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Warriors Beyond Battle · Your Thoughts Your Reality

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Welcome to your Thoughts, your Reality with Michael Cole, the podcast that shines a compassionate light on the journey of veterans battling through life's challenges.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Michael is a dual elite certified neuro encoding specialist in coaching and keynote training presentations dedicated to guiding military veterans as they navigate the intricate pathways of post-deployment life.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Join him as we delve into the profound realm of neuroencoding science, empowering these brave individuals to conquer universal battles procrastination, self-doubt, fear and more.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Together, let's uncover the strength within you to re-engage with families and society, forging a new path forward.
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: Hello, hello, hello everybody.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: We have our fan favorite, my friend, danny O'Neill, is on today.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: Danny is a US Army veteran who served with distinction and now advocates for veterans' mental health.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: He's a founder of multiple nonprofits that empower veterans through service, connection and purpose.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: He's a motivational speaker.
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: I mean this guy goes and talks to kids and schools.
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: It's fantastic.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: He's a powerful voice with trauma recovery, resilience and post-service identity, pts survivor as well and thriver, may I just add, openly sharing his journey through therapy, darkness and healing.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: And, of course, he's a big person in the community with his Warfighter Overwatch.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: And of course, he has a kinetic ink tattoo and kinetic ink threads and with wife on mother trucker hats Is that right?
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: That's right, mother trucker hat bar yeah it's fantastic man.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: So, um, if we can really quick tech issue fix, um, tell us a little more about yourself that uh, maybe people don't know.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: I know you've been on here multiple times, of course, but uh, share a little more about yourself yeah, first off, thanks for having me back on.
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: Appreciate you.
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: Uh, you know we love you, mike, and it's good to see you again.
• 2:04
  Speaker 3: So I was born and raised right here in Northern California.
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: I was born in Stockton.
• 2:09
  Speaker 3: I graduated high school at Grant High School in Sacramento.
• 2:11
  Speaker 3: I grew up in some rough areas.
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: I had some significant adversity and trauma as a kid and then, on 9-11, I signed up for the Army to be an artilleryman, a fire support specialist.
• 2:25
  Speaker 3: Essentially what I do is go with the infantry and call for bombs when we get in a gunfight.
• 2:29
  Speaker 3: The acronym for our name we have a lot of different names, but fire support team, so they call us FISTERS, which is my favorite thing to tell people.
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: It's hilarious, it gets very funny reactions, but it's a strenuous job and it costs me a lot of my friends.
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: So I have trauma from that and I, you know, struggle trying to build a life back here in the aftermath of the chaos of war, and I think I've done a fairly good job now.
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: So I like to share my experiences with other people.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think your story, you know, I'm just going to say it needs to be a movie at some point.
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: I mean truly, danny.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: I mean you are one of those inspirational stories, you know, and that's why I love having you on here, because you'll share the darkness but you also share the light, and I think that's inspirational.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: It's got chills, man and God bumps, but I think it's so inspirational for our veterans and first responders and their families to know, hey, you know what?
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I can be in the ship, I can be dealing with, as you say, the PTSDs or whatever the case may be, and come out and live.
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: That's right.
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: And thrive, and that's really what we're going to talk about, that resilience.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: Again, we're going to go from the dark to the light, like we always try to do on the show, because that's what we need to show our veterans and first responders, et cetera.
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: So with that said, I mean, can you take us back to the first moment you realized you were no longer at war but still fighting really the battles inside the mind, because that's what you really hear about, right, it's you know, no longer at war but still fighting really the battles inside the mind, because that's that's what you really hear about, right, it's you know what I'm back.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: And a lot of times you don't even know there's okay.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: I'm going to say most of the time from from my work with veterans, you don't, you think you're okay when you first get out, even with all the stuff you went through and guys Danny's been through, he's lost people at war and a lot after because of the mind battle.
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: So tell us kind of that.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: You know, when you realized that difference, hey, shit, something's going on.
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: So I think even at war we joked about it because we had been through so much we joked about he has the.
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: PTSD, which is where you just heard Mike say that's because we joke about it.
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: We joked about it because we had been through so much.
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: We joked about he has the PTSDs, which is where you just heard Mike say that's because we joke about.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: We joked about it.
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: We thought it was, it was our morbid sense of humor, but we were terrified of what was happening to us.
• 4:53
  Speaker 3: We were changing and and I think it felt scary, it was, it was foreign to us.
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: And so I'll tell you, the first moment that I realized something was a little different and I was in survival mode I didn't know necessarily that's what it was, but I realized it was different was when I got off the plane back at Fort Hood, texas.
