Sky High Leadership with Afterburner

0:00The MasterFill in your corner podcast is brought to you by PhilRoss.com, the home site of MasterFill Industries, books, presentations, virtual training, supplements, and products including the back better bar, strengthen your back and bulletproof your shoulders. The body bell method, the world's only kettlebell, body weight, and dynamic tension system providing continuing education credits for trainers, coaches, doctors of physical therapy and chiropractors. Be sure to check out our new app, MasterFill Kettlebells on the App Store. Thank you for your patronage. Greetings, and welcome to another episode of MasterFill in your corner.

1:11This is episode number 156, and we have a very special guest on today. We have a Christian Boob, Bokakis, can you pronounce your last name so I have it correct? There's a reason I have a nickname Boob, and it's that last name. My last name is Bokousis. Bokousis? Bokousis? Really? Does anyone get it right? I said, I'm fumbling over it, so now Boob is a fighter pilot, and he's the CEO of a company called Afterburner. We're going to get into this whole background and what he's looking to do for people because he does help a lot of people, and that's what we're all about here at the MasterFill in your corner podcast, bringing information and people to the forefront to help people live better longer. I know you said you were located in Park City, Utah. Yeah, I am.

2:11Beautiful. Finally got some snow. It's been a pretty drought. We've been here so far, so yeah, I just joined the view out the window and seeing some white instead of brown for change. Yeah, that's great. We're definitely seeing white here in New Jersey. We're getting... No, you guys are getting hammered. Oh, yeah, yeah. This year we're getting hammered. It seems every five years we get smashed, and you know what's funny is that I see people who work out obviously, I'm in the fitness industry, and it's my wheelhouse, and I see people work out, and then they go out and shovel, and they don't warm up. You warm up before you do every workout, something you do all the time. Why do you not warm up prior to going out and shoveling snow, something you do twice a year? Yeah. And then they hurt their bags, their shoulders, and so forth. So I just made a short public service video, you know, telling people to do one of my warm ups that I have posted online, and I showed them a little warm up, and also I had a shovel

3:11snow properly, because a lot of people bang themselves up with their poor technique as well. It's a whole part of our, you know, my personal practice and the practice in the business, which is humans aren't very good at the thinking before you do. They just get into the doing, and if you think about, you know, how many injuries, mis-spoken words, just how much happens in life, just because you don't stop and think before you act. Yeah, I mean, that is huge. So I'll practice that right now. Okay. I just stop to think. So, you know, being a fire pilot, I mean, there is very little room for our, you know, I've had, I've actually had a few pilots on before I've, and people actually train pilots as well. So could you tell us a little bit about, you know, the training and how precise you have to be, and how this translates to everyday life?

4:11Yeah, it's interesting. When you look at personal development and motivators, you know, people try and use aspiration as a motivator, but in the Air Force, and particularly as a fire pilot, it's the consequence of not pursuing excellence and everything that you do, which is, you don't come home or you hurt someone else. And without, we call it flawless. So afterburner 30 years ago, we created this idea called flawless execution. We've elevated that in a flawless leadership today. But really what flawless means is the acceptance that perfection is unattainable, but we're still going to commit to get as close to perfection as humanly possible. And the only way to do that is to just embrace learning and curiosity. And in our world, if you look at our metrics and the key metric really for a fire pilot, is how many airplanes get shot down before you get shot down at what they call a killer ratio. Some people get uncomfortable with that word, but it is what it is.

5:13And then the other one is, you know, how close to the, to the bombs get on target. And by any measure and any study, we achieve the target 99% of the time, which is a statistic unheard of in any other field, whether it's professional sports, whether it's corporates. And the key, as we said, sort of alluded to it, start the way to be that way is, is to be very structured in your intentionality, not just to be intentional, but to be structured in the way that you transform intention into action. And that for us is the, is the relationship between the three dimensions. We call it a leadership, but it's really humanity, which is the mindset you have as a person. What you do each day that aligns to the mindset, we call that the method. And then how you show up in, in moments of your day, and snow shoveling, for example, is a moment. It's a moment when you're transitioning from one state to another, and then when you shift the moments, you need to shift your mindset and also think, oh, I'm about to do something

6:18else, which isn't what I'm doing now, that requires a shift. And again, you know, shovel snow, it's a great, it's a great metaphor. You shovel snow twice a year, but for the want of five minutes of thinking, you might injure yourself and put yourself through six months of rehabilitation or two months of pain or two weeks where you're, you're a fitness and well-being and health is reduced, just because you didn't invest five minutes of thinking. And that's it. Doesn't require deep thought, you know, come by, sit on a mountain stuff. It's just that hang on a minute, let me just think before I move into this next moment. Yeah. I mean, you're talking about mind, body, spirit, you know, I have to, I have to go to this. Now do you, do you believe in the aspect of being present moment and then the preparation before that? Do you have, I'm going to throw a bunch of questions at you. Yeah.

7:18And how about the mastery of a, of a process? Is it, is it the 10,000 rep rule? And I know you chose, you know, we can't achieve perfection, but we can get as close as possible and do you believe in mastery of a, of a task is essential to success. Depends how you define mastery, I would, I would say there was, there wouldn't be a fighter pilot on earth that says, you ever master the job. It's so complex that the, the, the knowledge that you need to understand is so vast. And when it comes to mastery of anything, there's always a human being doing it, which introduces failure, you know, it introduces links in the chain that any, that a system can't stop. It can mitigate, but it can't, but it can't stop. So, you know, I think, let's, let's use the system where fighter pilots get as close to perfect as possible. Yes.

