May 5, 2025
Ambitious AF: Where Mental Toughness Meets Neuroscience with Erin Whitehead
Erin Whitehead, a brain health expert and CEO of Ambitious AF, shares her journey from surviving a traumatic car accident to coaching Navy SEALs on mastering attention through neurobiology.
• Survived a car crash in 2007 where another driver attempted suicide, leaving Erin with a traumatic brain injury
• Made a spiritual promise after her near-death experience that took a decade to fulfill
• Left traditional employment after being fired from every job and launched her own coaching business
• Now teaches Navy SEALs and other high performers the neurobiology of decision-making
• Works specifically with selective attention in the parietal lobe of the brain
• Believes mental toughness is not offensive and not optional
• Advocates for a "zero deviation" mindset - treating every day as Day One regardless of past success
• Rigorously vets clients for her coaching program to maintain high standards
• Recommends four daily critical tasks: one-word foods, physical activity, supplements, and quality sleep
• Recently discovered Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and finds it empowering for situational awareness
• Emphasizes the connection between physical health and brain function
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Episode Powered By Act Now Education
01:38 - Erin's Traumatic Origin Story
06:28 - Finding Purpose After Trauma
14:20 - Breaking Into Naval Special Warfare
19:40 - The Mission of Ambitious AF
27:56 - Accountability and Client Selection
42:53 - Daily Critical Tasks for Optimal Performance
55:22 - The Power of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
WEBVTT
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Warriors fall in.
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It's time for formation.
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Today, I'm joined with Erin Whitehead, who's a multifaceted professional with expertise in brain health, neurobiology and cognitive coaching.
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She holds credentials from Harvard and King's College in London and she serves as the CEO of Ambitious AF, which stands for about face right, right, nod, nod, wink, wink.
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Erin, thank you for joining me on the podcast today.
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I really appreciate you giving me the time and effort.
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I followed you on Instagram for quite a while and I like a lot of your material, but I'm interested to learn a lot more about you during this conversation, so thank you for giving me this opportunity.
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Great, let's do it.
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So, erin, I just want to start off with talking about your journey into the field of neurobiology and brain health.
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What inspired you to pursue this path?
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So, for those of you who do not internet stalk me, you would have no idea about the story.
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And for those of you who do know the story, when I tell it, people are not really expecting this.
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So on April 19, 2007, I was the front seat passenger in a car with a driver who suddenly decided to die by suicide.
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I have no memory of the impact and when I woke up, I was being braced to see a caller thrown into the back of an ambulance, lights and sirens to the hospital, spine twisted in the wrong direction, thinking, holy hell, this is going to be it.
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I'm either going to die tonight or I'm probably going to be paralyzed right, because that's just my luck.
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And, yes, I was left with my own traumatic brain injury.
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But that night I prayed so hard like Lord Jesus if you give me one more chance, one more chance at this life, I promise that I will help everyone who crosses my path.
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I will change my life around.
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I will do everything possible to be the child of God that you have created me to be.
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And I made it through the night long, story short, and that's really where the journey began.
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And, to be honest with you, I was still egotistical, so I wasn't acting so much as an asshole like I was before.
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So I was doing a little bit better, but I really wasn't doing what I needed to be doing, and it would be a decade until I would actually fulfill that promise.
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So, if you don't already know, I've been fired from every job that I've ever held.
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I just don't fit into those boxes.
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It just is what it is, which is why I signed the front of the check now instead of the back, and so I really needed to come to terms with my life.
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And what are you doing?
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I didn't feel fulfilled.
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I didn't know what my purpose was.
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If somebody had asked me what my core values are, I really couldn't rattle off any words.
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I really hadn't done that inner journey and inner work that people talk so much about, and so that's what I did.
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And I went on this inner journey and it got really dark.
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There were a lot of tears, and then it got even darker and then there were more tears, and when I sort of surfaced, if you will, I didn't have that epiphany that so many people talk about.
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They're like oh my gosh, like I finally saw the light.
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No, I knew exactly what the hell was going on with me.
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I knew exactly what I needed to change and I had been trading my dream of being an entrepreneur for the day job, for the safety of the paycheck, for the health insurance, for the 401k.
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For the middle-class families like myself who, when we grew up, it was like this is what you do you go to high school, you graduate, you go to college and then you find a job and you work at it for the next 40 years until you retire and hopefully you'll get married, you'll pop out a few kids, you'll live happily ever after.