• 5:13
  Speaker 3: I was in fourth infantry division, uh, just finished a year long deployment where we had lost nine guys.
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: Now I'm a backup one week from getting off that plane, or just four days, essentially, from travel the day we left, november 26, we lost two guys Captain Hamill was the company commander and Captain Frazier was the executive officer of Echo Company.
• 5:35
  Speaker 3: They were our engineers and they were killed hours before we got on a flight.
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: So now all the morale, all the good feelings of I'm going to go home and have a beer and a steak and you know, see my family that evaporated immediately when that happened.
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: We left devastated, and when I got off that plane I had to give up my M4, my weapon that has kept me alive for the last year through hell, and, to be honest with you, even now thinking about that, it was.
• 5:59
  Speaker 3: It was very hard because that felt like my lifeline, and so the good news for me, I suppose, was that the person that I handed that weapon to when I surrendered it, gave it up to go back in the arms room back here in the States, was my soldier.
• 6:14
  Speaker 3: His name's Niewadowski.
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: I called him Niewadomski for six months before someone finally told me I was.
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: We just called him Ski.
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: Most of the time, or Alphabet it's too many letters I give up Too long.
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: Most of the time, or alphabet it's too many letters I give up too long.
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: Didn't read, but ski had gotten hit in the neck one night and um, he has a scar from his ear down to his collarbone.
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: And um, he came back early.
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: He's lucky, he's alive.
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: I hit his artery and um, and he's lucky he's alive, but he was.
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: He was the armor when I got home.
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: Um, they had picked him to first off go notify families when their service member was injured or killed.
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: He had to go do those notifications, which was it's a moment to grow up.
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: Unfortunately, it's something you don't want to do, but there's a lot of at least honor.
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: You're going to be the person who's there telling this family the most devastating news of their life.
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: But he was also our armor, because we knew so much about weapons and things like that.
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: So I gave it to him and at least felt comfortable that I was giving it to my brother and that he would take care of her, you know.
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: But I also felt naked the moment I gave it to him and left.
• 7:11
  Speaker 3: I felt naked.
• 7:12
  Speaker 3: So I had a lot of guns.
• 7:13
  Speaker 3: I immediately started buying guns and ammo.
• 7:15
  Speaker 3: I felt vulnerable and I didn't like that.
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: Right, and that totally makes sense.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: I mean you, that was a part of you, that that was your lifeline, yeah, so that that absolutely makes sense.
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: So you know when, when you, when you got home and and guys, you know I always talk about it there's, you know, for veterans there's there's a, in a sense, generally some kind of a.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: Like he was saying, I'm going to call it a honeymoon period, a celebration period where you go home and you go have that beer and that steak and you're seeing the family and all that stuff, before really kind of reality sets in.
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: Right, yeah, you went through that as well, I assume.
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: I mean I've never heard of somebody not to be honest.
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: So my family wasn't there when I got home and my life was, you know.
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: There was several thousand miles away.
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: My family, you know, was fairly poor.
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: My dad's vietnamese like flying on planes.
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: Dad didn't really get on planes, um, and so well, I'll tell you, it wasn't just a beer and a steak.
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: I didn't go get beer, I went and got the biggest.
• 8:17
  Speaker 3: There's two bottles of of one of whiskey and one of vodka that one of the other guys had requested, and I was a Sergeant, so I had a house off the off the base and we went to my house and we and we drank it all that night and I remember sitting, I couldn't even.
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: It was the only way I was trying to go to sleep and that wasn't happening.
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: So just drink more and drink more.
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: We were kind of celebrating being home but also mourning the death of two guys who had just been killed.
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: Instead of getting, you know, instead of getting their hero home, their family got a knock at the door saying they're never coming home and that was just like it seemed really heavy.
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: Um, and I'll admit, you know, I've done a lot of training to make sure that I have broad shoulders and carry not only my own way, but when other people need it, um, as a leader, it's my job to help them carry their load, and so this was really hard for me to.
• 9:02
  Speaker 3: It just felt overwhelming.
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: But the honeymoon phase it didn't last very long.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and for you it was different.
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: So now that you start talking about that I didn't say that, right, For other soldiers I'm talking about, there's generally a honeymoon phase.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: Your honeymoon phase got ruined.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: My friend it did.
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: Well, it did, but the truth is we saw it everywhere, right, so you go to the clubs with your friends afterwards, cause that is that part.
• 9:29
  Speaker 3: Right, when I go hang out, I'm going to enjoy these freedoms.
• 9:31
  Speaker 3: I just fought for, um, you know, the only part the attachment for us was, and my friends died for.
