Get N.A.K.E.D. With William Branum

They say to accomplish your goals, one has to have a positive state of mind. We hear this often, however, a good amount of individuals often get confused where or how to start! Today, Ben Baker invites William Branum to talk about the Get NAKED mindset. William is a retired Navy SEAL with 26 years of service. He is now a keynote speaker and the Founder of the NW Recovery, a company that develops premium products to support individuals who are recovering from physical and mental damage. William talks about the 5 SEAL secrets: never quit, accept failure, kill mediocrity, expose your fears, and do the work. Tune in and learn to think like a Navy SEAL!

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What I Learned From 26 Years In The Navy SEALs

[00:00:42] Welcome to another episode of show. Welcome back my wonderful readers. I appreciate you guys coming back. Email me at [email protected]. You come visit me on LinkedIn. You tell me what you like. You tell me what you want to hear. I appreciate you. In this episode, we are going back to one of my first loves and talking to military people. I got a soft spot in my heart for the military. We got a 26-year veteran of the Navy SEAL. William Branum is visiting us and I got double thumbs up. We are going to talk about the Get NAKED Mindset and the power of recovery. William, welcome to the show.

[00:01:25] Thanks so much for having me on here.

[00:01:26] My pleasure. We had a great conversation. I do not know if my readers know this, but I always make sure 4 or 5 weeks before I have these conversations with people, we always have a pre-conversation because I want to get to know people. I want to know a little bit more about them. You and I had a great conversation. You were at home in Hawaii. I was jealous because I miss Hawaii. We started talking about the whole thing with your international travel, stuff you do, the stuff you could tell me about, and a lot of stuff you cannot tell me about. I appreciate that completely.

The whole life of a Navy SEAL has got to be extremely fascinating. A lot of that stuff, you cannot tell the readers, but why do not we start at the beginning and give everybody a sense about where you came from and what brought you to where you are, and then let’s get into your Get NAKED Mindset because I love this whole concept.

[00:02:25] I grew up in a little town outside of Meridian, Mississippi. A little town, not a lot of people, a small high school. I was heavily involved in the Boy Scouts and I liked hunting. I liked camping. I liked doing outdoor stuff and playing capture the flag. I always knew somewhere in the back of my mind that I wanted to be part of some small military elite unit. Although, I did not know the word elite back then because I am from Mississippi and all. Perhaps, we did not have that language.

[00:02:28] Did you come from a military family?

[00:03:01] My dad was in the Navy SEAL and I swore that I would never join the Navy. Number one, I do not want to float around on those big gray things out in the ocean. Number two, the Navy has the ugliest uniforms. Dungarees, bell bottoms, you look like you got out of prison with this white round hat that you have to wear, and it gives you a weird tan line. The people who lived up in the Chicago area would call new recruits straight out of bootcamp, where they were outside marching all the time. The top of their head was white and then the bottom part was brown. Use your imagination of what that might look like.

I was for sure never going to join the Navy. I always knew I wanted to be part of some small military unit. I was thinking like a Marine Corps Scout Snipers or I had heard of Army Rangers. That all sounded cool. John Rambo was a ranger. John Wayne was a “green beret” in Vietnam in the movie Green Beret. That was all super cool. Those were my role models growing up. I knew I did not want to be part of the big military, big army, big Marine Corps. I remember, as a kid, going to these civil war battlefields, and I could not wrap my head around why people would stand in these big open fields and fire at one another.

That was my idea of what combat looked like. Even now, it is still like that. It is a little different. With the urban environment, it’s a little bit different. Still, in the middle of the desert, they will be shooting back and forth to one another and work through that. World War II was the same way. I was like, “Why would you ever fight like that? That is dumb. I want to be like The Last of the Mohicans and ambushing the enemy from the side.” That was my mindset. That is how I thought.

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I went through this national jamboree. We were very poor when I grew up. The Boy Scouts knew it, but because I was so involved in the Boy Scouts, they actually paid for me to go to this jamboree because they wanted me to go and experience it. I met another guy that was a really good swimmer. I was a mediocre swimmer. “I am going to be a Navy SEAL and I am going to be an F-14 Tomcat pilot when I grow up.” I was like, “That is cool. What is a Navy SEAL?” He was like, “The most elite military unit in the world, hardest military training.” I was like, “That is cool. That is what I want to do also.”

