Does anything happen to me? I take what comes…
-Marcus Aurelius
Transcript
This episode is dedicated to the memory of Wes Doss. Warrior, Leader, and Teacher. My friend and coconspirator. You are missed.
In the Podcast description, the Trailer, Episode 1 and most likely in all things defining this podcast, we talk about creating winning individuals who create winning organizations. In this episode we are going to define and give examples of what winning is and why it is important. In fact, I consider this to be the goal of this podcast…define what it means and create a path on how to win.
Survival. Let us talk about this for a bit. Merriam-Webster defines survival as
a) the act or fact of living or continuing longer than another person or thing, or
b) the continuation of life or existence.
When I think about the word survival, I picture sailors in a little yellow raft, floating in an endless ocean. Doing what they can to, they hope, live long enough to be rescued by someone who happens by. Or plane crash victims in the darkest jungle, sitting around the wreckage, wounded, waiting anxiously for someone to come looking for them.
Have you ever been told, by the experts, what to do if you are attacked by a bear? If not, I will tell you. They say…Lie on your stomach, cover your head, and neck with your arms, and pray. This is survival, wait and hope.
For decades, in law enforcement circles within the United States, and elsewhere, there has been a collection of ideas, training, teachings, labeled as officer survival. These courses are based around the idea that when the absolute worst moments of an officer’s career occur, those when they have been forced into a fight for their life, they need tools, knowledge, and skills to survive. Every officer in the United States takes a course on this topic. Many officers are cycled through these courses annually, or so, throughout their careers.
There is good information being conveyed in these courses, but By the title, psychologically, are these courses setting our officers up for survival? Wait and hope?
My friend, the late Wes Doss, was retired U.S. Army, retired sheriff detective and SWAT commander, and owner of a global military and law enforcement training company. In his expansive career, Wes had been involved in many of those situations where his life was on the line. These incidents prompted Doss to want to bring something more to military and law enforcement personnel than just surviving.
Doss pursued a PhD in Athletic Psychology. He chose this path because the physiological and psychological effects of athletic stress, and of the cognitive drain of competition most closely matches those imparted-on men and women during the stress of life-threatening confrontations.
Win and Winning. Is it different than Survival? Let us talk about this for a bit. Merriam-Webster defines winning as:
1
a) to get possession of by effort or fortune
b) to obtain by work : earn
2
a) to gain in or as if in battle or contest
b) to be the victor in
3
a) to make friendly or favorable to oneself or to one’s cause
b) to induce to accept oneself in marriage
4
a) to reach by expenditure of effort
5
a) to gain the victory in a contest : succeed
6
a) to succeed in arriving at a place or a state
In September of 2005, I was lucky to meet a young woman named Jennifer Fulford-Salvano. A year earlier, the soon-to-be-married Fulford was a 3-year veteran deputy on the Orange County (FL) Sheriff’s Department.
Fla. officer takes 10 rounds to save children, her own life
Editor Lindsay Gebhart
It was shortly before 8 a.m. May 5, 2004. Fulford-Salvano and a trainee were on patrol when they received a suspicious incident call in an adjoining zone. An 8-year-old had called from a cell phone saying that strangers were in the house with his mom. So the two of them headed over to assist the primary responding Deputies.
The initial responding deputies were on the front lawn talking to a female. When Fulford-Salvano walked up, the female started talking to her. Fulford-Salvano assumed it was because the woman felt more comfortable talking to a female officer.
The woman told her there were three men in house and she didn’t know what they wanted or why they were there. She wouldn’t give any more details.
The situation seemed suspicious. The woman gestured toward a two-car garage that had a door open, revealing a gold minivan. Suddenly, the woman started crying, “My babies! My babies!”
Although none of the officers knew it at the time, the woman was hiding something that would later land her in prison. The men had come to take the 341 pounds of marijuana and $60,000 in cash the woman had in her home.
The officers told the woman to wait by the street. The primary unit decided to back off and separate to check out different parts of the house exterior, but Fulford-Salvano, the only officer at the call without children, was worried about the kids.