• 9:36
  Speaker 3: It wasn't just the freedoms that I fought for.
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: My brothers died for this, and so I wanted to enjoy that stuff.
• 9:43
  Speaker 3: But I wasn't doing a very good job of it.
• 9:45
  Speaker 3: Right, I was.
• 9:45
  Speaker 3: I was drinking to, um to cope, and that was much different.
• 9:49
  Speaker 3: I was self-medicating, um, and, and it was affecting my life in various ways.
• 9:53
  Speaker 3: Uh, and, and you know, I had anger seeping out, uh, you know, all the time, and I, just, it was the only emotion I felt comfortable sharing because, you know, I, what I really wanted to do was break down and cry, because I had all this grief and I, we didn't, we didn't grieve and mourn over there when I remember, you know, sarp's KIA days in two days, right, it's always.
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: It's always some Memorial day.
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: Today is the day that Russo died, back here, right, and he was.
• 10:21
  Speaker 3: He ran over the IED that was supposed to kill him.
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: The guy was the trigger man was hitting the button and it started sparking because they just ran it over and broke it.
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: It was the craziest thing ever.
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: They got very lucky and he came home and he was on pain medications and then the VA told me he was a drug addict.
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: So he went to the streets to get him and he ended up dying of an overdose and it's just like what you know.
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: It was unnecessary to me.
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: He survived hell and and now here he is, dying back here.
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: So for me, like the suicides that started, the things that were happening back here fairly quickly, it it first off.
• 10:59
  Speaker 3: That made me feel like we were being that stigma that people talk about with vets.
• 11:03
  Speaker 3: Right, the anger, the alcohol, the violence, the addictions that coincide with little to no coping skills.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: It's just, the military did a very bad job of helping us return home, unfortunately, yeah, and that's why I do what I do, right For my dad, Because my dad same exact thing thing till about a year before he died the the va and I don't want to, I'm not going to, you know, get on this for a long time but, um, the va does, I think, what they can do.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: They do and and the military does a very good job conditioning people to go do what they need to go do, yeah, and stay in the fight because you have to or the person next to you, your brother, dies or sister, dies or her, whatever the case may be.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: But they don't do a great job conditioning on the way out.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: And that's why suicide rates, you see them, but the first 10 years, highest rates, followed by what?
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: The second 10 years, followed by the third 10 years, if they make it that far, you know.
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: So that's why I think your story is so, so important and that's why I really focus on that transition period.
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: When you have a plan, when you have a support system, whether that be family or your buddies from the military or whatever the case may be and there's multiple things I'm not going to get into it it changes the game, but the military doesn't set you up for that and it's better than it was.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: I'll say that it's better than it was, but we got a long way to go.
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: It is, and I have way better care than my dad and the Vietnam generation got Right, nobody spit on me when I came home.
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: Nobody called me a baby killer, called me horrible names, had a parade for us and we had a good time.
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: Right, it was good, they, they, there was pride for my service and unfortunately, my dad's generation didn't get that.
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: But what I will say is you know, I walked into my dad getting ready to commit suicide and, um, and I'm lucky he's still alive, right, uh, his dad, my grandfather, was a world war two that he did commit suicide.
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: Uh, one of my dad got sent to Vietnam and and not just that, but moving forward, for me, I never thought mental health was going to be an issue.
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: I just thought that I was resilient, I was tough.
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: Now I'll say this in my early childhood my mom was a drug addict and my dad had PTSD from Vietnam and his childhood as well.
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: So, when being raised in a split family and trauma on both sides, unfortunately, I lived with my mom in my early childhood and I saw a lot of bad things and experienced a lot of bad things.
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: So there's this study it's called Adverse Childhood Experience Study, aces test, and it was developed by this smart lady over from Berkeley and I took it one day when I was in college, getting my degree in social work, so I could help guys in the aftermath, right, and I got a 10 out of 10 on this thing and it was.
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: It was rough realizing like, um, you know, I think like three of these you're potentially going to die early because you're gonna have chronic disease, heart, you know all kinds of issues, but I don't not that I don't buy into that, but I feel like that's where I do have a little bit of control.
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: I can make myself healthier, I can process some of my trauma right, and going through these things, what I've realized is I'm the one who's in control of my life and the direction that it goes right.
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: And it doesn't mean I'm in control of everything that happens in my life, but I'm in control of how I respond to it, how I let it affect me and my family.
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: Because in the beginning I was a terror to deal with.
• 14:27
  Speaker 3: I could only imagine, like you know before, all the tattoos and all that stuff.
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: I had them, but I was very professional, they were hidden by my shirts and I didn't probably look as crazy as I do now.
