Extreme Ownership

Sent to the most violent battlefield in Iraq, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s SEAL task unit faced a seemingly impossible mission: help U.S. forces secure Ramadi, a city in Iraq deemed “all but lost.” Despite seemingly insurmountable odds, U.S. forces, through heroic acts of bravery and courage, and by working alongside the local people, secured victory in Ramadi.

Through these experiences, Jocko and Leif learned many life-changing lessons, the most important being that leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield. Determined to not let the tragic losses that they had suffered be in vain, they took these lessons back to the SEAL Teams by instituting SEAL leadership training that helped forge the next generation of SEAL leaders.

After departing the SEAL Teams, they launched Echelon Front, a company that teaches these same leadership principles to businesses and organizations. From promising startups to Fortune 500 companies, Babin and Willink have helped scores of clients across a broad range of industries build their own high-performance teams and dominate their battlefields.

Since then, Echelon Front has grown to include 15 instructors, including Rob Jones.

Keynote: Own Your Attitude

Every single person can attest to the fact that almost nothing in life goes perfectly according to plan. Plans for our career path, plans for family vacations, plans for the day. Almost every plan is met with some sort of deviation caused by unexpected problems.

These situations will tend to make us feel frustrated, angry, and helpless. If we follow those emotions, then we will falter, fail, and nothing will change. In order to push through these situations, you have to take Extreme Ownership of them. However, before that you must make the decision to Own Your Attitude.

How you view your circumstances and the problems that arise in your life will dictate your success. If you see them as frustrations and barriers, they will block you at every turn. However, if you see them as opportunities to help other people, you will overcome the problems, improve the lives of the people you care about, and find success in your own life.

The Own Your Attitude Brief is a powerful, dynamic keynote detailing one man’s journey from the brink of death to the pinnacle of meaning and purpose. It is almost guaranteed to make the audience both laugh and cry, and quite often ends with them applauding on their feet.

In this keynote, Rob Jones will tell the story of the worst day of his life, and also share the tools that he used to overcome that terrible tragedy to turn it into a life more meaningful than he ever thought possible. He will detail tools that any human being, in any position, in any walk of life, can use to not only lead themselves, but lead others to lives of meaning and purpose.

These principles are called the Four Laws of Combat Leadership, and the Mindsets for Victory.

• Cover and Move: Put simply, Cover and Move is about teamwork. In order to accomplish the mission, every group of people has to be able to work together as a team. Most people learn this from a young age, however, the way that most people utilize teamwork is ineffective. Cover and Move will teach you the effective way to work as a team.
• Simple: In order to be successful, the team must understand the mission. However, without realizing it, leaders will quite often prevent their teams from understanding by overcomplicating their communication. Simple will teach you how to avoid this pitfall.
• Prioritize and Execute: On the battlefield, and in life, problems are inevitable. And, multiple problems always seem to appear simultaneously. It is our natural tendency, when we face multiple problems, to try and solve them all simultaneously as well. However, this will almost always lead to failure to solve anything. Prioritize and Execute will teach you how to see through the confusion, and solve problems quickly and effectively.
• Decentralized Command: Every single person on the team is a leader. And, in order for the team to reach it’s greatest effectiveness, every person on the team, regardless of their position, must have the power to lead, solve problems, and make decisions. Decentralized Command will teach you how to let go of your tendency to want to control everything, and give your power away to your team so that they can lead.
• Extreme Ownership: Things in life are going to go wrong. Problems are going to arise. And the only way that you can solve those problems, and find success is to take Extreme Ownership. Which means you going to take 100%, total responsibility for everything that affects the outcome of the mission. You will make no excuses, and you will blame no one but yourself.
• Humility: Humility is the most important quality of a good leader. In order to be successful as a leader, you have to be able to listen, and put the team first. Even in the most dire of circumstances, such as if you have sustained a life changing tragedy, you need to put other people first so that you can see how you can help the people you care about.

At the end of the Own Your Attitude Brief, the audience will be armed with the skillsets required for effective leadership so that they can overcome anything in life, and help their team win. At work, at home, and in life.

Leadership Workshops

Rob is also available to teach full and half-day leadership workshops. Such workshops can be catered to the needs of the team, and will begin with the Combat Leadership Brief followed by a selection of additional modules that will help the audience truly learn the Four Laws of Combat and how to implement them in more detail.

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