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Veterans know how to lead. The lessons we learned in the military form the foundation for bigger successes in business, entrepreneurship and community.
Host John S Berry, CEO of Berry Law, served as an active-duty Infantry Officer in the U.S. Army, finishing his military career with two deployments and retiring as a Battalion Commander in the National Guard. Today, his veteran led team at Berry Law, helps their clients fight some of the most important battles of their lives. Leading successful teams in the courtroom, the boardroom, and beyond, veteran leadership drives the firm’s rapid growth and business excellence.
Whether building teams, synchronizing operations, or refining tactics, we share our experiences, good and bad, to help you survive, thrive and dominate.
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[00:00:02.460] - Jason Dickinson
You need to be able to give people liberty and leadership. You have to have liberty and leadership. Otherwise, you're not letting them lead, you're letting them manage.
[00:00:10.920] - John S. Berry
Welcome to Veteran Led. I'm your host, John Berry. And today's guest is Jason Dickinson, founder of Veterans on the River. Now, Jason is not only a founder of a nonprofit but also works in the civilian world as the Director of People and Leadership Development at DLB Associates. Welcome to the show, Jason.
[00:00:32.900] - Jason Dickinson
Thanks so much, John. It's great to be here.
[00:00:34.940] - John S. Berry
What I love about what you're doing is that you're answering the question a lot of Veterans ask, do I start a nonprofit or do I build my civilian career? I don't know what to do, and you did both. Before we get to that, let's talk about the beginnings. You were an airborne ranger, green to gold guy. Talk us through that, becoming an officer and how that helped you now.
[00:00:56.880] - Jason Dickinson
Essentially, I went on a, I came from a blue-collar family, and my family was like, Hey, you're either going to go to work with me when you graduate or you're going into the Navy. That was my family. My grandfather took me to one of these all-point recruiting places. We literally walked in. My grandfather started walking us over to the Navy desk, and I just stopped in the middle and said, What's the furthest thing you guys got from the Navy? A guy jumped up in the back and he said, Airborne ranger in the United States. And I said, Sold. That's pretty much how I got into the Army. Then from there, I just started taking any door that would open because I'd come from a blue-collar family. I just wanted to be successful at whatever I did. I had a plethora of sports background that I was able to apply. Then it was just being successful at whatever the NCO has asked you to do and not quitting. Front towards the enemy, just like the Claymore says, you just keep moving forward. Then a door opened. Would you like to go to college?
[00:02:10.000] - Jason Dickinson
Yes, yes, I would. Fill this paperwork out. Filled it out. Next thing you know, I'm at college. Then get commissioned, come back into the Army. Then I was like, okay, that was great. We were in a place where you could get out of the military at that time, and they were paying you to get out. So, I got out and became a financial advisor, and then did that for a few years, and then 9/11 happened. I got recalled. When I got recalled, it was life changing. We were doing very well financially. However, I realized what I was missing. It was that brotherhood in the military, that being surrounded by people that have your back, you got their back, and you're all focused on the same thing. I went after that, had a discussion with the wife, and we stayed in. And then fast forward 25 years.
[00:03:03.740] - John S. Berry
Wow. So, you got out, and then 9/11 happens, and you stay in for quite some time. Now, one thing you brought up earlier, and I love this about the military, is that for most opportunities in schools, there's an order of merit list. And you said, you do a good job, you do what the NCOs tell you to do, you don't quit, you're going to get opportunities. And the same thing is true in the civilian world. If you're a good team member, and you may not be the top of the merit list today, but if you can work your way up, you're going to get those opportunities. I saw it for promotions, for schools, for all these great opportunities that the military had. If you worked your way up to the top, you got those opportunities. And the Shamers and the E4 Mafia, they never got those opportunities. And I can understand why you would start jamming if you didn't get the opportunities because you see guys like you who move up and move on. So, let's talk about now, because it's a long time back in the military, and you figure out, hey, what I've been missing in my life as a financial advisor is the camaraderie, the team, the mission.
[00:04:04.630] - John S. Berry
And so, you go back, you get that, and then we all get old. And now we can't be in the military anymore, or we've got families, and there's things that have changed our priorities. So, take us through just from that point now to your current position at DLB Associates. I know it has to do with people and leadership and in the field, but what do you do?
[00:04:26.820] - Jason Dickinson
So let me connect two dots there to help bridge this gap. And the first one is, so, yes, combat arms guy. And then in about halfway through my career, at about the 12-to-15-year mark, I was an active guard reservist at that time, AGR in the Reserves. I got a phone call that said, we're doing away with combat arms in the Reserves. You may remember that time.
[00:04:46.380] - John S. Berry
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
[00:04:47.280] - John S. Berry
Hey, I was an infantry officer, and then they made me a logistician before we deployed to Iraq.