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And I was like that just didn't feel right.
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So I did a cannonball off the high dive and I was like I'm going to start my own business.
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It's going to be like it's start my own business, it's going to be real this time.
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I'm actually going to do it.
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And that's what I did.
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And in that journey also came divorce, which was better for the both of us, to be quite frank with you.
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And now I'm sort of able to spread my wings in a way that I didn't feel like I was able to before, and because I signed the front of the check, I feel like I don't have to walk around with a muzzle.
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I don't have the HR department internet stalking me and fear mongering.
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Be like.
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You can't say this about politics, you can't say this about religion.
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And that is how I found human performance.
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And I just thought to myself how can I marry my love for genuinely wanting to help people better their lives with this kind of psychology-esque passion that I have?
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And that's how I found human performance and that is how I found neurobiology and I married them together and now I teach people, including Naval Special Warfare, how to master their attention attention so you can continue becoming an uncommon force for good in the world.
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And I do it all through the power of neurobiology.
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That is a that is a crazy journey.
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I wasn't expecting that.
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I wasn't expecting, you know, an accident where another driver was death um, death by, you know, by accident, by suicide, um, you know how that affected you.
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So when did that accident happen?
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April 19th 2007.
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Okay, and.
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I have.
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No, I have no memory of the impact, god, um, it's called retrograde amnesia and um, there is a story in between the impact and when I woke up, best saved for another time, perhaps a potential future podcast episode um, where I did experience the afterlife and and so that's cool.
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And so, um, people ask me all the time like I, I wish I could be more like you.
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I wish that I could dust off my courage and find my fire.
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I wish I had as much confidence as you.
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I wish that I could speak up out loud and I'm like you can.
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This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time.
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That's fight club reference, right, but it is, and I strongly suggest that you act like it, because this life will end for you.
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It will end, it will be done, and you don't want to be left with any type of regret.
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I was just asking, promised I was just asking yeah, that's definitely underlying and and bold faced right there, that's for sure tomorrow.
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I actually recently had a co-worker, um check into the doctors on a monday and by friday he was no longer with us.
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Um, so tomorrow is never promised for sure, um, I just asked when that happened, because I I know some people think that you know they get too old to pivot, to change, to take a different course, and it sounds like that hit you kind of like mid-range in your life maybe, and some people are too afraid to take that leap by then.
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So that's absolutely fascinating.
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And as far as your studies, so then you started to pursue your studies at Harvard and King's College.
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How did that shape your approach to the cognitive coaching overall?
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I think coaching gets a bad rap generally speaking, for a number of reasons, and I actually agree with it.
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The coaching is not a licensed profession.
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Like law, like medicine, like real estate, like finance, anybody can call themselves a coach, throw up a website, print a business card and charge you money.
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And 99% of the coaches out there either don't know what they're doing or they're what I like to call framework coaches.
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So it's like pay me some money and we'll turn to page four, and then you'll look at this sentence, you'll fill in the blank like you're a little third grader, and you might see some 5% marginal gains, right, but that's transactional, it's not transformative.
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And I wanted to learn how can, how can I learn how to dive underneath the surface of what's going on in the human body, specifically in the brain, our head brain, so that I can help others help themselves?
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And that's where it started.
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And I thought what is this whole neuroscience thing Like?
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What is it like now?
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It's like the sexiest term on Instagram, right.
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It's like you can't go through your feed without hearing the words neuroscience or dopamine.
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It's like these are the sexy terms, most of the time used incorrectly.
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But I thought, well, if I have a brain injury and I can learn how to heal myself through my own studies and my own actions and how I'm living my life, then maybe I can help others do the same, whether they have a brain injury or not.
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But, like you said, a lot of people are stuck in paralysis, in their 50s, for example, and they're like I really wish that I could make all of these major changes in my life, but, but, but and they're doing math Okay, so if you're in America, you can retire, you know, say officially by the age of, say, 65 or 67 or whatever it is for you.
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And they're thinking, okay, well, if I just hang out another decade, then I'll actually be able to do whatever it is that I love.
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And then you know, their values just don't match with their life.
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They wake up, they feel like a fraud.
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They so wish that they could make changes.
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You know the number one reason why people who try to start their own business because that's one of the things that people want to do they want to start their own business.
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And the reason why they fail is because of an unsupportive spouse.
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Your spouse is not supportive.
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Why?
