David explains, “In the SEAL Teams you want to get your fundamentals down cold. You need to have a great foundation to build upon in order to do the more advanced skills. So, we really focus on having the fundamentals down and we always revisit them. This turns you into a deliberate thinker versus a reactive thinker.”
A good way to visualize this idea is to think about some of the world’s greatest athletes. You don’t see a hitch in Usain Bolt’s stride when he’s gliding down the track. Great golfers and tennis players use the same smooth mechanics every time they approach the ball. In one of my favorite books on leadership, “The Score Takes Care of Itself,” legendary San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh describes how he drilled the essentials of the West Coast offense into his players until every passing route ran like clockwork.
The best athletes look effortless because they’ve spent hours breaking down every movement to its fundamentals and repeating those fundamentals until they’re smooth, and eventually fast. Great businesses work the same way.
When you slow down and make the effort to master the fundamentals, you can start stacking more advanced strategies on top of your strong base. Stacking leads to momentum. Momentum leads to compounding. And compounding leads to astonishing results.
How do you get better? Practice. That’s why my company, ROL Advisor, places a big emphasis on webinar training, monthly learning hours, and role playing. I know some folks worry that too much prep is going to turn them into a robot. But I’ve found that with preparation comes confidence, and with confidence comes the ability to improvise and personalize your message. As you get better at what Ross Levin calls “the slow things,” like helping clients deal with life transitions, your interpersonal skills will go from slow, to smooth, to fast, to scalable.
2. “Two Is One, One Is None.”
Navy SEALs never send just one helicopter out on a mission. There’s always a second available in case something happens to the first one. Likewise, a SEAL doesn’t pack just one radio in his gear, he always packs two in case the first breaks.
“In the SEAL Teams, we always have backup plans,” David says. “We have contingency plans A, B, and C. ‘What are we going to do if this happens? Where do we go if this happens?’ We walk through a lot of those. These initial contingencies become part of the plan, but we’ll explore other scenarios intellectually, out loud, so that it's embedded in our memory, and we're not surprised then if something happens.”
Imagine how powerful it would be if your client thought of you as the other half of their “two.” How much more would your clients value your services if you were the trusted “backup” to all their major life and financial decisions? A client who comes to you for “contingency plans” in those circumstances is going to be a client for life.
There’s also an important team-building lesson in “Two is one, one is none.” In their training, SEALs drive this home by having recruits perform physically demanding tasks that are impossible solo, like lugging an enormous log. New SEALS learn quickly that they can accomplish much more together than they can separately.