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: But what I will say is I acted crazy, right.
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: I looked like a nice person and I I, because I didn't want people to get close to me, because people close to me they die or they hurt me or things like that.
• 14:48
  Speaker 3: So I didn't want any of that and so I did things to what I thought was protecting myself and I was just pushing people away, people who loved me and cared about me, and I was, to be honest, I was an asshole.
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: So I didn't want to be that way anymore, and when I try to take my own life and I woke up, it's just like waking up on the battlefield when you're not dead, you better get up and fight, cause someone's going to try to kill you again.
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: You know, it just might be yourself.
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: So for me it was a hard reality that I was going to have to go through this shit and really unpack Pandora's box of trauma, and that meant, unfortunately, even going through my childhood stuff that I didn't ever talk about.
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: And so it's.
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: It's easy to understand how someone comes home from war.
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: Different, right, but talk about that childhood stuff, man.
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: That was hard for me.
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: Being a warrior was okay for me, being a little kid and vulnerable, was not.
• 15:32
  Speaker 3: I didn't know how to express or articulate that stuff, and I'm, you know, I'm grateful because now, not only have I learned so much from that, but it made me a better parent, made me more engaged with them and make sure that I know cause.
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: I can't protect them from everything, but my job is to try to prepare them from as much of life as possible, and so far I think we're doing a pretty good job.
• 15:50
  Speaker 3: My life is much better than it was when I was in that dark spot, ready to take my own life.
• 15:54
  Speaker 3: You know, when my dad was ready to take his own life, my grandfather was ready to take his own life, and I have family members who have fought in every war since the very beginning from the Revolutionary War, and it wasn't tradition.
• 16:06
  Speaker 3: It wasn't like I was supposed to go do this.
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: My dad was angry when I did it because he knew what that meant for my mental health.
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: But the truth is that if I hadn't gone through that stuff, I wouldn't be who I am today, and I'm grateful for that.
• 16:17
  Speaker 3: I do a lot of things to find gratitude and now I see it more because I pay attention to that stuff.
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: You just said that it's it's why did you give me chills, dude?
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: It's good stuff.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: That's why, because it matters and it, it, it connects.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: You know what I mean so much.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: So many people don't realize.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: And it's, it's the definitions that you give, the experiences.
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: And let's go even with trauma.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: I don't care if it was from a child, I mean, let's call it what it is.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: Most people have trauma somewhere in their life and it's the definition that you give it that changes it from being trauma to being, in a sense, something to learn from or a gift and a gift.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: Sometimes people have a hard time swallowing it until they process it and realize it years later.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: Man, if I didn't go through the crap that I went through, as a kid, as a teenager in my 20s, I mean, let's call it what it is.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: When you look back and you change the belief system and change the we have a table, we have legs on the table with this.
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: It's nice and stable with your belief system, and when you start changing those legs of being a victim or being this or being that or this was horrible and I'm a victim to hey, I learned something from it.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: It's it's actually something that I can help people with and exactly what you do and have done in your life.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: When you can switch that around, the trauma is redefined and it's not trauma anymore.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: Until then, what happens is it keeps spinning in your brain.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: I'm not going to get all scientific here, I'll make this quick, but it keeps spinning in your brain.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: The trauma generally happens once.
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: Now, there are hard cases, obviously, where there's multiple traumas, but the one that you're focusing on generally happens once.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: It's you hanging onto it and not redefining it and it spins around and gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and that's when the problem becomes a bigger problem.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: Kill the monster when it's small.
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: That's exactly right.
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: You know, like, if, if, specifically when I talk, like you mentioned earlier that I go talk to kids because I want them to understand that sometimes life is unfair and it hands you these, these really crappy sandwiches that you don't want to eat, right, but we can't avoid those things and a lot of times that's our response is avoidance Right, or running from these problems.
• 18:37
  Speaker 3: And that's why I love the analogy when people talk about buffalo versus cows.
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: Right, there's this.
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: It's kind of this crazy experience when a storm comes, cows run from it and they continue running and they're tired and they continue running, but the clouds just keep coming in.
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: But the buffalo, on the other hand, turns and faces the clouds and runs through the storm.
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they get soaking wet and their hair gets matty and they freaking, probably stink from being wet and beastly animals, but they get through the storm so much faster because they move into it headfirst and don't run from it, where it continues to chase them and follow them around like this proverbial rain cloud, except in this case it's real when they run through it and they get to the other side.
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: Well, guess what?