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Because when you do a cannonball at the high dive, it does not provide certainty, and the human brain is a prediction engine and it looks for a lookalike scenario that is preferably not cloaked in failure.
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And so if certainty cannot be predicted, then uncertainty is predicted, and people get real antsy about traveling into uncharted waters.
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And I can certainly understand that.
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You know very much so.
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But again, this is your life and you have to make choices and decisions for yourself.
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And, yes, it matters who is in close proximity to you, but, at the end of the day, your talents matter, and if you're not putting those talents into the world that could make the world a better place, then you're doing the rest of us a disservice.
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Quite frankly, we want you to put your talents into the world.
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We want you to put your skillset into the world.
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And it's not that people don't have the passion and the drive.
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They know what they want to do, but they don't know how to do it.
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And that's where the paralysis comes.
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It's like okay, well, so how do I build a business model from scratch and launch it into the market and land my first paying client in 12 weeks or less?
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How on earth did I do that?
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I don't know how to do that.
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I'm an attorney, I'm an accountant, I'm an actor.
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They think they have to have an MBA.
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You don't.
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You don't even have to have a business card.
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Spoiler alert you don't even have to have a website.
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I sent everyone to LinkedIn for four years because I didn't have money for a website.
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I was like if you want to learn about me, go on LinkedIn.
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What is a better way to learn about somebody than whatever it is that they post on social media?
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And that in particular, platform allows you to illustrate your education, for example, or any certificates that you have in about section and things like this, and it dives in a little bit more on the professional stuff.
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And that's where I sent everybody.
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I was like go there and if you like it, let me know and we'll talk.
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Like that's all I have.
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That's all I have to offer, yeah that's actually a great place to learn, uh, someone's background and and resume and linkedin.
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I don't spend as much time on there as far as posting stuff, but I do spend time on there when I'm doing research on folks and man.
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Aaron, you have as much tenacity and fire as the name brand of your company.
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I love it, though I think that out of a bad situation came a lot of fire.
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It sounds like and what better coach than a coach that's actually been through it before that actually has the battle scars to show other folks to say this is what happened to me.
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And here I am today.
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Folks to say this is what happened to me and here I am today.
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So talk to me about how you connected everything with special warfare.
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How did that come about and how did you get connected with that?
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And talk to me a little bit about the connection there.
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So my father served our country in the United States Navy two tours in Vietnam.
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So that is my tie to the military, specifically my tie to the Navy.
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I am what you would call a whole life citizen.
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So I've never been a military spouse, I've never served in the military.
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I don't know what it's like when my husband is deployed.
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I don't know what it's like giving birth in a hospital while my husband is not with me.
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I don't have that perspective, but I do have the whole life citizen perspective.
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And so I continue to post online.
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And this one gentleman reached out to me and he said hey, I saw what you're doing.
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I really love it.
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I see that you're in human performance.
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I am in naval special warfare and I was wondering if we could have a conversation.
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Sure, long story short.
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We get on the phone, right, he is a SEAL and he's like I've got all these coaches in my life.
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I've got like psych, I've got career coach, I've got life coach.
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I have, like you know, all these people Right.
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And then I I pushed back really hard.
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I was like you don't have coaches in your life.
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It's like that's some fucking bullshit.
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You don't have coaches in your life.
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He said like.
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What are you talking about?
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I'm like you have glorified consultants and what people don't understand is that coaching is not telling.
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Consulting is telling.
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So if I'm telling you, hey, kp, this is what I think that you should do, this is how you should adjust your resume, this is how you should conduct an interview, this is how you should work for a job and I'm consulting with you or these are the risks that you're going to take if you make these types of business decisions.
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You're a consultant.
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That's not coaching.
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People derive coaching from when they played t-ball when they were a child, or they played on the soccer team or the football team.
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And what does your coach do?
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What does your tennis coach do?
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Your tennis coach tells you here's how you hold your racket, here's how you have to hit it to get some topspin, here's what your footwork looks like.
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Like a lot of telling, but traditional coaching is actually asking high empowered questions that dive under the surface.
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That gets your client to come up with their own answers that live within, and you have what's called an aha moment, which is a chemical reaction in the brain, and then the coaching right Applying laws of constraint, so holding you accountable and getting you to take action against whatever it is a decision that you just made right.
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That is actual coaching.
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And so I was giving him all this pushback right.
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I was like you don't have coaches, you don't have coach, right.
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And so we end up partying away and like two months later he reaches out and he's like you know what?