8:19One of the key, key philosophies here is, as a fighter pilot, you, you're 100% committed and invested in what you can control. So, if there's something that doesn't require any external input, you should be able to master that. And a simple example might be the way that we memorize our checklists. So, the way in which we get to an aeroplane, we check the outside, make sure there's no kind of wasps or insects in there and there's no birds, there's no damage from the previous flight to climbing up the ladder, hopping in the aeroplane, doing your pre-flight systems checks, getting the aeroplane started to the runway, take off, out to the area, fight the jet, turn the jet off, come back down the hill into the circuit, land it, turn it off, make sure it put it to bed properly. You know, there's, there's around 300 items that we memorize from one to 300 and you have to do it in the right order and you can't miss one. And so, as part of your training, that's not even baked into the training course.

9:19That's the bit where they say, if you want to be a fighter pilot, you're going to do the extra reps at home. You're going to be sitting at night time in front of a cardboard mock-up of the cockpit and you are going to in that six weeks memorize every single checklist item and you can't forget one. And that, what it really highlights is, no matter what you do in life, they're a fundamental basics. I mean, if you look at it in the health of fitness space, it's your supplements regime, it's your rest, it's your loading, it's the things that you can invest before you start lifting or start really doing anything. And you know, I have a problem with exercise because I have an autoimmune disease. So for me, I get a double whammy, I exercise, it's uncomfortable and then when I come home, the inflammatory response to muscle repair creates a arthritis in me. So I get quite sick in the stomach and I don't feel well.

10:23So part of the intentionality for me is to understand, because for a long time, I just wouldn't exercise because very well, I just flop around, but understanding that that's just my paradigm. There's nothing I can control about that and you've got two options to not exercise and not be sick, but not be well or be well exercised and accept that, you know, you're going to feel a bit, you know, the word we use as crook, you feel like crook, you feel it. And that is what it is. So that there then becomes a mindset that shapes the method that you use. But when I go to classes, you'd be, so many people just rock up like two minutes late, they just, they're just flop in there and there's no intention at all. And that's fine. But if you don't bring intention to that, an intention we define as the intention is the story, the destination is the detail. So if your intention is to go and exercise to what end, like what does it look like at

11:25the end of the 45 minutes or an hour, what does that look like? And that intentionality drives so much more value per second. And as a fighter pilot, we live in seconds and minutes, we don't live in days and weeks. So you realize that, you know, to optimize a second, you have to define an hour. You have to define a minute. And seconds and minutes are what you can control and invest in hours, days, weeks. That's when the unknown starts to creep in. But if you don't, if you don't invest in the seconds and minutes, the amount that you deal with on a daily basis is so much higher. So much higher. So it's as a fighter pilot, you know, you just before you say I'm about to expense effort, I'm about to do something. I've got to know why. I got to know why and I've got to be able to define that it's finished, that something has been achieved. And that's a great opportunity for humanity. We don't think in terms of achieve. We think in terms of do. That's a great point.

12:27You know, you really seem to be in on that present moment, you know, that breaking things into seconds, minutes, hours, so forth, because that's where we need to live. You know, and my estimation for too many people think outside of that. They're not thinking they're not engaged in what they're doing presently. And I define presence as another layer. You can be present in that you exist in a moment, or you can be present in that you're aware of a moment. And they're two very different ways of showing up as a person. And we have this concept of situational awareness as a fighter pilot where your job is to be aware of your situation at all times. And when being aware of your situation doesn't mean you know everything, it's being aware that in fact, I don't know everything. And I'm missing some information and I need to ask a question. Again, you look at it in a fitness setting, you know, you'll go to the gym and you'll

13:30see somebody, you know, on the cables and their techniques, and they're not aware of it. And they're not curious enough to ask, is this right? They're just doing it. They're just going through the motions. So that to me, that's not presence. That's just existing. You're not present if you're not aware. And you're not aware if you don't define what you're trying to achieve. Am I doing a cable press because I'm doing a cable press? Or am I doing a cable press with correct technique? They're two different levels of awareness. Yes. You need to know the reason behind it because it adds more meaning to what you're doing. Yeah. So, and then you lay a fear, right? Yeah. Again, fitness is a great metaphor for business. You're afraid to ask someone, am I doing it right? You don't want to look like an idiot. And all of that is just your self-talk. As a fighter pilot, if you don't know something or you're not aware, you're immediately asked for help because you'll have an accident if you don't.

14:32So you're kind of override. And I'm, you know, we're all human. I have the same thing. Like I always feel like an idiot if I have to ask for help. That's my initial response. Like, I should know. But then I've got to remember, well, you shouldn't know because you can't know everything. So ask a question. That's a great way to approach it. You're also part of something else and I want to see if I want to share this with people about, we have goals. Now, how about the, it seems like you're focused on the process goals, I'm supposed to more of the outcome. So, you know, and how important is a process goal to achieving an outcome goal? Yeah. Well, first of all, goals in themselves don't sit you up for success because humanity has become very conditioned to the idea that a goal is nice to achieve. Yeah, I don't have to get there, which is why we think in terms of destinations and objectives. Okay. You don't get on an airliner and the captain says, hey, today our goal is to get to New York.