They do scuba diving, jump out of airplanes, blow stuff up, and shoot guns. I am like, “That is it.” I came back from that trip and this was the summer between my 11th and 12th grade of high school. The Navy recruiter called me. Had that guy called me six weeks earlier and said, “Have you ever thought about joining the Navy?” I would have been like, “Hell no,” but because he called me right after that trip, I was like, “Yes, I want to be a Navy SEAL. I do not even know what that is, but it sounds cool.” He is like, “Navy SEAL. F-14 Tomcat pilot. Got it. Why do you not come on down here to the recruiting station and let’s have a little dialogue?”

I went down there. They showed me the movie about Navy SEALs. It was super cheesy, terrible movie, but I was fired up after I watched it. I am like, “Where do I sign? How do I do this? How do I also become a pilot?” I basically joined the Navy that summer between my 11th and 12th grade of high school. When I started my 12th grade of high school, I was already signed up to go off to bootcamp after I graduated in the delayed entry program. I joined the Navy, graduated from high school, went off to bootcamp. I took the SEAL screening test. I failed it. I went to my follow on schooling to learn how to be a Navy guy. I decided, “I am going to go to this other school and get in better shape before I go to SEAL training.”

What I did not know is because I took this other school for four months, I had to go spend 24 months of my time out in the regular fleet. The thing that I did not want to do the most, I had to go and do because I made bad decisions. They did not counsel people. Once I was on that ship and it was my time to go to my next duty station, which for me, in my mind, was going to be SEAL training, I called the guy that lets you go to your next station. I passed the SEAL screening test. I had done all the medical stuff, all the physical stuff, and all the admin stuff. I needed this one person to say, “You can go. I am going to release you to go to SEAL training.”

He said, “You know that school that you went to for four months that you wanted to get in better shape? You went to that school that puts you on this ship, so that made you too critical to the Navy. I am not going to let you go to SEAL training. You are not allowed. You have to do the same job over again on another ship.” I am like, “No, that is not what I joined for.” The Chief of Naval Operations is the most senior guy in the Navy. The only people more senior to him are the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States.

He came to my little ship in Yakustka, Japan. He did not go to any other ship. People were like, “You should ask the CNO if he will let you go to BUD/S.” I was like, “Who is the CNO?” I had no idea who I was even talking to. We had CNOs call. The whole ship is out there. The CO was out there. He is like, “This is my vision of the Navy.” I do not even know what. “Does anyone have any questions?” I raised my hand. He called on me. He was like, “Yes, sir?” I said, “I joined the Navy to become a Navy SEAL. I think I deserve a chance to go. My detailer will not let me go, but I think I deserve a chance to go. What do you think?”

He turns to my commanding officer and he was like, “Is he a good guy?” My CO was like, “Yes, he was a sailor of this quarter,” which is like employee of the month because I did a good job sweeping or cleaning the P waves. He turns back to me and he’s like, “You will be in the first class after your PRD,” which is Planned Rotational Date. Six weeks later, I am off to California to go to SEAL training. I eventually made it through that, spent a bunch of years in the SEAL Teams, retired, and then here we are.

[00:08:49] I am sure there is a lot of stuff happening over those 26 years. I got a question for you and this is something that has been in the back of my head ever since you and I had this first conversation. Prior to Osama bin Laden being killed in 2011, 2012, whatever the date was, the SEALs were behind closed doors. They were ghosts. You heard about them. You heard about SEAL Team 6. You might know SEAL Team 2 if you were lucky, but you had no faces to these people. You had no names to these people. You never saw them. You never heard from them.

Over time, there has been more SEALs coming out of the woodwork in the private sector with leadership programs, with these types of programs, with all sorts of security, companies, etc., and being able to make a name for themselves outside of the SEALs. Has there been a change in the SEAL philosophy that has allowed for that? When I first heard of the SEALs, we’re talking many years ago, they were mystique elite units that went in, did their job, got out, and nobody even knew they existed.

LBL William | Get NAKED Mindset — Get NAKED Mindset: Thomas Edison discovered 10,000 ways to not create the incandescent light bulb. Michael Jordan missed more than 9,000 shots in his basketball career. But they took those failures and used those as lessons of ways to not do something and ways to improve the process.