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: There's light, there's sunshine, there's a time after the storm and life is going to bring storms, but it also has plenty of sunny days and you know, unless you live in the Pacific Northwest, I happen to live in a place where there's mostly sunny days and when I remember that, my perspective is gratitude.
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: Perspective is gratitude, it's that I have to put hard things in my life now to remain resilient, to remind myself of that warrior spirit that we all have inside of us.
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: Right Like last year, I took 15 guys up half dome and well, 13,.
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: Two of them got to the cables and said I love you, danny, I'm not going up that way anymore and I get it.
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: It can be a scary, daunting task, but putting those things in my life continues to remind me that I am capable of doing hard things and while my life is much easier than it used to be, right than it was at war or even as a child, I still have to continue to do things to keep that resilience and remind myself so I can share that with other people that you know the hard things that we do in life form our character and our resilience and our ability to deal with adversity, because there's always going to be some sort of obstacle or crap in front of us, but how we respond to that really reveals who we are yeah, I, I love so many different nuggets you just dropped in that that was.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: That was absolutely fantastic.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: So so if you were to go back and then we're this is just part of where I want to go into again the light of it.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: Right, you already started us here with.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: We're going to move into resilience now, which is which is really important.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: If you were to go back to your I'm going to say seven year old self because that's about when we stopped believing everything we're told and all of the you can't blah, blah, blah all the crap starts filtering in to start changing our belief systems.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: If you were going to back to say six or seven years old, what would you tell yourself?
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: Now, I didn't mean to go real deep on you, man, I'm sorry.
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: It's pretty simple and I've mentioned this before, but it's stay the course.
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: You don't realize where you're being led to Because we want to be like I said, the only thing I have control over is my life.
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: But sometimes life presents these opportunities or these different pathways and we take them.
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: Now sometimes we realize going down that path is not the right way and we need to correct, self-correct and get back on track.
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: But in the military, as a fister, I'm an expert in land navigation and map reading as well, because I use those maps to call for bombs, grid squares and all that sort of thing to give coordinates.
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: I helped my infantry brothers navigate life after the military.
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: I helped my military brothers navigate life after the military.
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: I wasn't a navigator before, but now not only am I a navigator, but I'm an expert in this stuff.
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: Right, and the government would tell you the same thing.
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: I'm really good at this and I spent a lot of time learning how to do it and walking out in the woods and learning that your pace count changes when you're walking uphill versus downhill or flat terrain.
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: I know how to get around obstacles.
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: Now I know how to figure out my path and I know how to um, how to do these things.
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: That can be if you don't know.
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: It can seem hard, right, but so does so many obstacles in our life.
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: They seem hard until you start chipping away at it, until you start, um, getting good at the things that scared you or made you vulnerable, or that you weren't good at, that you had never tried before.
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: And the only way to get better at those things is practice.
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: Practice doesn't make perfect, it makes better.
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: And we want to practice those things.
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: Whether it's self-care, because that's community care, whether it's, you know, an act of random, act of kindness, it's not random, it's intentional.
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: So do those things.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that, and everybody remember one thing, like Danny said practice you know, doesn't make perfect, it just makes better.
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: Right, repetition is the mother of all skill, right?
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: Build the muscle with these things that you say, oh, that sucks, and I don't want to do it.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: That's right.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: And here's the thing I'm going to say.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: I can't help it.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: I'm a neuroencoder.
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: I have to drop it, celebrate it, pat yourself on the back, shake your butt, smile.
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: It releases all the good hormones and your brain says, oh, I want more of that.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: And it's easier and easier and easier when you celebrate the little things.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: Listen, when you were one years old okay, I don't know age on this, but when you were little, you couldn't tie your shoes.
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: Well, you couldn't tie them at all.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: But guess what?
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: Your parents kept saying good job, good job, not.
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: Oh, you suck, what are you doing?
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: They celebrated you and you kept moving forward and made it something that was important to you until you did do it.
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: Now can you still tie your shoes better, absolutely Right.
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: But just celebrate the little things.
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: Be grateful for the little things, like you said earlier.
• 24:25
  Speaker 3: And we call it crawl, walk, run.
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: This is how we learn to do things as a child we crawl, then we walk, then we run.
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: Now there are a few people who walk first.
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: They literally don't crawl, they get up.
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: But let me tell you a little secret.
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: That's how we do every single thing First we crawl through it, then we walk through it and then we can run.
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: Right, but we can't do.
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: We have to do it in that order.
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: Because you know the way they taught me how to be an expert in land navigation was.
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: I'll tell you right now.
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: I took for granted how often I got to fly around in a helicopter.
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: So, me and the boys, we load up in one of the choppers and they go drop us off somewhere.