[00:04:51.340] - Jason Dickinson
I get it. They said, You got a choice. You can go engineering, transportation, or military intelligence because you already have a TSSCI. I chose military intelligence. That opened another door because I was transferring as a major into that field. So that opened up the National Intelligence University for me to go get a master's degree. And then I did well there, did well in a couple of positions. It opened up the Senior Executive Fellowship at Harvard for me. So now you can start to see the extra layers of leadership training that came in. And that's where I learned about psychosomatic testing conversational speech patterns in the cold learning system. I started putting all that science behind what I de facto learned from NCOs and officers in the military.
[00:05:41.380] - John S. Berry
Wow.
[00:05:42.200] - John S. Berry
And obviously, it's helped you quite a bit. How do you use that today? Now, we've got Veterans on the River where you're teaching a lot of that stuff as well as a nonprofit. But day to day as a civilian, how are you using that?
[00:05:55.240] - Jason Dickinson
So day to day as a civilian, as you're aware, I left the Department of Defense as an executive coach and teacher of leadership for the DOD in May. I took the fork in the road, retired from the federal government, and I was just taking time off. Then as would happen, a couple of people saw my profile, asked me some questions. A friend from my area works for this company as an executive, so we really need somebody that could help. We have a lot of engineers that are engineer-minded folks, and we think you could help them with their leadership as we start promoting from project managers to leaders of project managers. So I said, I think I can. And we started talking about all the different ways to do that, coaching, mentoring, building some curriculum around how to have difficult conversations for people that are typically introverted and spreadsheet-oriented. It may be the gift of gab may come for somebody like you or me, but it doesn't come for everybody.
[00:07:01.480] - John S. Berry
Yeah, absolutely. What I love is, once again, it reinforces the message. I mean, you got opportunities because you're a high performer and they kept coming. Look, we never know how long we're going to be in a position, but if you go all in, do your best, you're going to get more opportunities down the road and people are going to seek you out. And obviously, that's what's happened with you. And it's what happened to a lot of high performing Veterans. You can see that if you're a high performer in the military and you can just take that attitude into the civilian world, you are head and shoulders above your peers.
[00:07:30.920] - Jason Dickinson
I believe the same thing.
[00:07:32.280] - Jason Dickinson
It's really about that can-do attitude. Just having resilience is one of the things we reinforce at Veterans on the River, is having that resilient mindset. A lot of times, Veterans won't open up to people that are non-Veterans. Therefore, what they do, their resilience coping method is just to shove it to the side, bury it down, and not really speak about it. We give them an environment where they can allow that to bubble up from the top. Then we apply whitewater rafting to it on Veterans On the River that gives them leadership that they haven't done before because most Army people, or heck, most Navy people haven't driven a boat down the river. That's true. When we start talking to them about that, it all merges together and it's all about just staying positive, staying motivated, on to the next thing. This door closes cool. Let me just T and E around that door and get to the next one. I think that's probably That's really a good adage for life, right? Is just to keep going. The only way through it is to go through it.
[00:08:38.760] - John S. Berry
As I say, when you're going through hell, keep going. That's right. So when did you start Veterans On the River? And what was the genesis? What was the force behind that? Obviously, you didn't need to start a nonprofit. You had a team. Why do that? And when?
[00:08:53.380] - Jason Dickinson
Well, it happened by accident, like a lot of things in my career, right? If you ask me, they were by an accident, but if you look at them, you're like, Oh, this led to this led to this. So I went to my father-in-law's retirement in Colorado, in Salida, Colorado, where we have Veterans On the River today still. And one of the one of the events that we did for his retirement was the whole family. My wife has a large family. We did this, what they affectionately refer to as the grandmas and babies float down the Arkansas River. Not very white waterish, beautiful, picturesque scenery. I wrote on that in about 15 minutes as somebody that's kind of a high-action guy. As you might imagine, I was like, Yeah, it's beautiful. Now what? For two and a half hours, that was it. I made friends with the whitewater guy The whitewater guy was like, you think this is great. You should come back tomorrow and go down Browns Canyon. I was like, What's Browns Canyon? He tells me all about that category four, Whitewater, all this. I was like, Oh, yeah, let's do it. I convinced my father-in-law and one other person to go with me.
[00:10:03.540] - Jason Dickinson
So, we did that. Really loved it. Started asking him questions about the river and how he knows where to drive the boat and to keep us from flipping over. Then he started just philosophizing about the rivers like life. I was like, okay. But I started seeing these leadership lessons in what I do every day being implemented there. He said, I'll tell you what, if you want to come back this summer and take our whitewater guide school, why don't you come take your vacation time, come here, and you can go down this river 27 times in two weeks. Then while I was there, one of my really close friends, who's now a colonel about to retire in February, he calls me every day. Bro, what are you doing? Why are you doing? I was like, I don't know. He goes, you probably ought to be journaling this or something because I don't understand you hanging out with a bunch of hippies by the river or whatever. He had it all wrong. As I started journaling, I was like, I bet other Veterans could use this opportunity to take a knee to do some soul searching to start to what I call lift that mirror up.