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You're right, I don't have anybody like you in my life.
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Would you please consider coaching me in your style as I transition out of the Navy, which was like another nine or 10 months.
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At that time I said absolutely so he's meeting with me, we're coaching like once a week.
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You know we're moving through this and just a change it really quick.
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I was 100%, absolutely not prepared for what was about to happen.
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I had never had a very close front row seat, like with an eagle's eye transition out of the military.
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It was the biggest bullshit I've ever seen, but story for another time.
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So it was extremely volatile and I have told him today that had he met me four years ago, five years ago, six years ago as a coach, I would not even have been prepared.
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So everything that I had done in neurobiology, in human performance, all of the education, all of the excess reading, everything that I was doing on the back end came to fruition and because of him I became smarter, sharper and stronger in my skillset.
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So four months goes by, right, and DevGrew invites me to be part of this fundraising event in downtown Nashville.
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And we're there and I say just so casually over dinner hey how long have you guys been SEAL Team 8?
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.
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And they looked at me and they're like what?
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Who told you we're Team 8?
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I'm like, oh, I'm like I've just landed in a pile of shit.
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What's going on?
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And I gestured to one of them like didn't you tell me you're teammate?
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It's like, well, I was team two, then I was team eight and now we're team six.
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And then I said it in my brain seal team six.
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And that was four months into it that I didn't even realize the level of caliber who were in my coaching practice, because it was never about development group, it wasn't really about Naval Special Warfare, it was about helping those who were in the Special Operations Forces community transition out successfully.
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And that's how I ended up in Naval Special Warfare.
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And so you wouldn't know this unless I told you because it's not advertised, and so yeah, and so that individual led me to other individuals and it's, like you know, just like good old-fashioned American values should be.
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If you like what you see, if you like what you hear, if things are working for you, go tell your friends and in the SEAL community it's extremely tight, and so for them to raise their hand and say, hey Joe, you need to talk to Erin Marie like she can help you, it means the world to me, yeah.
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So I've had several of them come through my human performance trading firm and I walk them through the neurobiology of decision-making and teach them the skill sets that they need to know as they transition out and to be out successfully to continue becoming an uncommon force for good in the world.
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Because that's what we need them to do.
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That's a very cool story.
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Very cool story and it's just kind of that wasn't your target client.
00:19:05.866 --> 00:19:14.756
It just so happened that they found you, more or less, and what better client to have than Special Warfare and Navy SEALs?
00:19:14.756 --> 00:19:27.986
Very great folks, um, and God bless you for helping them with the transition out of the military.
00:19:27.986 --> 00:19:29.469
I know that as a former uh army guy myself.
00:19:29.609 --> 00:19:46.887
Like getting out is not an easy thing to do and I think a lot of times for us, uh, it can be a little bit of a sucker punch when you come out into the civilian side and you realize that a lot of the things that you did in the military don't really translate uh easily across the table from a recruiter.
00:19:46.887 --> 00:19:49.713
And then also, too, you have to figure that out.
00:19:49.713 --> 00:19:50.923
How do I draw those lines?
00:19:50.923 --> 00:19:59.570
I personally do volunteer work and I'm a board member with Act Now Education, which we help folks make that transition out of the military.
00:19:59.570 --> 00:20:07.806
So I'm glad there's coaches like you that actually help people execute, because that is a huge thing, like executing and taking action.
00:20:08.267 --> 00:20:09.369
We can talk about it all day.
00:20:09.369 --> 00:20:23.788
I could talk about making a podcast all day, but until I go buy the actual microphone and join Toastmasters to learn how to talk and speak and present and then actually do a few episodes to get better, than what's the point of even talking about it that.
00:20:23.788 --> 00:20:39.386
So, um, that sounds like my type of coaching and it's interesting because, let's face it, like you're a woman and, at the end of the day, for you to break into that side, um, especially being a woman like um, that must've been real difficult for you.
00:20:39.386 --> 00:20:43.963
Have you reached any kind of like resistance or pushback because of that?
00:20:43.963 --> 00:20:49.875
Or is that something that people have kind of, at this point, guarded your respect because of the clients that you've had?
00:20:51.320 --> 00:20:56.573
So what I know about Naval Special Warfare is that whatever happened yesterday doesn't mean shit today.