15:35Right. If they said that, they'd be like, whoa, I'm getting off this airplane. They call it a destination. So again, when you bring intentionality and you're being present and awareness, you won't be aware if you don't know where you need to arrive. If it's just a goal, you know, we know that, you know, I had a goal, didn't get there. Is what it is. Yeah. My kids play football, they score a goal, but they still lose the game. So, there's a whole bunch of cognitive biases around that word goal. So, and, you know, I, I could see him a lot of personal development stuff. And you've got half the people saying you shouldn't be goal-oriented. You should be focused on the process and other people saying it's all about the goal and the aspiration and the process will look after itself. It's both like that. That's the answer. It's yes. The answer is yes. Yeah. Exactly. But you don't, you should never say, you know, focus on the journey and you'll get to the goal because it's, unfortunately, it's just not how the brain works. Like, you need to know where you're going. Like, at a human level, when people say start with why or what's my purpose, you know,

16:40you don't have to have, you don't have to have a sense of personal purpose and everything that you do. You know, that everything you do has some sort of purpose. Like, if I, if I drive the car, the purpose of driving the car is to get somewhere. Like, it's not, oh, what's the purpose? Yeah. And, and we just, it's human nature. There's this massive disconnect between the big dreams, the big aspirations, and what do I do in the next second minute and hour to get there? That's what firefighters do really well. We've got to win the war. Yep. That's a given. That's a nice goal. We're not going to do it unless we fly 2,000 missions and we win 99% of them. And then let's break down each mission. And if you look at the way the world of a fire pilot, like if, if you were in a gym, and that was a, the world of fire pilots, let's say, there's a hundred people in the gym, there's a hundred squadrons around the world. Every morning you come to work and everything's mapped out. Here's your mission objective, here's the time the airplanes will be available. You work out the details and how you're going to do it.

17:41You've got to, and that coordinates every fighter pilot on the whole planet. That's what happens. It's created in the big headquarters in Hawaii, the big headquarters in, in the UAE. And that's the, that's the level of focus we bring to execution towards the big goal. We'll just all show up and then go fly our planes because of the plane. Right. You have no real destinations. You just go aimlessly. Yeah. Whatever. I'm wasting a lot of time and energy. Something, something that's coming to mind, you know, when people talk about, and I've made many mistakes in my life, and, you know, when, you know, let's just take, for example, I coach wrestling, kids make mistakes, you know, and I tell them, don't be afraid to make mistakes. You know, just go for it, try things out, solve it, and so on. It's a learning process. The thing is that with, with what you do as a fighter pilot, there really is little to no room for error. The stakes are very, very high, almost like Miyadomusashi as a, you know,

18:44book of five rings as a samurai warrior, not too much room for error. You mess up, you'll lose your head. Yeah. You mess up up in the air, you will come, you may come down in pieces if you come down at all. So, you know, so tell us what, some of the differences between, you know, when you're doing a typical sport or even a business, and what you've had to endure, and how your program relates to that. Yeah, well, first of all, in the fighter pilot community, we, those words don't even exist. We, we don't have the word mistake. We don't have the word failure. They're just, the only thing that, where we have the word failure, is if a system on the aircraft is broken, it'll say failure. But from the human side, we do good things and we do other things. So we call everything that wasn't the plan, others. So if you start, because they're always going to be there, it's humanly, others, others is just what happened with the unknown stuff in life, and unknown stuff in the mission, and how was our decision making around that?

19:46Was it good? Was it not so good? And we have a philosophy where, if it's really bad, just turn around and go home, like, abort, like don't, there's always a, there's always a positive decision to make, to survive. So I think the reality is, because life is perpetually moving forward, and everything in the future is unpredictable, so how can you not make mistakes? It's, it's impossible. Like it's, it's, it's just unexpected stuff's going to happen, and sometimes you're going to make a good decision and sometimes you aren't. I mean, that's, that's what it comes down to. It's the decision. It's not what you do. It's not what you did. It's the decision you made that put the doing into action. And again, in the world of fighter pilots, we invest a lot of time in, in the decision point, the point at which a pilot makes a decision. And you try and dial down as many of the unknowns as humanly possible. But, you know, you, you know, you know, most of the things that are going to happen

20:46or could happen, which means when something, a bit like Sherlock Holmes and the way that he comes to a conclusion through deduction, if you've got a whole framework of, well, it's not these 10 things. It's this thing I can make a better decision rather than, oh, my gosh, which one of these 10 things is it? Yeah. You know, so it's, and again, it just comes, again, it's all about shifting from existence to awareness. Just existence is the safe space where you only react like that's, that's the world that most of us live in and, and because we react, we've always got an excuse because it was, was out of my control. Whereas in the world of fighter pilots, it's like, well, there are no excuses. There's just stuff that happens and how you deal with it. And if you deal with it well, or you don't deal with it well, that's cool. We'll just, well, let's sit down and talk about that. Let's learn from it. And that learning experience helps you over time, you know, you just, you just get better and better at making decisions. Your, your awareness is, is better and better because you're, if you don't reflect,

21:49if you don't, bring a cognitive step to learning, you'll forget it within seven days, like a ebbinghausen, back in the 1800s, ebbinghausen, create, discovered this, or define this idea of the forget curve in that you, you forget, wrap, you forget very quickly until seven days, you remember about five percent. And they, they just tested that study again five years ago, and it's the same. So the life is not life is the same as studying to become a psychologist. It's just, you don't have a textbook, but you can still learn. You know, there's no quizzes, but you can still learn. So, so we have the practice of debriefing as phytopilot. So a debrief is a ritual after every single mission and the philosophy we bring to debriefing is it's more important than the mission itself, even if the flight is canceled or the mission is canceled, we'll still debrief. What, what did we learn about the planning process? What did we learn about the reason why it was canceled today?