[00:11:09.400] - Jason Dickinson
Most valuable leadership tool ever invented is a mirror. If you stare back in that mirror, 85% of your problems are looking back at you.
[00:11:17.680] - John S. Berry
If you don't like what you see in the mirror, don't blame the mirror.
[00:11:20.960] - Jason Dickinson
That's right. It's doing its job. I started journaling this down, and then I talked to my father-in-law about it, and we drummed up just barely enough money to put six people through the first year. They happened to be six people that I knew, and two of them were guys from JASOC that I knew that were going through their apex which is their last year, where they start to plan their separation and stuff. They came and gave me tons of feedback. You should try this, you should incorporate this, you should do this. So next thing you know, I had a curriculum, and then it was start knocking on doors. How can I get a sponsor? Figuring out the budget, all the things that I never thought the MBA that I would... I never thought I'd use it. Now all that starts kicking in. How do we build this? How do we get it going? You get motivated, and then I was already volunteering for Vetland, 4 Block, doing a lot of Veterans activities. I said, I'm just going to start this thing myself, see what happens. Here we are about to go into 2026, our fourth year.
[00:12:26.780] - Jason Dickinson
We're still on a super fine budget, but we are having a great time, and we affect anywhere from 15 to 20 lives a year. The goal is to get a second river in 2027 so that we can start doing 30 to 40 lives a year.
[00:12:43.160] - John S. Berry
Having a full-time job, how much time do you have to carve out for this or to run a nonprofit? I mean, you founded it. Obviously, there's a lot of work on the front-end, and it's been four years, but even on the day-to-day, how many hours you have to put in a week?
[00:12:55.480] - Jason Dickinson
I'd say a week, I'm putting in 4-6 hours a week. Some of that's just getting back to people like your staff saying, hey, are we still on? Are we doing this? Am I doing this? I'm a hands-on person, which is why I'm sitting here in front of you today. I didn't want to do this from my desk. I wanted to be able to interact with you and make sure that we got the message that was supposed to be sent. I'm a little bit of a perfectionist in that kind of way. But I probably spend 4-6 hours a week of my own time I'm doing that. A good bit of my own money that anything that comes up short, the flight out here. It's funny because when I bring up that, there was just this Facebook battle of big military organizations or Veteran organizations and how much of their money goes to their staff versus how much actually makes it down to the Veteran. I'm proud to say that at Veterans on the River, 100% of any dollars that come to our organization goes straight into the program Veteran. We pay no one on our staff. I pay my professional river guides from that budget because they have a certification that they're using.
[00:14:11.400] - Jason Dickinson
But without our sponsors and people like that, like the river company, independent whitewater out in Colorado, that basically gives us our gear, puts us up beside the river, does the whole thing for us. Without them, we wouldn't be possible. It was all just the for the first couple of years, I will tell you, it was more than 4-6 hours a week. Now it's 4-6 hours a week, and it's to sustain. We'll hit another growth spurt at some point, I believe. I'm happy to be working with the organization that I just took the job for because 60% of the company are prior service. We're a platinum, Hire Vets members. We're doing the right thing, and I can get behind a mission like that.
[00:15:00.000] - John S. Berry
Absolutely. That's the great thing. I think I even saw it in one of your videos that you don't necessarily want to do the work because you're worried about paying the bills. You want to do the work because it actually is meaningful.
[00:15:12.560] - Jason Dickinson
That's absolutely right. Without passion, it took me a long time. I was a financial advisor because I was chasing the dollar, and I didn't realize that I missed the brotherhood, the passion, the mission, the focus, that moving forward towards a combined mind, effort, and goal. That's just something that needs to happen, right?
[00:15:36.220] - John S. Berry
Yeah. I think once you get a taste of it, right? You're in the military and you realize like, this is great, I'm part of a championship team, and then there's no mission, there's no team. And then you find yourself, your life just changes. And sometimes it's not as meaningful because you're not putting the meaning in it. You're looking at, okay, how am I going to survive? How am I going to pay the bills? But then it's Mark Twain say something, the effect of, Most men die at age 35 and are not buried till age 70.