[00:10:04] There are still some of that out there. There were some books that came out. When some of those books came out after killing Osama bin Laden, the Special Operations Command did this big lockdown and this big culture shift like, “You will not advertise the nature of your work.” That was my philosophy for pretty much my entire career. Number one, I do not think anyone needs to know what I do. When I would tell them, I would get all sorts of weird questions. I am like, “Let’s not tell anyone.” I might say, “I am in the Navy. I do some Navy stuff.” If they are actually interested, I might, after the 5th or 6th question, tell them what I did.

At that point, I steered the conversation in a certain direction so that I did not have to answer weird questions anymore. What they do not tell you is when you get out that I still struggled with telling people that I was a SEAL. Now, I have no problem. I will tell anyone all day long because they still live by that, “Do not advertise the nature of your work.” While I was in, I did not have any social media at all. I had no presence on the internet. You could not find me if you tried. There was a reason for that. That was part of the job that I was doing. It was part of my security for my family and friends and other stuff because bad guys were hunting us.

As I got out, getting out of the military, getting out of the SEAL Teams is what I like to call the hardest military mission I have ever been on. They train you on how to be in the military, how to become a SEAL, how to do all that stuff, but they do not train you how to be a civilian person. You might get from the military how to write a resum and how to do a budget. I do not need any of those skills. I have those skills from other things. I need to know how to market myself. I need to know how to put myself out there in the world. I was still very hesitant on telling people I was a SEAL, but someone made the comment after I got out. When I would see guys come out and they would say, “I am a SEAL. I am using my Trident to promote myself,” I would be cross for them, “You are a sell-out.”

When you get on the outside world, they are very different rules. The Navy is not paying your salary anymore. They are not telling you, “Do not tell the nature of your work.” No one tells an NFL linebacker or quarterback or an NBA player, “Do not tell anyone what you did in your sporting career to not try and advance your career in the civilian world.” When you enter the world of entrepreneurship or anything else, no one cares what you did.

There are a million of you out there. Unless you can set yourself apart somehow, like saying, “I played for the Patriots. I played for the Celtics,” you have a little bit more credibility. Guys are taking the skillsets that they learned in the SEAL Teams, bringing them to the outside world, changing them up to fit whatever the new mission is in the civilian sector and saying, “I am credible. I may not have 30 years in the corporate world in corporate security, but I have 25 years in the SEAL Teams doing security and all these other things.”

They are like, “Check, you are credible. You do have the experience.” Joe Schmoe has only lived in the corporate world and has never been in a real stressful security-like situation or real leadership situation where it is very hard to control some of your environment or the people that are around you. Learning how to control the culture of an organization is a super valuable skill. You have to do that in the SEAL Team. You might as well tell people. That is part of your resume now. “That is what I did in the military as a SEAL. That is what I am going to do and how I am going to help your organization grow and create better culture and leadership.”

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[00:14:29] You said something that was powerful and it says that preparing to be a civilian was probably the hardest mission that you came across. That struck me because I know that a lot of people that leave the military that go into civilian life have a real difficult time translating what they did to civilian and making it relevant to civilian life. You have got the skills. You learn to adapt. You learn to overcome. You learn to be creative. You learn teamwork, leadership, and 100 other things that you learn within the SEALs.

It is a matter of does the military teach you how to rebrand yourself? That is where a real disconnect is. Hopefully, there are organizations out there that are helping translate to civilian life to be able to sit there and say, “You have an incredible brand. You have the brand a Navy SEAL. I cannot tell you what missions I was on. I cannot tell you what ordinance I worked with. I cannot tell you the special ops-type things that I did. However, here are some analogies, stories, and situations I can tell you that enable you to know, like, and trust me and believe that I can do what you need me to do.”

If you want to conquer the hardest things in your life, you have to keep accepting those failures, learn the lessons from them, and use that failure as a foundation for the success that you're going to create. Share on X

[00:15:47] When I first got out, I could not even tell you those. I was still very shell-shocked. No one is going to know what you did unless you talk about it in some capacity, share something that you did. You do not have to share any secrets. I can tell stories all day and not tell a single secret of what we did, of the things that were secret. That is a skillset and it is also a mindset shift that you have to go through. I think lots of veterans, it is not even specifically veterans. I have a friend who is a professional baseball player. He was a professional athlete. He did not make it into the major leagues.

