Today, we welcome back the author, actor, public speaker, Ret. Lt Colonel Scott Mann to discuss his new book "Nobody is Coming to Save You" https://scottmann.com/
The website Nobody is Coming to Save You is a practical guide for leaders who want to make a bigger impact in the world now. It distills what I’ve learned over my three-decade career as a Green Beret into strategies you can use to lead others through hard change. These are the same tactics Green Berets use to get vital stuff done when stakes are high and conditions impossible. You’ll also learn about human behavior, strategic influence and dynamic storytelling because relationships are rocket fuel for getting big sh*t done.
---
One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at [email protected]
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
---
Special thanks to Ahimsaz for the sample of “Shahamat." Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wmoH-fHhwQ
---
Transcript
00:00:01 Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Please welcome retired Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann.
00:00:39 JACK GAINES
As a Green Beret, Scott designed and led the local village stability operations program in Afghanistan. After leaving the military, he began to focus on using his experience with the struggle of transition from a fast -paced, high -risk lifestyle to civilian world of work and family. As a result, he launched Hero's Journey to help other service members, first responders, and their families cope with post -crisis trauma through storytelling. Scott also wrote and featured in the play and film Last Man Out, which portrays the impacts of war on our veterans and their families. Additionally, after Kabul fell to the Taliban, Scott and others launched Task Force Pineapple Express to help Afghan partners leave the country. Scott has made three appearances on TEDx to discuss his work with veterans and first responders and is now announcing his new book, No One is Coming to Save You, which will be released in October. So enjoy. Your book is coming out. It is. In October, right? October 1. October 1. It's a great book. I really liked how you took the turn. This is a lot of different things that the ESM would diagnose as issues with. adaptability, with coping skills, general anxiety, you were able to successfully build them down into a thing you call the churn. And that's really, really helpful because if I told somebody they have a bipolar and anxiety complexity disorder, they'd be like, what in the hell are you talking about? But if you say you're stuck in the churn, which is a culmination of all these different types of things they're struggling with. you created an object, you gave it a name, and it gave them a way for people's minds to focus on that and identify it. And then by doing that, preying on how to separate themselves from the churn and give themselves a break, give themselves some air so that they can recover a little bit. Because with any kind of condition that people are struggling with, they have to learn how to separate themselves from it in order to grow, to heal.
00:02:45 SCOTT MANN
Yeah, it's well said. And the thing is, I've been working on the book for years, and most of the books I've written have been either about Afghanistan or they've been about veteran transition. And a lot of folks have been after me to write a nonfiction, story -based, narrative -based book on how did we do Pineapple? How did we do Last Out? Because I don't have a title. I don't have authority. I don't have a lot of resources. Yet those were strategically impactful things, just like DSO. How did I do that? And so I decided to write a book, a very quick read, called Nobody's Coming to Save You. which was the rally cry in most SFA camps throughout history, but you can still get big shit done. And this is what this is. It's kind of a guide to getting big shit done. And to your point about the churn, the thing is, and this is Ivan Tyrrell again, he says that the brain is a metaphorical pattern matching organ and it has a mandate to make sense of the world. So metaphor and story is how the brain makes sense, right? And this is another reason that we want to be storytellers. And what I found is, for example, The Democrat or Republican sitting across from you at the holiday dinner table is not the enemy. The person that cuts you off in traffic is not the enemy. The person who wears a mask or doesn't wear a mask and points their finger at you is not the enemy. The person on LinkedIn that disagrees with your political opinion is not the enemy. The churn is the enemy. And I characterize the churn as the antagonist in this book. It is both an external and internal condition within our civil society that is novel and new. And it's something that we just have not faced as a country until the last five, 10 years. And we see versions of the churn over in Afghanistan, in Iraq, where tribal dynamics at play in groups and out groups. And you've also got your own internal resistance that you're dealing with. And that's just the nature of being in that roiling, churning environment. But it's weird to see it here in the United States, where we are supposed to be a society of abundance and rule of law. And out of many come one. And much of that has fallen away. And it was in that dark period of my transition that I saw, wow, there's a churn right here at home. And as Sebastian Younger says, most combat veterans are willing to die for their country, but they have no idea how to live for it because it's hard to know how to live for a country that's tearing itself apart along every imaginable line from race to economics to religion. And that is my assessment, the churn and that division, that distrust, that disengagement. As humans, we have an obsession for imitation. Back in the traditional world, we imitated animals when we thought animal pelts. Well, now we're obsessed with imitating machines. And the left hemisphere of our brain is obsessed with control while the right hemisphere is obsessed with the connection to the natural world. And the left has always worked for the right. But according to a lot of neuroscientists, it's flipped because of these things. We've become so obsessed with this represented reality that we've lost our connection to the natural world. And so my book starts off by framing the enemy. That's the first special ops imperative. Always understand your operational environment. Well, our operational environment has changed. What got us here is not going to get us there. So I take about one third of the book to lay out, look, your operating environment is different. And it's not just about transitioning from military to civilian. The civil society we live in. is different externally and internally. And if you don't know that, then you are at risk of being lured into shadow tribalism and a range of other things. If you do know it, the antibody to it is an understanding and appreciation of the human operating system. Another metaphor I use is the iceberg, right? So you've got the iceberg versus the churn and getting below the waterline of that iceberg part you can't see. That's where the innate human realities reside that we can leverage.