22:52What, what, you know, what did we learn about the world that we can't control, that we can lock in one day, and it might happen again, and we can make a better decision. So it's, it's that intentionality that's important, and it becomes a way of thinking. So for me, you know, when I work out at the, I'm debriefing after every rep of debriefing, oh man, that, that was okay. That should have been eight reps on my third set, and it was seven. Let's go back. What was the, what did I have for dinner last night? Is it an energy thing? Is it a technique thing? You know, hey, get one of the folks working in the gym. Can you just watch and spot me on this one, make, because something's happened that I'm not, I did that two days ago, and it's not, it's not not happening for no reason. Whereas most people just say, oh, it's just, just got seven reps instead eight. Oh, it is what it is, and nothing is what it is. It is what it is for a reason. Yep, absolutely. You know, it's got, you brought up so many, so many important things here,

23:57and there's one thing I want to, I want to ask you, many people may not know about this. I mean, they may not have heard this, but I've listened to pilots account on a black box. And like when things go wrong, and the thing that impressed me, especially with the fighter pilots, and how chill they are, how cool they are. Okay, tried this, didn't work, tried that, didn't work, and they go through their checklist of all the possibilities of what could be going wrong. And you know, either they have to eject, or whatever's going to happen, or they straighten it out and find out what the issue was. But, you know, one thing comes to mind, a cooler heads prevail. And, and how, how is that brought about? How do you guys bring that about that cool presence that, that thinking that going through logical sequencing? How is that achieved? Well, first of all, you've got to put your emotion in a box, right? So that's, you've got to,

24:59you've got to stop the amygdala hijack, where all of a sudden, all the blood drains from your brain, goes into the fight, flight, or freeze, you know, extremities. And your brain doesn't have the processing power or cognitive bandwidth to make, to make good decisions. So the first thing that happens is, you know, we say sit on your hands. Something, something's gone wrong. Sit on your hands. Or if it's really bad, we have just a few items that we consider, we call them boldface. Like, you must always know that when you see this light, or this happens, you follow, and that's, that's when the airplane catches fire or loses an engine, you know, but everything else, it's not that engine. It's, you can, you can work it out. But if you jump in and start doing before the thinking, you, statistically, generally, it makes it worse. There's plenty of examples in aviation, where an airline, it takes off, it has a problem with the left engine and the pilots accidentally turn the right engine off. Because they're not, they're not thinking. So there's, there's all of these little steps. And a check, all a checklist is, is, it says, it's the deduction again. It's like most of the time

26:02this works. And when you look at a fighter pilot checklist, it literally goes, Dada, Dada, Dada, what's happening now? Go to page, there's a little bit like choose your own adventure. And you start to get to the point where it's like, well, everything that we know about, it's not that, it's something else. And then you go and you get on the radio and you speak to the operations room, they might speak to Boeing. But at least everyone knows, have you done the checklist? Yes. All right. Well, it's not, it's not those 35 things then. So we don't, you know what I mean, that's acceleration of execution. And, and we do that a lot in business. We'll come in there. They'll have a crisis and they'll put a hundred people on the phone. And it's like, did anyone just turn it on and off yet? Oh, well, that's a checklist, Dada. And you, you build checklists for companies with, with really, really basic stuff. So if you're kind of just called a time out, I've just got to turn a fan off. It's really annoying me once, one second. Thanks. Appreciate it. Yeah. So checklists, it's, it's really funny. We work with organizations

27:05and they're like, oh, you guys are too structured. We need to be creative. We need to be, you know, fast on our feet. And I'm like, well, you're not going to be fast on your feet and you're not going to adapt quickly if you don't have the basics done. And when everyone's sitting there trying to figure out, what does this button do? Who do we speak to? What's this process? Why isn't it working? How do I put the data in? And that's, you know, I will tell you that is so essential. You know, your company has planned, brief, execute debrief. I ran, I used to run big events. You know, MMA events, wrestling, so forth. And after every event, I'd sit down right away and write down everything I need to improve on. Yeah. Go through my checklist. And then when I had, you know, when I used to run like my class, especially when you're running kids' classes, you can't have any downtime. You lose them. So I had everything was put where it needed to be put. So I didn't have to think I just grab it, pull it out, boom, and go to the next thing. And, you know, for business, if you want to move fast, you want to be creative, you have to have all

28:07these in place. You have to have the structure to enable you to perform at the level you need to. Always. It's, you said something there that's really important. Straight away, I would sit down and think what I needed to learn from that experience. And that's a critical part of debriefing. It's straight after the mission. Even one day later, it's too late. One day afterwards, your brain, your memories have shifted. And they always shift towards, it's not your fault, right? That's where, and I think there's some primal programming there. Otherwise, we'd get so down in the dumps with all the stuff that we screwed up in a day. I think, I think we have this, you know, that optimism bias that drives us into. Oh, it's a good day. Yesterday, you know, that that reflection also feel you'll be aware is, let's see, you know, when people experience an event, they don't see all the stuff you see, right? And as far as they could say, and that was great. And you're sitting there saying, damn, we were like seconds away from that being an absolute disaster. And, and, and, and, and this is why organizations rely on talent because that's