[00:16:02.940] - Jason Dickinson
Yeah, right. Absolutely. So, I look at it from the aspect of if you have something that you're passionate about, one of the things that we do at Veterans on the River, we teach the Ikigaya philosophy, the Japanese philosophy about having a purpose for your life. And that's one of the things that I talk to them about. It's how I decided to take the fork in the road. The federal government was changing some of their policies towards leadership and leadership instructors. So, they were starting to make me more of a project manager and less of a leadership instructor. I'm standing there last May pouring my heart into my lessons that I'm giving my Veterans. I said, you got to be passionate about what you're doing. If you're working for an organization that you can't get behind or that's not feeding your soul, then you need to maybe consider moving to another organization. Then I went back to my truck that night and I started scratching my head and I was like, That's me right now. Oh, my gosh, I need to make a change. And I called my wife immediately. And thank goodness, I have an amazing wife that says, I know if nothing else, you need to be passionate about what you do, and I support you.
[00:17:12.800] - Jason Dickinson
So I'm lucky. Very lucky.
[00:17:15.340] - John S. Berry
Yeah, that's great because a lot of people get so caught up in the daily needs that they're afraid of change. And in the end, you're not really living. You're not focused on what you're meant to do or what you want to do. It's more of what's expected of you. And I think in the military, we learn that expectations and standards are pretty high, and they're always set for us. And then you get out. And guess what? It's your life. You're going to decide the expectations. You're going to decide the standards. I mean, and if your standard is sit on the couch and drink beer, that's what you want to do. And you're retired. Hey, that's your right. But I don't know that that's going to bring happiness. And so I think for a lot of us, it's finding, wait a minute, no one's telling me what standards I need to meet. It's not like I'm worried that I'm not going to get promoted or I'm going to get kicked out because I didn't meet height and weight. Nobody cares. Once you're out, the only person that really cares is you.
[00:18:06.880] - Jason Dickinson
That's right. And it creates a vacuum, John. When you get out and you lose that, and then you're sitting there and you're just in this place, it's been given to you all this time, this mission, this purpose, all these things. You get up and you go to the motor pool because it's Monday. The pool Mondays, you go to the motor pool, right?
[00:18:23.600] - John S. Berry
Yeah, those suck, by the way, especially in Fort Hood. Back when we had the starched BDUs, the Shining Black Boots, and it was a motor pool. Oh, man, it was 120 degrees. It was miserable. I hated motor pool Mondays.
[00:18:34.730] - Jason Dickinson
Yeah, but you lose that. You have a vacuum that happens, right? And then a lot of people just bury whatever that is, and they just start going towards whatever their daily job is. They took a job, and then they just keep working that job along the way instead of really soul searching and figuring out what do I want to be doing and where do I want to be going, right? That's what we try to incorporate. I believe that that just about anybody can learn those leadership lessons. I say there's three things. When I teach high school kids, I used to give some lectures on leadership, and I would say it's the law of leadership. L stands for lead yourself first. A stands for attitude over performance. Your attitude will get you a lot further than your performance will. And then the W is what's next. And if you're leading yourself, you have a great attitude, and you're always looking for what's next, you're going to be just fine. That's the high school kid methodology piece, and we can grow from that.
[00:19:35.060] - John S. Berry
Yeah, absolutely. I think back to the people that I knew in the military that were so focused on, hey, this is the mission. These are our standards. Look, they seemed to be a lot happier in miserable conditions. I know we all know this as Veterans, you watch the movies and it looks like if you're going to a deployment, it's going to be action all the time. And the truth is, there's a lot of sitting around and there's a lot of waiting for things to happen. And we've all experienced that. And if you have the mindset like, okay, well, this sucks. I'm waiting around doing nothing. You're missing the opportunity, right? And that's where we have things like hip pocket training, where a down moment is an opportunity to do something. But also, it's when you're not doing something that you get homesick, that you get depressed. You start thinking about all the bad things. And what I found, too, is doing the hard things, it seemed like the soldiers were happiest. It's raining and you're digging in that 18-inch grave, and you're digging in at night for a trading event, to put together a fighting position because When we're not aware of on defense.
[00:20:46.550] - John S. Berry
But, hey, when we deploy, we're going to need this skill, and you're out there. It's miserable because you hate doing it, but it's not because you're doing something, and you're challenged, and you're tired. I think as civilians, we get away from that. And no one's telling us.
[00:21:01.930] - Jason Dickinson
I still do that today when I cold plunge. My wife thinks I'm absolutely mental because if it's raining outside, I'm like, this is the best day to cold plunge. And my cold plunge is outside. So, it'll just be coming down on me, and I sink down in that ice cold water and I go, nobody's doing this. Nobody's doing this. This is special. And that's what you bond over. The things that you go through with your brothers and sisters beside you, you're like, who Who's in 110-degree heat at Fort hood? Who else is under? I mean, obviously, the whole division is probably a vehicle, but it's just you guys. The rest of the world is in their air condition, chilling. It's those things that get you through. Because look, it happens to a lot of us. One of the things that I've unfortunately had to work with in the last year is my brother-in-law, who served five years in the Navy, got out, started doing life, did all the things in life, just kept chugging, kept chugging, and then got hit with a divorce 22 years into his marriage. It threw him for a mental loop, and it woke up so many things from his past that he hadn't dealt that he had just felt with because he had just pushed him down and pushed him down.