He was in the minor leagues. He was right there at the cusp. He tore his shoulder and he could not pitch anymore. He had this mission that he was on and then, all of a sudden, I used the analogy of the movie the Avengers where Thanos snaps his fingers and half the world’s population goes away. That is like that. You have your team, your family, your mission, your purpose, you have everything right there in front of you, and then overnight, it is gone. You are like, “What happened?” There is no transition or feathering in. Coming in the military, you have bootcamp. Coming into professional sports, you have high school, college, minor league, maybe major league. There is a ramp-up.

Maybe a CEO or an entrepreneur builds a company up to a multi-million dollar, billion-dollar company, and he sells it. He is like, “Holy crap, what do I do now? I am completely lost. That was everything I knew. Now, I do not know what to do.” I found that that is a very common occurrence, more common than what we think. We do not prepare for these life transitions. There are ways to do that now. I have created some courses to help people with that and leadership and some other stuff.

[00:17:43] I look at it from a civilian point of view. You get a CEO, as you said, who decides, “I am now going to become a consultant. I have been a CEO of this multi-billion dollar company. Now, I am going to be a consultant. Wait a second. I do not have three secretaries anymore. I do not have a driver. No one is taking care of my flight operations for me. No one is booking my hotels. There is not an expense account to cover X. All of a sudden, people that took my calls anytime that I wanted no longer take my calls anymore.” We all get to a point where we transition, where we change, where we need to adapt and overcome.

What I want to talk about is how that translates into the Get NAKED mindset. You said that there are five secrets. This is a great transition moment. Now that you have gone through this, now that you have been through the life that you have lived and you are coming out of the other side, you sit there going, “What have I learned that is going to not only help me, but it is going to help the people that I can influence?” What are the things that you have found, the five things that will let people sit there and go, “I can overcome and adapt and be creative?”

[00:19:00] First of all, you already know the answer, so that was a great tee-up. I am here in Arizona doing some photo shoots for some magazines that I am going to be a part of. Every piece of apparel that I own has the words Get NAKED on it. Get NAKED is a mindset. When I got out of the military, it was the hardest military mission I have been on. I had all this noise in my head and I could not control the noise. It was really consuming me. What every good veteran would do is I would go to the medicine cabinet, which was the liquor cabinet. I would pour glasses of vodka and pour them down my throat and dull out the noise in my head.

I had heard about this molecule called CBD. I was like, “Maybe I should use that because it is good for stress, anxiety, sleep, and all the things that I am having an issue with.” Outside of epilepsy, I do not have an epilepsy problem. Maybe I do. I have got an ADHD problem, but that is fine. CBD seemed to be something that could help. I tried CBD. I did not notice anything when I was taking it. What I noticed over time is that I was drinking less. I noticed that water boils at 212 degrees and I was probably living at 210 degrees. Over time, I went from 210 to 205 to 200 to 195 to 190, 185. My fuse got longer. I was able to reply to these stresses in my life instead of respond in a negative way.

My habits got better. I did not rely on alcohol so much. I was able to control the noise in my head a little bit better. A little bit better mindset. From that, I was like, “What do I need to do to actually change my life?” I thought about my time in the SEAL Teams. It came up and it was The Naked Warrior. A little bit of history, the predecessors to the Navy SEAL were called Naked Warriors, Underwater Demolition Team. The Naked Warrior maybe should be a part of my company. I liked the thought about getting naked and about taking your ego off. When we go into combat, we put our armor on, we put our helmet on, we go into combat, and we go into harm’s way.

Sometimes it saves our lives and it is really good. We come back. We take that armor off and hang it up. We strip down and we get naked. We are vulnerable at those times. We get the showers, rest, recover and get ready for the next mission. In life, we do not do that. We have gone into some sort of combat environment and we put this armor on because we are under attack. This ego up like, “You cannot hurt me. Stay back.” We get attacked so many times and it can be little, teeny tiny attacks, but the pain is accumulative. Over time, you are living with this armor up. All the time, you are hiding behind the armor and you never have time to recover.

