Former Navy SEAL Teaches Team Resilience | Pete Naschak

Pete Naschak (0:00)

You have to just take the next step. You have to just say that this pain is gonna end at some point. Like, that's the optimism, the realistic optimism. You aren't trying to convince yourself you aren't struggling. What you're trying to convince yourself is that the struggling is fine, it's part of the process, and it'll end sometime because you're not gonna be struggling as much anymore.

It's just the next step.

Michael Gervais (0:31)

Thank Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist.

I am really excited to sit down with my dear friend, Pete Naschak, for this conversation. Pete served for 21 years as a Navy SEAL, where he held various operational and leadership positions and participated in military contingency operations around the world. Now, Pete has taken what he's learned as a leader of one of the most elite and high-performing military units and founded Performance Activation, a company specializing in leadership development, mission enhancement, team performance, and resilience training for top-tier companies, pro-sport teams, and individuals.

Pete and I have had the pleasure of working together at companies like Nike and Red Bull and Under Armour and Microsoft, and I'm always fascinated by his insights and his approach to helping others thrive. Most importantly, I have an incredibly high regard for Pete as a human. He is resilient and optimistic. He's a great teammate. He's a true problem solver and authentic across environments where I've seen him challenged by some hardships and times that are incredibly difficult as a human. Now in this conversation, we talk about how these concepts can be applied to building great individuals, great teams, and deeply resilient organizations. So with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Pete Naschak.

Pete, I'm so stoked to sit here with you. So thank you for coming in. And more importantly, thanks for the long relationship we've had as a friend.

Pete Naschak (2:12)

Yeah, definitely. No, I'm super excited. I mean, I don't know where it's going to go today, but hopefully it'll be in a good place.

Michael Gervais (2:18)

Well, that's the thing. You know, like who knows where we're going to go, but I want to start with resilience shepherds.

Pete Naschak (2:25)

Yeah.

Michael Gervais (2:26)

Being a resilience shepherd. This is a term that you've coined. It's a concept that, you know, you have written about now.

And when you shared this concept with me, I was like, oh, there's something here. And so can you just take a quick run at describing what a resilient shepherd is?

Pete Naschak (2:47)

Yeah, so a resilient shepherd, from what I've found researching some different teams, again, this is in the team resilience space, which is different than individual and organizational resilience.

So a resilient shepherd is really an individual who's not in a leadership position, who influences positively the resilience phenomenon, the team-shared resilience phenomenon. So it's people that tend to just be in the mix of that team, who can, by their actions, and typically there's a few characteristics that they have, that then change the way that team functions as a unit and can manage adversity.

Michael Gervais (3:27)

I love the concept because forever, we've been talking about resilience as an individual skill, a protective factor, a characteristic that you can develop even. And you just added to it, which is saying, no, there's somebody on the team that is taking care of the team from a resilience standpoint.

Okay, so can you make it concrete, like maybe an example that you've seen it or when you first noticed it and you're like, oh, what is this?

Pete Naschak (3:58)

Well, I mean, really the idea was coming through because a lot of the team research, which there's not much out there because team resilience is a newer area of research, probably maybe 10 years. So in the academic world, that's early.

Individual resilience has been around since, you know, for 50 years plus. And it's been something that's been very focused. And that's why we hear a lot about individual resilience. But, you know, I got interested in looking at it because in the team, they constantly pointed to the people or the person that would influence the team resilience phenomenon was always a leader.

And I've been in some bad teams.

They had bad leaders. You know, they were, there wasn't shared leadership. There wasn't a transformational leader. And so, but, you know, they still were resilient. We still handled adversity well. So it wasn't because of the leader. It was because of the team and how we influenced and interacted with each other. So there was, there had to be something more than just leadership that makes resilience work.