[00:22:17.860] - Jason Dickinson
So, the resilience that he knew that the Navy helped him build was amazing because that is what caused him to be able to call that Veteran hotline. Instead of doing something drastic with himself. And then I immediately got in touch with him as soon as he got out of his treatments and therapy, and we surrounded him by Veterans so that he could have somebody to disclose to these challenges, these things, because you and I both know Veterans want to talk to Veterans about their stories, their life. That's who we know we'll identify. But a lot of times when you get asked as a civilian, from a civilian, a Veteran, hey, tell me a story. Tell me this. Tell me that. It's like, Yeah, do you really want to know? Probably not. I probably don't want to go through the process of telling you, and then you're not getting it. I think it's important to have that brotherhood and camaraderie in everything that you do as far as pushing forward. You got to surround yourself by those good people.
[00:23:26.740] - John S. Berry
Yeah. I think the lesson here is that it's not so much that you got your E-Tool out digging into that Georgia clay. You're trying to dig that fighting position, and you're thinking, this sucks. I'm miserable. But you have moments then, I think as a civilian, when there is no team and you're faced with a tough decision, whether it's a divorce or whether it's just a stressful time at work where you don't have as much control as you used to have in the military, and you don't have the team you used to have. And it's like, I would rather be out there on that E-Tool right now digging into that clay than then dealing with this right now, because at least I would be with a team of people, and I feel like I was doing something that had a purpose. I think we all get caught up in that in our civilian lives, if you will. I know in the military, divorces and things happen, too. But it's always when it would happen in the military, I can remember those things happening. And for the most part, your buddies were there and everybody had had a divorce.
[00:24:25.390] - John S. Berry
And it was like, Hey, no problem. We're going out tonight, or I'm going to get you a date, but no, we're not going to sit around and waste time. And you had that team because-
[00:24:34.920] - Jason Dickinson
Well, and you knew which buddy to call with which problem.
[00:24:37.460] - Jason Dickinson
You wanted your battle buddy that was going to be like, Yeah, man, screw that, or whatever, or the person that jumps on and says, Yeah, you know what we're doing? We're going here. We're going to go for a weekend camping trip, and we're going to be around nobody, just the dogs, or whatever. You knew which buddy you needed to call for all that. I think it's nice to be able have that team that looks like a Swiss Army knife. If I need the corkscrew, I can go to the corkscrew. But I think you hit the nail on the head there, and it's why our mission statement says that we help Veterans transition their warrior spirits to balanced, inclusive lives. So that include meditation, that include CrossFit, that include whatever it is that's going to help you get through these difficult times. You need to try a lot of things. If you're a Veteran that hasn't figured out what your thing is yet, try a bunch of stuff. And surround yourself by those good people that will help you just push through it and call your buddy and say, let's go grab a beer or five or whatever.
[00:25:52.720] - John S. Berry
Yeah. And I think that's the great thing about the one, especially when I learned in ranger school, when you're deprived of food and sleep, you appreciate those things so much more. And so when you look, you retire. You don't have to work out anymore. You could sit on the couch, drink beer, go to the bar every single day if you want to. But at some point, then it's no longer fun. But if you've been working hard and you haven't seen your buddies in 30 days and you're going to get together, have a few beers, I mean, that's a great time. Absolutely. Sitting at home, drinking beer or going to the same bar every single day, that's not a great time. That's a routine, and that's a bad unhealthy routine. But when You can do something that's meaningful, and then you get a break from it. Those breaks are amazing. And it's the hard work and getting the break, and when you said, Graduating ranger school, coming back from a deployment, whatever it is, you get that break. And it's just like, man, you feel like you earned it and you enjoy it more than if you're doing it day after day after day.
[00:26:51.480] - John S. Berry
It just becomes a bad habit and it's no longer fun.
[00:26:53.960] - Jason Dickinson
Yeah. With the nonprofit piece, one of the things that I have a hard time talking to people about is like, two weeks isn't a lot of... It's not a long time of your life to work on yourself, right? No. To reflect, to figure out where you want to go, what you want to be doing. Are you doing the right thing? The first time I did Veterans on the River myself with the group, I was like, I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. I'm teaching leadership stuff in my civilian world. That's what I'm doing. And I love it. And now I get to bring it here. And then when that changed, I had to figure it out again. So here I was two, two years later, another two weeks by the river where I was surrounded by Veterans that understood what I was going through that I could talk to. All the magic happened around the fire. Happened at night after we had our lesson. You go on the river for about five hours during the day, and then we have a little break, and then we have an hour to two-hour class at night.
