things bigger than yourself that will raise you up above the masses. This is what we all need to really be diving into right now. My call to action for you this week is simply this, what is your level of commitment? Evaluate it, write it down. How committed are you to your goals? Where are the gaps right now, what do you know is going to show up in your life externally and internally, and put itself between you and this higher purpose?

You know what your enemies are, they show up all the time. Write them down. How committed are you? Write it down, make a contract with yourself, a plan to face these enemies head on. Because next week we're going to be talking about what it takes to actually execute on this. The resilience that you need to do this, and commitment to get it done is the rocket fuel that you'll need to achieve the right mindset, and frankly, realize the higher purpose that you were put here to do.