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: And then we got to go walk and I would joke with the pilots hey, sir, you mind dropping us off a lot closer?
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: We got 12 clips to walk, you know, and he's just like no way.
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: So they dropped us off and then I got to navigate with my map and compass and get me to where I'm going and I'm just me, but my crew.
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: We have a very important job to do when we get there.
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: So I took that stuff serious.
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: Take your life serious.
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: Be intentional about what you're doing, because life was intentional about trying to kill you.
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: Life was intentional about giving you bad coping skills and trauma and all this crap.
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: It was serious about that stuff.
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: Those are things that stay with you and they gave me, you know, survival issues at times.
• 25:35
  Speaker 3: And I still go to therapy every single week.
• 25:39
  Speaker 3: Right, because this is the best gift I could ever give my family, my community, is to be a better version of myself each and every day.
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: Try to improve a little bit.
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: Right, the building blocks of life aren't these great, far apart rungs, they're closer together.
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: The steps are closer together.
• 25:54
  Speaker 3: You do those small things and it leads to big things.
• 25:56
  Speaker 3: And when I, when I realized, like, trying to overcome PTSD overnight wasn't going to happen, that it was going to be a slow grind I've watched my dad do this for 50 years right, like, excuse me, fuck that, I can do better.
• 26:10
  Speaker 3: I can do better than that and so I'm going to.
• 26:12
  Speaker 3: That means that I'm going to.
• 26:14
  Speaker 3: I'm going to do whatever it takes to win this war.
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: And just because I'm not walking through, you know, kicking down doors and doing raids and stuff like that anymore doesn't mean my fights, and it's just different, but it still requires the same figure, the same intentionality and the same warrior spirit.
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: Amen, she just got kicked off Facebook.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: I'm joking, no, well, it is what it is.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: No, but seriously, what you just said is so important is just keep moving.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: One step, one step, one step.
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: It's when you stop it's a problem.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: Human beings are meant to progress and move forward.
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: They are not meant to stay.
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: And because how many people do you see that are just sitting stuck and happy?
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: So there's this and I've learned this.
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: Unfortunately, I've learned that sometimes people aren't ready for for healing the process.
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: Right, they're not.
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: They want to be, but they're not.
• 27:18
  Speaker 3: And and so you know, there's this I'm going to screw this up, but there's this um quote by hippocrates, and it says um, before you heal someone else, ask that person if they're willing to give up the things that make them sick.
• 27:30
  Speaker 3: And so sometimes we seek those toxic behaviors, relationships, things like that.
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: Cause that's what we know, like you said, with that table.
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: That's what we're comfortable, that's where we're stable, even if it's chaotic.
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: I lived a chaotic life as a kid.
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: That made me great at war, made me crappy at coming home, and so the things that I had to learn um, it was all that stuff was internal.
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: Happiness is an inside job.
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: If I wanted to be happy, it was going to be.
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: It required some stuff from me, right, exactly like your wife just said, the devil, you know you get comfortable with that stuff versus the devil you don't.
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: And and you know if you're a person out there who's struggling with this stuff and you don't like who you are, maybe you're short-tempered, maybe you're um erratic sometimes, maybe you're shut off or closed and avoid things and maybe you know who, who knows how you're dealing with things.
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: But if you don't like that, if you realize that potentially this is stems from trauma, I just want you to know that you, you can overcome this stuff.
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: You can live a great life, that that isn't, doesn't have boundaries, by by trauma right, that doesn't control my life or my behavior, and at one point it did so.
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: I just want you guys to know that.
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: You know if I can do this, you can do this.
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: I love that, and so we're getting low on time and I love that you said that, because it takes us right into resilience.
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: I do, if you have time.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: I'd like to go over just a couple of minutes, if that's okay with you.
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah, let's do it.
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, because I think the value is is huge.
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: You know you talked about the stigma earlier, about you know veterans and drinking and the drugs and you know all those things.
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: Right, let me share something everybody that's listening right now and in the future, on on the podcast forums.
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: It's not veterans get rid of the stigma, it's the human condition.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: That's right.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: It's not veterans Get rid of the stigma, it's the human condition.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: We all stuff too much food in our face.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: When we're trying to mask something, we all drink too much alcohol.
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: When we're trying to mask something Drugs, I mean.
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: You can go down the road with social media and technology and all the different stuff, right, that we get ourselves sidetracked from reality, if you will.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: So the stigma it shouldn't be a military thing, guys, it's a human condition.
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: It really is, yeah.
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: So, with that said, let's move into resilience, right?
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: So what are some of the key things that you do, or people you know?
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: Whatever the case may be, you know what?