[00:27:50.360] - Jason Dickinson
Then after that, it's all camaraderie. It's magic to watch the camaraderie happen. It starts off with somebody just telling a story, Yeah, not having a... I got a 16-year-old daughter at home. It's driving me crazy. Then it just starts from there, and it unravels all kinds of things. You just watch fireworks go off, and you watch people helping people around that campfire. It makes all a difference in the world.
[00:28:18.520] - John S. Berry
Yeah, absolutely. The interaction, the camaraderie, they all matter. But more importantly, I think what you bring up, and this is really important, two weeks is not a lot of time, and neither is just one time I had one moment of self-examination, and it's not the same. I can remember in 2018, I went to the Jerry Spence's Trial Lawyers College near DuBois, Wyoming. And you're there for three weeks. You don't really have cell phone access, and you're training with the top trial lawyers in the world. And you get the last day, or close to the last day, you show up in the morning and they tell you, Okay, go off, do whatever. Don't talk to anybody. Be back this afternoon. We're going to talk about two things. Who are you and what do you want to do with the rest your life? So I got the answers to those questions, and I went on a very long hike and came back that night, and I had the answers, but the answers have changed. Here we are seven years later, the answers have changed. And I think it's constant evolution and examination Motivation. I would ask you, every time you go on the river, year after year, it's the same, or does it evolve for you?
[00:29:20.620] - Jason Dickinson
It evolves. I tell people all the time, one of the quotes that I say all the time is, Motivation is a moving target. And I can't motivate you if I don't know you. Because you have different buttons that need to be pushed, then I know to push. Unless I know you, then I can start to push those buttons. It is absolutely different every time on the river. I can tell you that, just like Simon Sinek says, we can't just send you to a two-week camp and all of a sudden you're a leader. You can't do that with knowing what your purpose in life is either, because your purpose is going to change. My purpose changed when I had my first child, changed again when I had a second child, changed again when I had a divorce, changed again when I retired, changed again now that I started Veterans on the River. It's all of these life changes that make all of that changes what your purpose is, what your motivations are, how do you move forward. My wife getting a promotion changed a lot of my purpose. It was like, okay, now how do I spend my time?
[00:30:17.260] - Jason Dickinson
Is it best served, like supporting her and her career and things of that nature? Or are we equals? Or how's it going? Because I don't believe at any point in time in a healthy relationship, Is it rarely 50/50? I mean, how often do you see a seesaw in perfect balance? Somebody's getting a little more at any given time, and it's okay. I think the same thing happens on the river is some people come out. One of the guys, I'll use Kurt as an example. I'll just use first names. He came out. We're walking out of Walmart on a little, I call it a Class 6 run, going out of Walmart. And he looks over at me and he goes, You know I only came to this to spend all this time on the river, right? And I said, Cool. Yeah. Actually, I did know that the guy that referred you to come out said that you really wanted to be a whitewater raft guide, and that's why you're coming. He goes, I've learned so much more. We're on day four out of 14. I went back to a concert to see Kurt about two months after we graduated, and his wife came up to me and gave me a big hug and said, It is amazing how much better he's communicating with his kids now, and just out of the blue.
[00:31:36.960] - Jason Dickinson
A lot of that has to do with some of the assessments that we give and helping everybody find their thing. Everybody communicates in a different way. The question is, do you know how to adjust your communication to meet you where you are versus just saying things over and over and over again? How much emotional intelligence do you I have. My wife tells me all the time, no matter how many men you have in a room, if they're together in similar age, you end up with a bunch of 13-year-olds by about 20 minutes later. And it's true. He's like, You're always one extra guy away from somebody, pull my finger. That's the way it works. But there's a time and a place for all that stuff. And we teach you and talk you through the... Give you some tools to be able to do that stuff.
[00:32:28.300] - John S. Berry
Yeah, I think the important thing is having that space, right, to do it. Because if you're, oh, I got to improve these things about myself, or I'm not happy with who I am or what I'm doing. But day after day, you're in a routine, and it's so hard to break those patterns. And then that's one thing I've learned over the years, is that we all develop patterns. And They're very easy to pick up. They're very hard to break. And if you can't give yourself that, what we call the head space and timing, right? You get that head space and time, right? Yeah. That head space. To give yourself just some time away to really reflect, it's very difficult to see things. You're so caught up in your own head. You get away from yourself. You can see yourself from the outside. But until you get away, you can't do it. Day to day, you got to go away for a little while.