It weighs you down physically, mentally, and emotionally. The Get NAKED Mindset is about taking that ego off, taking that armor off, standing in the corner, becoming vulnerable, and exposing yourself a little bit. NAKED is also an acronym. This is the five SEAL secrets that we were talking about. The N stands for Never quit. The A stands for Accept failure. The K stands for Kill mediocrity. The E is Expose your fears. D is Do the work. When I talk about never quit, I do not mean never quit smoking or drinking or bad habits or toxic relationships or anything like that. I mean never quit on yourself.

If you made a conscious effort to start something, a project, a program, something in life, take that thing all the way to the end. There are going to be times where you feel overwhelmed. That is okay. It is natural. You are going to. I say create small victories. Take that giant thing that you have, the audacious goal, and you chop it up into bite-size pieces. Every day, you attack one of those pieces. In hell week, which is the most famous week of SEAL training, is five and a half days, you are cold, wet, and miserable. It sucks, but it does not matter how much it sucks. There is one thing that is constant. They feed you four times a day.

They make sure you have plenty of calories in your body. It is also a little bit of a break. It does not matter how badly you are shivering there uncontrollably in the surf zone with the guy to your left and to your right or carrying that boat on your head. All you have to do is make it to that next meal. That event is going to end. That misery that you are going through is going to end. You are going to get to a meal. You are going to have time to sit down, consume some food, have some dessert, enjoy that little bit of time, and then go back and hit it again.

If you take those big things that you have in your life and you chop them up and you make it to the next meal, nothing can stop you. The A is Accept failure because failure has been the biggest teacher in my life. It has been the best coach. It has been the best mentor that I have ever had. I am a little bit hard-headed. You can tell me the right way to do it, but I also have to know that all these other ways do not work.

Thomas Edison discovered 10,000 ways to not create the incandescent light bulb. Michael Jordan has missed more than 9,000 shots in his basketball career, but every one of those guys took those failures and used those as lessons of ways to not do something and ways to improve the process. Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg was like, “Fail fast, fail often. The more times you fail, the more things we know do not work. We can find the things that do work.”

If you want to conquer the hardest things in your life, you have to keep accepting those failures, learn the lessons, and use that failure as a foundation for the success that you are going to create. The K is Kill mediocrity because we are surrounded by mediocrity every day. If you do not think so, how hard is it to not get stuck scrolling this phone, social media, texts, TikTok? You can hit a button on your phone and have ice cream delivered to your house in 30 minutes or less, not so much in Hawaii, but pretty much anywhere else in the United States. It consumes us.

We find excuses to not attack our goals, to not create those small victories every day. Excuses to not do the things that we need to do to make ourselves great. We find excuses. What I tell people, when you want to kill the mediocrity in your life, you have to learn how to compete. Start small, start simple. It is amazing how easy it is to do this. I tell people to compete in kindness, compete in generosity, and compete in gratitude. Once you learn to compete in those things every single day then start to compete against your ego. Your ego knows exactly what to tell you to make you mediocre. It knows exactly what to tell you to make you quit. If you learn to compete against your ego, you will improve your life and the life of the people around you.

[00:25:40] The amount of self-doubt people have is enough to drive people into a hole that they never come out of.

[00:25:49] I have some coaching clients and 98% of them have some of imposter syndrome. I am 100% part of this. “Do this.” “What if someone does not like it?” “Who cares? Do it anyway. Someone will like it. Keep going forward. Keep moving forward.” I have high performers and they still have imposter syndrome. No one knows that they have it except for me because they tell me that. I am like, “I got it too, so let’s keep doing it together.” We practice competing, creating the small victories, competing in those little things, competing against your ego. That is killing mediocrity.

There's a saying that says Rome wasn't built in a day. It was built every single day until it became an empire. Share on X

The E is Expose your fears. I do not mean lions and tigers or bears. I mean that fear that is in that deep dark part of your brain, that fear that you do not want to tell anyone about. There are thoughts that you keep to yourself that you do not want to share with anyone. I think of those fears to be like a vampire, because a vampire lives in the darkness and it sucks the life out of you.