00:20:56.573 --> 00:21:16.887
I know that I have to continually sharpen my iron, to be continually invited into the community, and the day that I think, oh, I've made it, oh, I'm here, look at me, look at me is the day that they're going to kick me to the curb and they'll never let me back in, and I appreciate that very much.
00:21:16.887 --> 00:21:19.648
So it I don't want to be.
00:21:19.648 --> 00:21:31.711
I don't want to be part of a community where there's anything lackadaisical that's happening, that there's any, put your feet up, kick back, we'll deal with it whenever it comes.
00:21:31.711 --> 00:21:46.270
No, like I am, I am reading, I am studying, I am learning, I am diving into clinical literature, I am applying the knowledge, I am asking them how I can get better, et cetera.
00:21:46.270 --> 00:21:56.493
So the pushback that I get in the Naval Special Warfare community never comes from the SEALs, never it comes from the females.
00:21:57.339 --> 00:22:02.780
That's actually, I mean, that's just a very difficult group to break into for anybody in general.
00:22:02.780 --> 00:22:07.064
So it's amazing that you got through and and you're doing great things for them.
00:22:07.064 --> 00:22:16.412
Um, and I want to talk about, uh, ambitious AF, all right, ambitious about face right or you know, we all know what AF stands for.
00:22:16.412 --> 00:22:24.034
So you're the CEO of of ambitious AF and, um, so what are the core core objectives of?
00:22:24.034 --> 00:22:26.320
So what are the core objectives of?
00:22:26.340 --> 00:22:36.152
your business To build a coalition of mentally tough individuals that are inspired to eradicate mediocrity from the planet, because the fate of the next generation depends on it.
00:22:36.152 --> 00:22:36.752
Period.
00:22:36.752 --> 00:22:54.124
Oh boy, that's what we are myopic about no-transcript, showing up and holding extremely high standards for ourselves and high standards of others.
00:22:54.124 --> 00:22:58.337
We are not afraid to disturb people.
00:22:58.337 --> 00:23:04.391
It is sense that we are out making our lives purposefully harder.
00:23:04.391 --> 00:23:13.171
We're not making our lives harder, we're making them purposefully harder, and in doing so, we are able to change the narrative.
00:23:13.171 --> 00:23:16.378
And the narrative is that mental toughness is offensive.
00:23:16.378 --> 00:23:17.541
It's not.
00:23:17.541 --> 00:23:19.093
It's not offensive and it's not optional.
00:23:20.494 --> 00:23:55.875
And by making our lives purposefully harder through nutrition, through sleep hygiene, through physical fitness, through hydration, through personal development, literature, through right, what it is that we ingest into our brain, through shedding interpersonal toxic relationships that are no longer functional, right All of these things that we're doing, other people can see, and what people want more than anything is to give themselves permission to be who they really want to be.
00:23:56.076 --> 00:24:01.758
They want to give themselves permission to chase their most ambitious desires in life, whatever that looks like for you.
00:24:01.758 --> 00:24:07.039
Not only that, to give themselves permission, but the second thing is that they want validation.
00:24:07.039 --> 00:24:23.255
That, okay, if I do start my own business, if I do go on the journey to try and lose the weight for good again, if I do try to increase my wealth, if I do want to become more spiritually sound, if I want to double down on my marriage, if I want to double down as a parent, am I going to fail?
00:24:23.255 --> 00:24:26.583
Am I going to be a big fat failure once again?
00:24:26.583 --> 00:24:29.881
Right, and so we're out there showing people.
00:24:29.881 --> 00:24:46.919
If you make your life purposefully harder and you operate with a zero deviation mindset and you run over anybody who tries to get in your way, like a freight train, we show others what's possible and in doing so, it gives other people the silent permission to do the same in their life.
00:24:48.711 --> 00:25:05.828
You know we've done, we've done ourselves a real disservice in this country I don't know about the rest of the world in this country not raising our kids to be tougher and and right now we are seeing, we're seeing the results of that and we've had.
00:25:05.828 --> 00:25:18.204
I mean, I can tell you right now I can't, I can't even count how many 20 something year old boys, men, whatever, that can't do a pull up, can't do a push up, that just don't have any grit, any fight.
00:25:18.204 --> 00:25:26.296
And I feel like it's my generation's fault.
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I'm 45 years old.
00:25:27.398 --> 00:25:35.836
I feel like it's our fault, because I know too many kids that are still living at home, who are like 25, 30 years old, have never really experienced in life, have never paid, paid a bill, have never got left their own county.
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