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: Not today.
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: I'm getting out of bed, I'm going to go accomplish this and I know you touch base on some of them, but I'd like to know some of the little trick secrets, some of the other things that Danny O'Neill does no-transcript.
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: I go down there and I go kick the crap out of myself and I put adversity in front of me.
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: There's heavy weights.
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: I need to move them.
• 30:46
  Speaker 3: Now, I'm getting old, I'm getting beat up.
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: I don't, I don't lift as heavy as I used to.
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: I don't do.
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: I still do plenty of things to make sure that I'm feeling physically fit, that I'm feeling um.
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: I just think it's so important, right, that it reduces our stress levels, it, it, it boosts our mental health, and so exercise is top of that list.
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: Um.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: It does.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: And let me let me just say this because, again, brain science can't help myself Exactly what you said, because you're releasing the hormones.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: You're releasing and getting having less of the bad hormones, the cortisol and all those things, instead of sitting in bed going oh my God, I can't deal with today.
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: Oh, I hate my boss, I hate this, I all those things.
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: Get up and move, Just just walking changes the game and it's something my clients, it's one of the first things I teach my clients Get out and move, get out in nature.
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: If you can Put your feet in some grass, if you can.
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: But if you can just do that, like Danny said, it changes the game.
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: And I know, danny, you say that you don't work hard.
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: You're not working out as hard as you used to.
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: I've seen the videos, dude, You're always sweating.
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: So don't give me that're not working out as hard as you used to.
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: I've seen the videos, dude, you're always sweating.
• 31:54
  Speaker 3: So don't give me that crap.
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: Well, I work out hard.
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: I just don't lift as much as I used to.
• 31:57
  Speaker 3: My body says that's probably not.
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: I have to have shoulder surgery, right.
• 32:01
  Speaker 3: But this is me taking care of myself.
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: Before I would have just continued to ignore it.
• 32:04
  Speaker 3: And I went to the va and I said, hey, man, something's wrong my shoulder.
• 32:07
  Speaker 3: And they essentially kind of ignored me and it was persistent.
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: So I went back like two and a half months later and they said, all right, we'll send you for an MRI.
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: Well, why didn't you do that when I asked the first time?
• 32:16
  Speaker 3: But they took the MRI and they said you got a torn labrum and partially torn rotator cuff.
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: And I'm like, all right, well, maybe we can do it in the winter.
• 32:25
  Speaker 3: I need to golf more.
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: I got a few things I'm trying to do.
• 32:28
  Speaker 3: You know I'm still that guy, but I am going to take care of myself because that part is important.
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: We always take care of other people and rarely take care of ourselves, and you're number one on this list.
• 32:37
  Speaker 3: When you're on the plane, they tell you to put your mask on before you help someone else.
• 32:40
  Speaker 3: It applies in all facets.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: I love that.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: You said that I was going to say it, so bless you, sir.
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: So I I literally was thinking man, how's he going to golf?
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: You'll figure it out, I will.
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: You'll just work harder to come back from the surgery.
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: That's what we'll do.
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: That's exactly what's going to happen.
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: I'm already, I'm already thinking about it.
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: I already got the bands in there.
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: I'm ready to go and that's the results.
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: Anything else you want to mention about resilience, before we jump off yeah, absolutely.
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: You need to have a support system right.
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: The people around you need to, first off.
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: You need to have people that hold you accountable.
• 33:17
  Speaker 3: When they see you're sucking or having struggles or whatever, they need to know you well enough.
• 33:21
  Speaker 3: You need to have relationships that are intimate enough for people to call you on your crap and make sure that you're doing the right thing, which is taking care of yourself, and so that is part of our resilience is having a support system that, when I'm unable to carry my full load, I can give a little bit to someone else.
• 33:37
  Speaker 3: I can count on these people, and it doesn't have to be a big circle right.
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: Quality over quantity.
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely love it.
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: I think that is super important.
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: And the last thing I just want to add on resilience is literally, you can do it, no, you can do it, no, you can do it, because if you just take that one extra step it doesn't have to be a big step, but just one more step you get closer to where you want to be.
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and resilience doesn't happen when it goes your way.
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: That is very true.
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: That is the ultimate statement right there, my friend, that should be a bumper sticker.
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: I like that, all right.
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: With that said, danny, how do people reach out to you if they want to reach you for public speaking or any of that fun stuff?
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: Or just reach out to Warfighter Overwatch, of course.
• 34:25
  Speaker 3: So our website for Warfighter Overwatch is warfighteroverwatchorg.
• 34:28
  Speaker 3: My email is danny at warfighteroverwatchorg.