Those fears live in that dark part of your brain that you do not want to tell anyone about. They are sucking the life out of you. Those are the things that keep you awake at night. Those are the things that wake you up in the middle of the night that you need to talk about or do not allow you to go back to sleep. Those are the things, those thoughts, those stresses, those anxieties that you start having an argument with yourself while you are in your car. There are lots of ways to expose those fears.

Some of it is just do hard things. If you have a fear of public speaking, take a public speaking class. If you were bullied as a kid and you have low self-esteem, take a Brazilian jujitsu class for a year. You are going to be forced to fight someone every night that you go to class, but you are going to learn a skill. You are going to learn how to defend yourself. You are going to learn self-esteem and you are going to get better at something that is going to make you better across the board.

One of the things that I like to tell people the most is one of the ways that one of my coaches and very good friend, he is in the billionaire category. He says that fear does not exist on paper. He will be driving along in his car. You will have all these thoughts, these stresses, these anxieties that consume him. He will pull over to a Starbucks, order a coffee, and take a pen or a pencil and a piece of paper. Not his phone, not his iPad, nothing like that. He will write down, do a brain dump, every one of those thoughts and stresses like, “The thing that is bothering me. So-and-so said this about me. I need to get this thing done.”

Put all those things on that piece of paper and you read it. You are like, “That is what is making me so anxious and controlling my happiness?” Once you start exposing the fear, you will start to control the fear and the fear will no longer control you. A guy said that, “Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the resistance to fear, the mastery of fear. Courage is the mastery of fear, not the absence of fear.” I forgot the guy’s name. He is probably one of the top ten quoted people in the world.

D is Do the work. What I mean by that is we are consumed by social media, TikTok, and instant gratification, all these dopamine hits. We will start something and we will not succeed right away and we will quit. I talked about in the never quit, chop that thing up into small victories and do one little thing every day. Anything that is worth doing and putting forth that effort in. Becoming a Navy SEAL, that is not something you do overnight. Becoming a million-dollar business, that is not something you do overnight. Becoming a six-figure business is not something you do overnight. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes grind to get through the effort, to have the failures, to start over, to do it again. That is really what doing the work is all about.

There is a saying that says, “Rome was not built in a day.” It was built every single day until it became an empire. That is what doing the work is all about. In the SEAL Teams, we have a saying that says, “You have to earn your Trident every day.” That gold eagle that we wear on our chest, that is showing up every day and doing the work. You do not go through training and then you do not have to do any work anymore. When I graduated SEAL training, that was the mentality I had. I was like, “I did all the hard work. It is going to be easy from here out.” When I got to the SEAL Teams, I learned very quickly that that is the furthest thing from the truth.

Everyone has done that. Now you come to the team and now you are expected to perform better every single day than you did the day before. That is why they say, “The only easy day was yesterday.” It does not matter your rank, your age, or how long you have been on the teams. One of the beautiful things about being in the SEAL Teams is maybe I am in a leadership role and I am holding young guys accountable. If I showed up one day and I was not performing to the level that I should have been or above, they would hold me accountable. It would be like, “You need to get it together. What is wrong with you?” You do not want young A-type personalities who you have been riding pretty hard, turn the tables. It is not going to end well.

We held each other accountable and no one cared about my rank, my age, my anything else. I did not care about theirs either. People who were senior to me, I am like, “You need to start putting out because you are not setting the example and that is your job.” That is leadership across the board, junior, senior and middle levels. Show up and do the work and do it every single day. The only easy day was yesterday and that is what that is all about. To recap, the N is Never quit. The A is Accept Failure. The K is Kill mediocrity. The E is Expose your fears. The D is Do the work. Those are the five SEAL secrets.

[00:31:41] My philosophy of that, and I love that, is that leadership is not a rank. It is an attitude. You need to have the attitude of leadership. A leader steps up every single day and tries to be better than where they were yesterday. I think we all need to be thinking about that whether we are in the military, civilian life, wherever, whether it is with our wife and kids or husbands and kids, whether it is teaching school, it does not matter where it is. How do we be better than we were yesterday? What can we learn from what we did and be able to move forward? This has been incredible.