00:06:32 SCOTT MANN
storytelling, empathy, active listening, breath, a range of things that are available to us. They're innate. They're already in us. Our ancestors knew, but we need to access them in a new way with an improved understanding of how our environment has changed so that we can lead with those things. And the cool thing is, and I'll end on this for this question, is that that's available to all of us, whether you're working in diplomacy right now, whether you're working in civil affairs right now, or whether you are transitioned and you're trying to just lead your family, most people are victims of the churn. And if you have a language and a grammar for it, and if you have an understanding of the human operating system and a practicality and how you can engage using old school or personal skills, you can lead your way pretty much out of anything without a time.
00:07:20 JACK GAINES
One brilliant point you had in there was that the person on the social media that's Leaving comments is not your enemy. A person who cuts you off is not your enemy. Because if you are stuck in a churn, it triggers that they are the enemy because it's your natural instinct that they've wronged you and you have to defend yourself. So by separating the person from that sense, you can back away from potential fights, road rage, getting arrested. It does. Yeah.
00:07:50 SCOTT MANN
And all of that could happen. Think about how we're trained in these rough places around the world to respond, and the responses that have been ingrained in us are not necessarily appropriate for responses in our civil society here at home. Yet, the way in which our body physiologically responds, it goes into a trance state. We enter a sympathetic state of fight, flight, or freeze. Our bodies have been preconditioned to fight. Our bodies have been preconditioned to lean into the problem in a very aggressive way, for example. And that's a primal response that has been infused with training. Okay. Well, here, if you're watching your 401k erode over six months, kind of response that we were trained to do is not appropriate. Is to go burn down the hedge fund. Yeah. The reality is, so what's actually happening there is that trance state that Ivan Terrell talks about. We all go into it. A trance state is just a state of hyper -focus. And the churn has created these conditions all around us where people are in it all the time. And when you go into a trance state and get a secondary emotion of anger, anger makes you stupid. Anger reduces your higher intelligence functions. You can't look with a shared perspective. You're trying to survive. And so what are we going to do for those of us who have trained a certain way? It's not good. And so we have to manage our energy. We have to manage the energy in the room. And it starts, I believe, when emotions are low by reading about and learning about the charm that's out there and this human operating system that's old and primal within us and is going to act on us one way or the other. And the more that we can appreciate the human operating system and reconnect to it, the more we can manage our own energy in a possible way within this new context that we live in. and be the most relevant, relatable person in the room. Those skills that we learned in the military all of a sudden truly then become very relevant. But if we can't manage the churn or read it for what it is and then manage our energy and those around us, we will be a pawn for the divisionist leaders that are out there just like everybody else.
00:10:09 JACK GAINES
That's a great point. That churn of feeling like it's coming at you from every angle. allows people who do work in information and influence to then say, okay, you're all wound up. Here's the bad guy. And then have them lunge at that person or that issue and explode all that energy that they've been building up on a problem. It goes after what I want them to do versus them thinking through an issue and actually coming up with their own position, either agreeing or dissenting on what I want.
00:10:37 SCOTT MANN
It's a very good definition of what I call divisionist leaders in the book. It's at a basic level that the civil society we live in here in the West is based on the individual. The individual is above the group. Well, in most places of the world and where we all come from, the group is above the individual. Status society is where we all come from. Just like any other mammal, it's for the good of the group because it's the only way you can acquire resources, maintain resources, find a mate. It's all within your circle, your tribe, your quam. And the group is above the individual. Well, in America and other places, we put the individual above the group. That's not a natural state of affairs. Which is why cults are so popular. Yes. And it's also why leadership is so essential and why a lot of social scientists say that you need for a democracy or a republic to survive that way. You need social capital where you have faith in each other and trust as neighbors. You need institutions that you can. have trust in and then you need stories that you tell each other and the outside world that you believe in right how are we doing on that we are really struggling with all of those so as a result they've abandoned that stewardship of bridging and then instead they practice this divisionist approach where they foment instability from the president all the way down both parties to meet their own narrow agenda social media engineers Instagram and Facebook create algorithms that are designed to encourage us to share negative fear -based information about outgroups because they've done the studies and they know that we will share information faster if it's negative information about an outgroup. So in other words, you have engineers that have done deep research on in -group, out -group, tribal dynamics, and then they're using it. You orchestrate algorithms that will leverage in -group, out -group behavior. Now, that to me is insidious. That is a divisionist approach that is practiced in 24 -7 news. It's practiced in politics. It's practiced in social media. And if we're not careful as humans who are just moving along our day, we will enter into this represented world. It's not reality. It's a represented reality. It's not the natural world. And that world is their world. 24 -7 news is the world of the divisionist. It's not an even plank. And so it's so easy to just get sucked into that trance state where the primal condit