29:16happening all the time. And you need the quick thinking person that just manages to pull it all together. Yeah, that's not what you want as a fighter pilot. You want the minimum number of those events. But what it does is if you just walk away from that without reflection, it doesn't feel very good. You feel like, no, that was a total disaster. But when you bring the reflection and you learn and you come up with a bunch of new ideas to do next time, it actually releases dopamine oxytocin serotonin endorphins. And, and you take a situation that wasn't great and turn it into something that feels pretty good because isn't this exciting that we can do all this next time? Yeah, that's, that's, that's also what attracts people to this type of thing. And I do this with my personal trainers because, you know, one of the things about personal training, I think, is, is they're always worried about losing a client, right? And as a result of that, they're, I feel that they're always overly nice and, and offering false praise. And there was this really interesting study

30:20that came out that said 69% of people prefer constructive criticism than meaningless praise. And I always say to my trainers, I'm like, look, at the end of the session, yep, great, good work out. That's, that's fine. But let's look at the stuff that that we can learn from for next time. Just recap it, you know, recap the posture of the deadlift at the end. Go, go back over there and just rehearse it again. So next time, the muscle memory is a little bit tighter. But, but if you don't do that, you'll experience what psychologists call behavioral regression. And you'll just regress to what you did last time because you didn't, you haven't reprogrammed the brain with the new piece of learning. And even that 10,000 hours of practice, you can do it in about 5,000 if you debrief. Because the debrief is the mental exercise for the activity. You're practicing. Reinforces the learning. Yeah, you're practicing when you're debriefing. You know, one of the things

31:20I've, that helped out a lot was the quality, sandwich correction. So you give, especially with kids, yeah, let's say they're doing a kick. Nice kick. Just need to turn your foot on the floor. You do that is going to be perfect. Yeah. So something like that where you're giving them, you're giving them the correction, which also give them the compliments. So you can kind of mold them then they don't feel like they're doing terrible, but they feel like there's hope for them to get better. Yeah, again, we have structure for that. We call it the teacher demo do model. If you want to do something new or you want to improve something, you know, like teaching isn't a one time thing like, like you could teach someone a forehand in tennis, but then coach them. And this is where coaches get lost a little bit. It's like sometimes you're in the coaching, but you've got to go back to the learning. You're coaching a skill that still hasn't, that still hasn't cognitively taken hold yet. And you're, you're trying to improve something

32:21where the baseline still not set. So in that scenario, you'd, you would say, you know, you'd see a kid who's not applying the technique. You would, you would teach it again and go, okay, this is the, what we're looking at doing. This is what it should feel like. You demonstrate it. This is the right foot placement. Boom. And then they do it. And then when they do it, you run, do you, okay, is it a teach demo or another demonstration? And that's really how people learn you, you, you want to hear a concept. You want to see it in practice. And then you want to give it a try. But that bit about giving it a try, that's where debriefing has to hit. Because it's the, it's the actual stuff you're doing, not the stuff you're learning. It's the doing part that tells a coach or an individual, do I not know or I do know, and I'm just applying it incorrectly. And after better, when we, you know, we worked with the NFL for six years, because the first NFL team we ever worked with in York Jones won the Super Bowl. And there's nothing on paper

33:23that says that should happen. And they are still today, the only NFL team to win the Super Bowl that had more points scored against them than they want than they scored themselves. But they picked it the right time. They just learn and learn and learn and learn and learn. And the peak of the learning curve hit during the playoffs and the Super Bowl. Yes. Yeah. I worked with a couple of those guys two down in the Giants facility. I'll tell you, Eli was a great guy. He was just like very magnanimous. It was good. And it was the Manning Brothers. That was the difference. We worked with 19 teams. But the only two teams that won the Super Bowl were the Manning Brothers. And they were the ones that, as the leaders of the team, committed to the process. And we kicked the coaches out of the room. We said to the coaches, don't teach, don't coach, let them figure it out for themselves. Then once they've done that, come back in and see where

34:24the what they figured out themselves was wrong or right. But at least when they've gone through the process of figuring it out for themselves, they're firing the right neural pathways that other pathways to learning, which is learning yourself and doing yourself as opposed from the passive structures, which is just listening and being told what to do. That's not learning. That is just wasted oxygen. Yeah. You don't want someone just regurgitating. You want them to process the information, formulate it and apply it to the task at hand or to their job. Yeah. Yeah. So now let's go through the process. So let's say a company says, boo, I want you and your team coming in. I want you guys from Ashton Berner coming in here. We have Lacka Moral. We have a lack of performance. There's 150 people in our organization. There's five layers. How do we do that? What's the process for you? Well, again, it's the simplest question to ask anyone.