[00:33:17.320] - Jason Dickinson
Yeah, I think everybody deserves their time out. It's not the time out, my wife and I just took a vacation in September. It's not the same. It's not the same time out. I think each person in a relationship or in a family or each individual needs to take some time for themselves to be able to do their own reflection, to do something that recharges your battery. I'm a big outdoors person, obviously. We stay on the river in a glamping situation. I don't take you all the way back and make you suck it up. No e-tools. No e-tools. It's a 10 by 10 tent for you and a roommate. We're there, you get showers, you have a bathroom, you have those things that are there for you. But it's really all about connecting. You can pull out, not be at the campfire at night, have some time to yourself. There's limited cell phone coverage throughout the entire canyon, in Browns Canyon. Nobody's on the raft with cell phones. I have one guy that's the person that takes all the still photos and gets the YouTube video stuff for us or whatever. But the rest of the time, it's just you, a paddle, four or five people on a boat, and you're talking about life and talking about the river.
[00:34:37.900] - Jason Dickinson
So, you're completely distracted from your real life at that point. You're getting that river experience helps me penetrate at night with a 90 minute to a two-hour class on something that may normally... Look, if you go and tell A 75th Ranger Regiment guy right now is 25 years old. Like, Hey, I want you to come out and hang out in a tent with me on the river, and we're going to talk about communication styles and emotional intelligence, and maybe I'm going to teach you how to journal. He's going to look at you and be like, I'm good, bro. But if I tell you we're going to go down class three and four whitewater and you got to put up with a 90-minute class that may help you reflect a little bit, it's a different ball game. And that's the main reason we have the river element. Everybody's like, the rafting doesn't go with the classes. I don't understand. I was like, but it does. Because a guy like me wouldn't ever go to a guy like me would never go to a retreat that helped me work on myself that I didn't know was also going to be a heck of a lot of fun.
[00:35:55.340] - Jason Dickinson
Now I put those two things together, and it just so happens that the river teaches you all those lessons, It doesn't matter how big, how fit, how much mental fortitude you have, the river will take control of you, just like life will. You'll get stuck on a rock for an hour, and you can't figure out how to get off that rock. Do you just give up? What do you do? You're in the middle of the river. No, you keep working on it until you get through it, just like what we talked about at the beginning. That's what it's all about for me.
[00:36:30.000] - John S. Berry
Yeah, I think it's so true that, hey, we're going to camp out and talk. Hey, I spoon with some other soldier at the LPOP. Freezing under the poncho line. You're like, I don't need to go in a tent with somebody because we've been there where it's like we're forced It's amazing. The conversations you'll have at 3: 00 in the morning after you've been on the... I don't know if they still call it the listening post observation. LPOP. Yeah. But it's like, and you're sitting there because you're trying to stay awake, so you'll talk about anything. But this is a little bit different situation.
[00:37:00.420] - Jason Dickinson
Absolutely. It's a 10 by 10 tent with roommates, and it's seven foot tall. So you stand in it. They're really nice. We're partially sponsored by Spring Bar Tent, so they help us out with having affordable lifestyles for people that are out there on the river. And we also have females in every cohort, so we want to make sure that we're putting everybody in a comfortable situation. And we also have a lot of guest speakers that come out and talk to us and teach different skill sets. Last year, I had a guy from a South African guy come out and teach jimbay drum meditation, and everybody got a jimbay drum. So, it's all kinds of stuff. Nothing's off the table for the only thing that is the core curriculum will always be there. But whatever I can find as an idea of something to help you try something new that might work for you, then we're going to try it.
[00:37:54.920] - John S. Berry
That's great because I love when there's a core curriculum where you know what you're going to get. But we live in such a fast-paced world, where different skills, different opportunities, they come along. There's things that I've done through different groups. I would never do that. Then it's like, that's an opportunity, and you learn something. You're surprised at this stuff, whether it's breathing exercises or stuff like that. You're like, yeah, whatever. But You get in a group and you're doing it and you learn something.
[00:38:19.180] - Jason Dickinson
It's funny with the jimbay drums, everybody got them and they're all looking at them like, this year, there were 12 men sitting around in their folding chairs with a drum in front of Danny starts talking and they're all like, right? They're looking around like, what do we got going on here? 20 minutes in, you look around and they're like, animal, animal, like the Muffet guy. They're all into it. And you're like, oh. And then almost every night, somebody would bring their drum out by the fire where you got some music playing in the background. It would be like some little... It became like a toy. But also, I'm like, cool. And you know what? If you don't want the drum, when you get home, give it to your kids. And that was the last thing in either one where they were like, I'm not taking this home for my child to play with.
[00:39:09.550] - John S. Berry
Right. Yeah. No, that's the point. And I think learning new skills is so crucial to development. It's not necessarily what skill you learn. It's that you're learning a skill and your brain is developing. It's like decision making. It's not important. The decision you make, it's just important that you make a decision.