“I was trying to get to the kids. Everyone else was saying ‘pull back, wait for K-9,'” she said. “But all [the intruders] had to do was put a hand out and put down the garage door.” Fulford-Salvano didn’t know exactly what kind of situation these kids were trapped in, but she knew it wasn’t good and she was gravely concerned for their safety.
She entered the garage through the open door and crouched down on the driver’s side of the van. She could see two-year-old twins but she couldn’t see the little boy who made call. The door handle was locked so she couldn’t get in.
Suddenly she heard male voices and three to four shots from house. Stuck in the garage with no where to go, she hit ground and yelled, ‘Shots fired!’
George Jenkins, came around the back of the garage, positioned himself behind the van and began firing out through the garage toward the street. Then he spotted Fulford-Salvano and began firing directly at her. The deputy returned fire and ducked back behind the van. Jenkins fell against the garage wall.
Fulford-Salvano then heard movement from the front of van. Another man, John Dzibinski, began to fire at her from the hood. She fired back and began oscillating between firing at Jenkins and firing at Dzibinski. She emptied her magazine and reloaded.
“I kept on thinking, ‘I need to keep them away from me,'” she recalled.
The last time she leaned out to fire at Jenkins, she landed a head shot, but not before one of his rounds hit her in the right shoulder. She didn’t notice the injury until she was done firing. With her right, dominate hand out of commission, she picked the gun up with her left hand.
At this point, Dzibinski popped out again from the front of the van and Fulford-Salvano fired, hitting him in the head as well. He would be pulled off life support a week later.
Knowing for sure that Dzibinski was done fighting, but not sure the status of the other gunman, Fulford-Salvano took a minute to check on her own injuries. When she looked at her body she saw blood coming from lots of different places. She knew she needed to concentrate, control her breathing and focus on staying conscious. She had learned what to do to prevent shock, and she didn’t know if the guy in the front was going to come up again.
Unbeknownst to her, Jenkins, who was fatally wounded, had stumbled out into the driveway and collapsed. “We’re all taught that you have to believe you are going to win, not die,” Fulford-Salvano said. “But it is one thing to have someone telling you that, another to hear from someone who had been through it. I remember thinking, ‘This garage is not the last thing I am going to see.’ She said her recent training was the key to her making it out alive.
“[Training in] off-handed shooting really, really helped me. I just reacted,” she said.
In her weak hand development training she held a tennis ball in her strong hand and learned to use her off hand to do everything, including reloading using her shoe or the ground. She said her
” [The incident] felt like a movie, It wasn’t like I was watching it, but it was like, ‘This can’t be happening.”
“All things considered it turned out well,” she said. “Forensics said ten bullets hit me. Three hit my equipment and didn’t injure me.” The other seven did.
None hit her Bulletproof vest.
Juliane’s Story
Christmas Eve, 1971, a 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke fell 10,000 feet into the Peruvian jungle. Strapped into seat 19F. As she fell, she was thinking the trees looked like broccoli.
Prior to finding herself in this predicament, Koepcke was aboard LANSA Flight 508 alongside 86 passengers. After flying into lightning storm, the Lockheed L-188A Electra was struck by a bolt and disintegrated. Juliane remembers, “I was outside, in the open air. I hadn’t left the plane: the plane had left me.”
Post-impact, Koepcke awoke to find she had a broken collarbone and an open wound on her calf. She remembered advice from her father. Go downhill and find water. Rivers can lead to civilization. That’s what she did.
Others had survived the fall too. But they chose to sit tight and wait for rescue. Choosing to wait for rescue proved fatal for them all.
Koepcke on the other hand trudged and sometime swam on. Resting in the heat of the day and travelling in the cooler periods. For 10 days. Enduring leeches, and some nasty bugs the whole way. On day 10+ She came across a hut and took a rest. She awoke in the company of the hut’s inhabitants, three men. They were able to tend to Juliane and get her to a doctor in short order.
Notice that both Fulford-Salvano and Koepcke said the same thing.
Fulford-Salvano- “her recent training was the key to her making it out alive.”