35:28What are you trying to achieve? What are you trying to achieve? Nine times out of 10. No one really knows. It's just a little bit better than last year, $50 million in revenue. It's like, okay, that's their fuel gauges. That's not achievement. That's just mapping out how you're going. What are you trying to achieve? People don't know. If they do know on the rare case, let's take the one out of 10 that they do have a good strategy and they are aware. So if you're in let's say supplement space, and this is what happens when companies start entrepreneurial, they actually create supplements to help people perform better. But then all of a sudden, they become corporate. It becomes, oh, let's sell a hundred million bucks for the supplements. And they wonder why people are disconnected because they came on board to help people. Now they're chasing money and they don't get any of the money. That's just what you want. So we'll say to the

36:30first of all, let's create the destination, head, heart, and soul. We've got to get those organized or bought mind, body, soul, feelings, thoughts, actions, whatever you want. So let's get the narrative down. Once you've done that, everyone in the person, every person in the company has to be able to answer that same question. What are you trying to achieve? How do you know whether you've achieved it? Who were you dependent on? And we call it the clear, measurable, achievable test. Is what you're trying to achieve clear? Is it plain language? Has it been tested with other people? Have you read teams it? That makes it achievable. And does it have a number? So you know how you're going. And if you, and is it aligned to everyone else? Does it line up to what? Yeah, because there's no, there's no supreme commander or leader in an organization, right? Everyone is, yeah, you might be at the front line supervising a warehouse. And you might feel like the CEO is the supreme commander, but he has a board and the board has shareholders. So it all, what goes around comes around. And that's when you start

37:32to see a flawless company when the shareholder aspirations are aligned to the board level strategy that are implemented at the CEOs level all the way down to the forklift driver. And everyone can say, hey, this is what I do to achieve this value for the people that we're part of this complex organization. So do you ever have to establish or help people decipher what their value prop is in order? We have to, I run through that process all the time. I know all of this stuff and I educate on this stuff, but my natural humaneness is to forget it all and just wake up and exist like that. So I have to bring my own intentionality back and and say, hey, look, you know, the good ideas factory is running hot here, but where's the production of the product factory? How's that going? So it's just normal default human behavior, which is why for me, I want to sit down in the morning, I have to reconnect to what are the three things we committed to at the end of the quarter?

38:35What are the three things this month that we agreed would deliver that? What is it this week and what is it today? And that's how I just quietened down the noise and stopped doing stuff. That's not really adding value where I want to do it. And I'm the CEO. So, you know, technically I could do whatever I want. But I and most of us get into business to because that's what we want. But then you realize, oh, it's the complete opposite. Like you have to be the one that sets the example, does the work shows up early? You know, it's the grind. So and I think the, you know, the challenge in corporate is people confuse leadership with control. Like they want to be promoted to be in control of more stuff because that's a safety blanket. Rather than, oh, I have more I need to give now because I have bigger problems and I have more people. I've got to, I've got to do the heavy lifting of how do I make really complex stuff that needs lots of words to explain and turn that

39:37into a punchline. So it just, it just kind of, it kind of shifts. And when we work with large organizations, you know, we say to the leaders, 80% of your work should be strategy and 20% doing stuff. And it's always the other way around. But it's just 80% putting out fires and 20% right, what are we trying to do again? Yeah, you know, it's funny when you talk about putting out fires. You know, if you look at the different quadrants that we, that we live in, you know, urgent, important, important, but not urgent. And then, you know, some things are not important and urgent and then other things are not important and not urgent. You know, where do you, where do you strive to get these corporations to primarily live? If you are going to break up those quadrants, everything is a perception. So 95% of everything that we see or feel is through our

40:39own eyes. So perceived urgency, perceived priority. And, and things only become urgent when they're unexpected, which means you haven't planned it. In the cockpit of a fighter jet, there's very rarely is there urgency or what are we going to do now? What's the priority? Like it's, you just, you just know what's going to happen. And oh, there's a missile we weren't expecting. I've got loads of brain capacity to deal with that now. So, you know, you should be able to stabilize 60 to 70% of a business. It should be pretty stable. But most of that 60% is firefighting the fires that we've started ourselves. It's, it's someone who didn't do something because they weren't listening. It's 10 people that put in a massive amount of effort, but the leader didn't articulate the destination well enough. So they put all the effort into the wrong things. And particularly,

41:41we see this in technology all the time. So the business says, hey, technology, we need a tool where people can pay their bills. And you've got 10 people in a room. Those 10 people have their own experiences with paying bills. So they build the technology based on what they think paying a bill is. And then they go to the business. And they're like, here you go. And the business is like, oh, no, not those sort of, no, not payables. We're talking about credit card bills or we're talking about, uh, uh, government, uh, playing, uh, and it's okay now. And then you waste a whole another week because no one invested the 30 minutes to plan. And that's what we meet. Look, if you think, when you say plan, brief, execute, debrief, it's just a fire pilot way of saying stop and think, put all the people in the room who are going to be affected by what you're about to do. And hash out together what good looks like for you collectively and individually. Briefing is not transmission. It's the opposite. It's listening. So when we talk about a fire pilot brief, what a

42:41fire pilot brief is it's to say, right, here's the mission. I'm going to speak through everything that we know. And then I'm going to ask lots of questions of you to make sure you understand it. So briefing is comprehension, not transmission. And then execution is just do it. Like, like, just, just do it. You should have asked your questions in the brief. You should have been involved in the planning. So there should be no reason for you to now, uh, need to have a conversation. The challenge at the moment is because everyone's not 100% sure what I need to be listening to because everything is a priority and there's 60 million things coming on. So I don't actually know whether I have to do it till I get in trouble. And then when you talk about the triage of what is important, that's what the debrief is for. The debrief is where you're asking yourself, where are we trying to go? Where are we right now relative to that? Why is there a gap? And what do we need to do about it? Uh, and because humanity is biased towards thinking, everything is a lot easier than than it actually is. And I need less resources than most of the time we fall short. Like most of the