[00:32:27] It is a mindset. It is building the culture in the organization. Someone that I was on a call with one day said, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” I was like, “That is brilliant.” You can have the best strategy in the world. If you have an A-Plus strategy and you have D-minus culture, your organization is going to fail. If you have an A-Plus culture and D-plus strategy, your organization is going to succeed. You execute as hard as you can, as well as you can, with an 80% solution or even a 50% solution. A 50% solution executed with the right attitude and the right energy is going to be more successful than a 100% solution executed poorly.

[00:33:14] Strategy is one thing, but all it is, is a binder. In the end, strategy is a binder. Somebody told me that 70% of strategic change initiatives fail. A lot of it has to do with fear. It has to do with the fear of failure. It has to do with the fear of looking bad. It is the fear of, “What if this does not act the way that we want it to?” We are going to do nothing. When we do nothing, all we do is move backward. As anybody, it does not matter who we are. If we are not moving forward, we are moving backward.

[00:33:59] That is all do the work. I have heard some really good analogies. Tim Grover has a good one in his book, Winning, where he talks about you hit the championship and there is a bus waiting outside for you to go back to hell. I am like, “That is good.” I had been talking about like, “Climb this mountain, and then you have to go back down the bottom of the mountain and climb the next mountain.” It is the same thing. If you are not continually moving up, then you are regressing. At the end of the day, it is a treadmill that is going backward.

You can go forward as much as you want, but as soon as you stop moving, it is going the other way. If you have ever gotten on an escalator going the opposite direction or those moving walkways in the airports, if you get on the one going the wrong way, if you are not even moving fast enough, you are going to go backward. You have to move fast enough. If you stop moving, you are definitely going to go backward. That is life. If you want to be successful in anything, you have to continue moving forward.

[00:34:53] Two things, then I am going to let you go because this has been an incredible conversation. The best way for people to get in touch with you is NW-Recovery.com.

[00:35:03] That is the CBD site. It is NW-Recovery.com. You could also get there through NakedWarriorRecovery.com. If they wants to buy CBD, we will make a code Ben20 and give them 20% off. I will set that up as soon as we are done here so that I do not forget because my ADD will for sure kick in. I will be moved onto the next thing. The other way to get a hold of me, especially if you want the 5 SEAL Secrets, that Get NAKED Mindset because it goes into much more detail, the website is the 5SEALSecrets.com. Put your name and email in there. I will email you a copy of this PDF.

If you are interested in coaching or have some sort of conversation about speaking or anything like that, reply to that email and say, “I am interested in coaching or I am interested in having a conversation about some sort of a speaking engagement or corporate coaching.” That is my email. That comes directly for me. We can start that conversation as well.

[00:36:13] I have one last question. This is something that I ask everybody before I let them out the door. As you leave a meeting or get off the stage, get in your car, and drive away, what is the one thing you want people to think about you when you are not in the room?

[00:36:27] I want them to think about the Get NAKED Mindset, 100%. I want them to wake up in the morning and think, “How do I Get NAKED today?” If they do not remember my name or my face, they will remember getting NAKED and what it means and how to apply it in their life.

[00:36:40] We all need to Get NAKED. I think I need to get a Get NAKED shirt because I love the thought. I love the thought process. I love the philosophy. William, thanks for being incredible. Thank you for all that you have done and all that you do.

[00:36:55] Thank you for having me out here for sure.

About William Branum

Founder and CEO of Naked Warrior Recovery, a CBD company focused on the recovery of veterans and first responders. He is a retired Navy SEAL with 26 years of service. He has served on both traditional SEAL Teams, taught as a SEAL Sniper Instructor and served on Teams that specialized in undersea operations, who’s missions must be approved by the President of the United States. He led major combat operations ranging from protecting the interim Iraqi elected officials to Direct Action missions in Baghdad and across Ambar province.

After retiring from the military in 2018 he realized that he was suffering from physical and psychological symptoms that negatively impacted his well-being and quality of life. Migraines, severe anxiety, chronic pains, difficulty focusing, difficulty sleeping/falling asleep, and depression are some of the symptoms I struggled with on a daily basis.

Like so many others, he used alcohol & prescription drugs to mask the symptoms he had. Then he discovered CBD and it changed his life. It had such an impact on him he started Naked Warrior Recovery to bring the highest quality products to the market and to teach the GET NAKED! Mindset.