Koepcke- She remembered advice from her father. Go downhill and find water. Rivers can lead to civilization.
Their training is what gave them the power and motivation to continue along the path to win. To Persevere.
I did not start writing this episode with this conclusion. Originally, I was thinking I would use these two events along side a couple others where survival was the goal and the worst possible outcomes were realized, to show the differences between winning and losing. But as I wrote I recognized a pattern within these two wins. Training.
Fulford-Salvano utilized departmental procedure and repeated performance of tactic to keep her gun in the fight and knowledge of shock and how to mitigate its affects to stay alert and aware of the situation.
Koepcke trusted her father’s advice from long before the crash. She trusted the knowledge and went with it.
If we are going to create winning people and organizations. We must be giving our people the tools to do more than survive which can be recognized as buzzwords like quiet quitting and downshifting. This can be seen in mass exits. One goes and many follow. Or more dangerously and more common, your people drift into failure or at best into mediocrity. But that is for next week’s episode.
To grow to a winning organization, you must have a personal definition of what winning is. But to make sure your definition and path align with the organizations needs, we should define winning for the organization first.
Winning for each business varies.
Are you a founder? Is creating environmental change what’s important? Or is it about creating an amazing work environment. Or is it about positively affecting world hunger? Crazy, I know, but is it about creating wealth?
Early founders are eyebrows deep in just trying to get to tomorrow. But leaders of organizations that succeed are looking 10, 15, even 25 years in the future. It is a long game. Buffet and Munger do it. Jobs did it. Bezos is all over it.
So, learning from the winners before us, what does your winning company look like 25 years from now? Got it?
Grab a notebook or your favorite word processor and describe what you see. Where is the company based? Is it fully remote, or do you own a skyscraper in some big city?
How many employees are there?
Have you gone public?
Annual Revenue?
You get the idea. Write all out.
Spend some good quality time on this. From the story you tell you get all your goal building metrics.
Now. Perform what has become known as a pre-mortem. Ask: the business has failed to reach thee goals. Your answers should be a Who, What, When Where, Why and How.
Once you have multiple views of how the goals fail to be reached, you can begin to design systems and culture building capabilities that will drive the organization to the desired end.
That’s fine and dandy you say. But I am just a little cog on a big wheel in the company. I am no founder, What does winning mean to me?
It is the same. We are al leaders at some level. You have influence over some level of work. Do the same thinking and pre-mortem concerning your area or responsibility. This gives you your path and how to reach the desired win.
Now that the organizations path to winning is complete, its time to figure out what a winning you looks like.
You know what the organization needs to make it to its winning self. What can you do to facilitate those things?
What areas did you identify in the organization that will need special skills to obtain? What knowledge or skills do you have that can get the company to reach those goals? What can you learn that gives you what Cal Newport in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You as CAREER CAPITAL. Naval Ravikant in his famous Wealth Creation Tweet Storm, calls this SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE. In other words what can you become that makes yourself indispensable. We will drill into this more in Episode 5.
Now, you have a path of your future in the organization. How you can support the organizational growth and path towards winning. In doing so, you are winning.
The intent of this podcast is to investigate the avenues to winning for both organizations and personally. Fulford-Salvano and Koepcke were given tools, ideas and/or training that allow them to win where others would have only survived, at best. Stay tuned as we explore ideas, identify new questions, and hunt for the best answers.
I am your host, Eddie Killian. And this is the end of Episode Two.
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References
Aurelius, M. (2003). Meditations. New York: Modern Library.
Doss, W. (2003). Train To Win. Fort Mohave: 1st Book Library.
Doss, W. (2007). Condition To Win: Dynamic Techniques for Performance Oriented Mental Conditioning. Park City: Looseleaf Law Publications.
Gonzalez, L. (2008). Everyday Survival. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc.
Gonzalez, L. (2017). Deep Survival. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Merriam-Webster. (2003). Merriam-Webster’s Colligiate Dictionary, 11th ed. Faridabad, India: Thompson Press India Ltd.
Newport, C. (2012). So Good They Can’t Ignore You. New York: Grand Central Publishing.
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