43:42time we fall short on our fitness goals, our life goals, uh, we, we over commit, we buy a property that's beyond our financial means and we spend the next 10 years surviving while we pay the mortgage. Like we don't, we don't go, oh, big aspiration. What does that mean? What does it mean for me today? Or all the opposite is true. If I put $50 in an interest bearing account today, and I do that every Monday, what does that mean in 60 years? Uh, we just have this total, humanity doesn't do it very well. Like, I have ADHD and there's this great book called ADHD2.0. And it talks about human beings only understand two states of mind now or later. Uh, we don't, we don't define later as anything that other than I'm just not going to do it now. Yeah. So, you know, whereas the fighter pilot, you know, I'm doing this debrief, so my mission tomorrow is better. It's time down. And, and the next event is also, uh, clearly defined. So now, uh, this is, it's going to be kind of an

44:45ambiguous question, but I just feel compelled to ask it. Um, because you brought something up before about how people start with, let's say they're doing the supplement company and they want to help people, you know, be healthier, live better longer. That's my one of my sayings, live better longer. So they get so big though that they start losing sight of their initial goal and they start chasing the dollar and chasing the dollar only. Do you see, um, how can people avoid getting to that point? And when they get to that point, how can we bring them back? And how does afterburner address that? You need to, so we called the, we called it the three moments people leadership, impact leadership and leading now. So when you're talking about people leadership, that's, that's the human connection. That's, that's the, we're doing this for a human reason, for humanity, right? Uh, and every day you've got to connect at these three levels with your people.

45:47Leading impact is all the numbers. Like you, you've got to make an impact. The only way you make an impact is to hit a target. The only way to hit a target is have a target. Uh, so we help them define all of those, you know, what to achieve and then what to do to achieve it. And then leading is in the now is when it both comes together where you've got to make a decision. Uh, and the decision is a difficult one. And you need to make the decision guided by the values of the organization. Uh, and that's why organizations often fail because people make short-term financial decisions rather than long-term human decisions. And you start chasing the dollar. Like, the minute the whole company starts chasing the dollar, you lose 50% of the motivation and the effort. Reconnect them to helping humanity. You unlock all the effort again and you get, you get more done. So it's, and it's, it's intentionality around that. So if you're, if your job is, if your vision is living better for longer, then there's one session a week, which is all about living

46:48better longer. Uh, I had a client, spec savers. Uh, and in the United Kingdom and Australia, they're the biggest provider of, you know, prescription glasses, um, spectacles. And they have a slogan, better life through better sight. Okay. So we came in and we worked with them and they had, had, had sales eroding and they wanted a performance framework. So we came in and we, you know, what we saw was a lot of better sight. Like, like, the whole systems engineered towards getting people in, giving them an eye test, getting their prescription, sending them out by one, get one free, you know, yada yada yada. It was all about better sight. And, and we said to them, show us, just give us an example of a conversation that's better life in this, in the store. What's a better life conversation? It's like crickets. It's like, and there's this assumption that the site equals the better life. So we flipped it on the head and we said, let's have conversations when people walk in around what a better life looks like for them. And that's not, don't say what is a

47:50better life look for you. Just connect them at the personal level. Hey, what, what, what brings you in the store? What do you do? And then we have this story called the, the truck driver that had a garden. And truck driver came into the store and one of the girls in the, in the store front said, what brings you in? What do you do? And he says, oh, I'm thinking about getting some new glasses. I'm a truck driver. And I said, oh, cool, we're a truck driver. What do you do when you're not driving trucks? I'm a gardener. Awesome. And she said, hmm, looked at these glasses and like, do you use those glasses for gardening or for driving? And you said, both. And she said, when you bend over, do you have to hold your glasses on to all the time? I'm sweaty. My glasses are, they're always falling off because I'm looking down. And she said, you know, what, what if we look, we've got to like a buy one 50% off the second pair today? What if we got you into a pair of light frame glasses for the gardening? And, and we got you a new set for your truck driver? Would that be good? He's like, oh, yeah. And if they fall off your face, come back in. Just come back in and we'll fix that.

48:53So all of a sudden, I went from someone coming in to get a new pair of glasses for driving to two sets of two sets of glasses, someone feeling like people care about them. And you know, that, that truck driver will come back. Oh, yeah, 100%. Yeah, that, you know, that was a great way to make that connection because you actually made that person's life better. Yeah. And, you know, and I said all the time in the, in the, in the personal training space and I ping my trainers. I'm like, you haven't asked me today at all. Like what, what is this session in service to for me? You're just here taking me through the reps, yelling at me, you know, crushing me like, like, you're not, you're not, you're not connecting me to what, what I want. And for me, it's always muscle bulk to protect my, you know, fragile bones because I have this medical condition. And so the minute they reconnect me with that, boy, by the way, it helps them as well because they're like, oh, hang on, well, actually, what we're doing now is not actually going to build bulk for you. That's so, I