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: My email is Danny at warfighteroverwatchorg.
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: You can find us on social media kinetic ink tattoos on Instagram, facebook.
• 34:37
  Speaker 3: Same thing with kinetic threads.
• 34:39
  Speaker 3: Our custom apparel shop.
• 34:40
  Speaker 3: Now we have another trucker hat bar and boutique do custom stuff with that.
• 34:44
  Speaker 3: There's all kinds of I mean I'm literally easy to find.
• 34:48
  Speaker 3: If you spell my last name right, it's O, apostrophe, n, e, e, l, you're going to find me real quick.
• 34:52
  Speaker 3: First name really is Danny.
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: That's my legal name, easy to find.
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: There you go, there you go.
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: Can you give us three tips and it could be something you already said to get veterans and their families further faster, please sir.
• 35:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely.
• 35:05
  Speaker 3: So.
• 35:05
  Speaker 3: First off, like I said, stay the course, right, you don't know where you're going to end up, but if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, you're going to be somewhere different than where you are now.
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: So, um, stay the course.
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: Uh, I gotta.
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: The self-care is so important that, um, you know, I neglected myself, right, I put my team before myself over and over.
• 35:29
  Speaker 3: In fact, I put myself last.
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: I had this thing that said if I asked you to comprise a list of all the things you love, how long would it take you to get to yourself?
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: And at one point the answer was never.
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: I never would have put myself on that list, right, but the truth is, I've learned to love myself and care about myself, and that was so vital for me.
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: Being a good parent, a good spouse, a good neighbor, friend, brother, you name it.
• 35:51
  Speaker 3: It makes us better.
• 35:52
  Speaker 3: So you're the average of the people you surround yourself with.
• 35:57
  Speaker 3: So choose wisely.
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: You have to have these people in your life who are good for you, not just, yes, men or women who always agree with you.
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: And it's just an echo chamber.
• 36:09
  Speaker 3: Now, you need to have diverse ideas and experiences, even when talking about this stuff.
• 36:16
  Speaker 3: These are my experiences, but they're America's stories and so if I don't tell them, nobody will know what happened in Sutter City with the Hounds of Hell, and that's true.
• 36:23
  Speaker 3: But for me it's even more important talking about my struggles and victories in the aftermath.
• 36:30
  Speaker 3: And so I have these people in my life who are saying danny, you're doing god's work, keep doing it, and and it may look different in a year or two, and I'm okay with that I want to be focused on my family more.
• 36:39
  Speaker 3: I want there's things I need to do, but the biggest part of that is surrounding myself.
• 36:43
  Speaker 3: Uh, you know, with the right people amen, man.
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: Um, I'm glad to be one of those people.
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: My friend, I truly am.
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: You are one of the precious people in my life I've got to tell you.
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: Thank you, austin.
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it is so true everything you just said, and we could have a whole other show discussing all of that.
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: You don't want to be the smartest man in the room.
• 37:04
  Speaker 2: You want to be around those people that bring you up, that make you want to be better and learn from, because otherwise you're the smartest one, you never rise.
• 37:17
  Speaker 3: Being a business owner, like multiple businesses, nonprofit that helps people.
• 37:23
  Speaker 3: I couldn't imagine 10 years ago my life being here, because I didn't even want to live right 10, 12 years ago, and so that's why I just want people to stay the course.
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: Listen, it can get better.
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: I promise I can.
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely Take, just take that step, because how often can you look back and go five years ago?
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: If I wouldn't have done that, I wouldn't have helped these people or I wouldn't be here, right, I mean, I could go through.
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: I'm 53, man, I could go through, like all of these different places, and just be like man and everybody's brought, everything has brought me to where I am now, be like man and everything has brought me to where I am now.
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: Thank God, thank you God.
• 37:53
  Speaker 2: With that said man, we are so far over For Danny O'Neill, my dear friend, time and most precious resource we have as human beings.
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: We do not get it back.
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: Thank you for being here, thank you for spending the extra time and thank you for just being you man and just sharing your story, because people need to hear it and I want to be involved in the movie.
• 38:13
  Speaker 3: You got it Appreciate it brother.
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: All right, man, and on that note, everybody we're out of here.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on another insightful journey of your Thoughts your Reality podcast, with your host, michael Cole.
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: We hope the conversation sparked some thoughts that resonate with you.
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: To dive deeper into empowering your thoughts and enhancing your reality, visit empowerperformancestrategiescom.
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: Remember your thoughts shape your reality, so make them count.
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: Until next time, stay inspired and keep creating the reality you desire.
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: Catch you on the next episode.