49:54forgot. You know, and it's so simple, feel like it's the simplest thing in the world because it's the biggest brighter star that everyone's navigating by. But no one ever asks about it. No one ever reconnects to it. It just gets lost in the busyness. Yeah, you know, the funny thing is when you did mention about your autoimmune disease and so forth, of course, my, my, Jesus started flowing in my head. And, you know, so I don't, I don't want you to have to share what you have, you know, you know, dude, I'm an open book. I'm an open book. It's like, they call it bamboo spine is the, okay, the layman's terms for it. So it's like a, it's a form of arthritis, only men get. Now, are you, what type of a strength conditioning are you doing? Do you, do you work on the erector spinae and the multifidae to help support? What I, I, about 10 years ago, I met two trainers that just turned everything around for me, but they were fully connected to

51:00what I was trying to achieve with my personal health journey. And everything was geared towards that. Every rep, every set after everything. Where did you feel that? And before I met these trainers, you know, I would do bench press and have collarbone pain for two weeks. And I couldn't press again. I would do overhead lifts and I would have a nerve pinch in my, in my shoulder. But they were on top of it. They're like, you know, you'd be, are you feeling that collarbone thing? Right. Let's stop. Let's go and do some sub-substructural work. Let's, let's, if you're feeling it in the front of your body, let's do some pulls. Let's, let's strengthen the back of the body. And over a year, these niggles that I had had for over 20 years went away and they've never come back. You know, so that, to me, just reenforces, you know, when you're in service to the individual rather than the activity, and you're in service to their aspiration. And I didn't know all the technical words. And they did. And they, they, they spoke in my, my language. And I was curious.

52:05I'm like, so what's happening now? Like what's happening? And they're like, are these fibers? And this is your sling and your sling, your sling on the right hand side of your body is weaker than the left hand side. So we've got to do your core and get you rebalanced. You know, that's why you've got to saw ITVs because you're right ITV is because of your left shoulder. And it, you know, they just rebalanced and rebuilt, rebuilt me. Awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if you're familiar, but I recently released a book managing back pain for dummies. Yeah. Yeah, I did that with Dr. Pat Roth. And you know, we address a lot of these issues. But so much back pain is preventable, right? Uh, yes. Yes. I have, I have testimonials that of people that I fix in quite just a few sessions and they've had pain for years. Yeah. They just have, I just have a bad back. Yeah. No, you're a bad back. It's just what it is. Yeah. And they wait at that. No, you can fix this. You can, yeah, unless you've had some type of massive trauma or some type of, you know, deformity,

53:09most of these things can be fixed with proper exercise and nutrition. Get enough of your ass and getting out of, getting out of a chair and you're like, laptop. You see me? Yeah. I'm on a physio ball. Yeah. That's it. I'm working my core the whole time. Keep my stabilizers going. So, I have a stand-up table on a balance board. Uh, so I just stand up on the balance board and stand up in my, and you know, and as you know, Phil, we've got so many tools these days to help us. They're my watch or bars. Hey, you haven't stood up for 45 minutes. Yeah. You know, yeah. So it's, but again, it's, it's, it's, you know, Simon Seneca is why, you know, 50,000 other people say find your life purpose. Yeah. It doesn't need to be that big. Like it, it just, it just needs to be something that when you get there, it's like, hey, that's cool. And if you do that enough, eventually the big purpose thing will fall into place. You know, you didn't start your career in this job right now. No, but what you do now and the value

54:13you bring and the wisdom you have is through the commitment that you had to the small things on the gym and your open-mindedness and curiosity. Like, people, there's plenty of people that don't need the fight-a-pilot mindset. They don't need plan-brew-free ski debrish. It's just, it's just how they are. Like Elon Musk doesn't need it. No. But again, to you every day, he's trying new things. He's failing. He's learning from them and he's applying those learnings. Yeah. We're more to help people that don't know how to do that. Right. So you're giving them a plan, a roadmap, and just follow these eight steps. Boom, boom, boom. And by accident, you'll achieve what you want to achieve. That's awesome. We can do a lot of good things through action event. So let me, so if I know, I'm going to, I'm going to list everything here. Well, what are some of the best ways people can get in touch with you and afterburner? So there's, there's two ways. My website's callmeboo.com or if you just type Christian Bacussis on the only one on a planet. So I'm easy to link you or anywhere else. And if you're in a company and you feel like the company's stagnated

55:16or you're aspirational, but the people around you aren't reach out to afterburner. And we have these very high impact programs that kind of shock people into a mindset shift. And that's, that's how we get this kind of operating at scale. And when companies do it, it's a lot of fun. It's, and they start working together. We've had it called like, um, it's like therapy. Then all of a sudden we're open and honest and we're talking about problems and we're fixing them. I mean, things that never worked, all of a sudden we're on fire and we're, we're successful. Like it's, it's, it's a little bit like magic fairy dust. But you just got to be aware of the steps to take to get to the destination that, you know, means everything to you. Wow. This is great stuff. Hey, you know, just, you know, we just want to help people. And I said, live better longer. You want to help people perform at, at levels that maybe they never thought possible before. Yeah. And, uh, you know, absolutely. Yeah. Excellent. Well, thank you for coming on. It was great to have you. And I look forward to getting this out to

56:16everybody. So thanks, Phil. I appreciate that honor. Take care.