[00:39:28.460] - Jason Dickinson
Absolutely. That's how I never really wanted to get into jiu-jitsu. And then all of a sudden somebody's like, Come with me to jiu-jitsu. I was like, okay. And then the next thing you know, you're doing it for a little while. Then you're like, I want to go get level one or whatever. You have to just say yes, every now and then. Say, you know what? Yes. We had a guy this year, 55 years old that came. He'd been only served four years in the Army and he had been out for however long after that, 20 plus years. He's actually one of the testimonials on our site. And he said, I've been out for 20 years, and I've really haven't made a ton of friends, and I haven't really wanted to. And he goes, but I He goes, But I didn't realize how bad I needed these two weeks. He owns his own business. Taking those two weeks off were a big impact for him financially. But he says every day, now, I just talked to him yesterday. He said, completely worth it. Taking that knee and being able to recharge, it's invaluable.
[00:40:35.560] - John S. Berry
Yeah. I mean, as a leader, you got to know when to take a knee and drink water.
[00:40:38.560] - Jason Dickinson
That's right. I mean, if nothing else, ranger school will teach you that. The answer to everything is take a knee, drink some water. When you start trying to get the Pepsi out of the pine tree because you haven't slept in four days, and you start cussing out the pine tree, talking to your buddy's like, Hey, you all right? And it's like, the thing took money, man. It won't give me my Coke.
[00:41:03.720] - John S. Berry
Yeah.
[00:41:04.540] - Jason Dickinson
Maybe that just happened to me.
[00:41:05.760] - John S. Berry
No, we all hallucinated. And I think mostly for me, it was in the mountain phase. It's a hallucination. But lack of sleep. But I think that was one of the lessons, right? That was one of the lessons. That was one of the best, I think, leadership lessons of Ranger School was you got to take care of yourself. If you don't sleep and you don't eat, you will make bad decisions and you will put people's lives in jeopardy.
[00:41:26.480] - Jason Dickinson
Absolutely. And it's, again, it holds that mirror up in front of you for the rest of your career to be able to look in that mirror and go, I am tired right now. I don't need to make this decision right now. This isn't a right now decision. So, I'm going to give me 20 minutes of shut eye and then come back and try to solve this problem. Yeah. Invaluable lessons.
[00:41:50.230] - John S. Berry
That's a great point. I think it's a great lesson. Once again, easier said than done, because you have that emotional response where you want to solve it right now, but you know. You No. Okay, I'm tired. I'm not in a good state of mind. I'm not in the optimal place to make this important decision. I need to get some space between me and the decision. Sometimes there are bigger decisions that if you go to a river and spend a little time on it and go there with the intention of, I'm going to figure this out, you're usually getting a better answer than if you try to fix it right on the spot because you have your own time-imposed deadline on this thing. No, take some time, figure it out, and be around people who will be that listening board for you. I mean, that's the one thing I've learned the most about the military leadership, is sometimes you just need people to listen, like when you're giving an off order, and then your NCOs are like, they are looking at you and you're like, okay, I knew that was bad. I can't even need to say it.
[00:42:49.320] - John S. Berry
Okay, let's go back through the concept of the operation. I got it. But all I need to do is say it out loud and have somebody listen to me and to realize this is a really shit idea.
[00:42:59.020] - Jason Dickinson
Right.
[00:42:59.520] - John S. Berry
That's all I needed. I didn't even need them to say it, but it wasn't until I voiced it to them that I could then internalize it and really see it for what it was. I'm sure you experience the same thing on the river where you get people to talk about, hey, let's actually people don't want to talk, but you don't solve problems by not talking about them.
[00:43:17.100] - Jason Dickinson
That's right. On the river, again, like life, 90 to 95 % of that river is pretty much pool and even flowing water. And then every, let's call it 10 to 15 or 20 minutes, there's a rapid. And it all happens fast and quick, and you have to be in sync. And then it's back to, okay, right? And what it's teaching you is like, hey, once you get through that, we do a quick after-action review, same as you want to do in life, just like you just talked about with your given your off-order and your NCO looking at you and you're like, Yeah, it was bad, wasn't it? I didn't guide the boat. We almost flipped over there. We lost Jimmy. Had to go recover him. And oh, by the way, everybody in that boat, pretty much no one in there has ever guided a whitewater raft boat before. It's very rare that I've had anybody that considered themselves a whitewater extraordinaire when they got there. So, you're trusting yourself in categories. And one of the first things my instructor says is how many deaths occurred on Browns Canyon last year. It's like a Navy SEAL training.
[00:44:28.880] - Jason Dickinson
They tell you how many people Sharks had everywhere out in the water before you go out there. Same thing. Eight people died on this river last year. So, you need to take this river serious. And all of a sudden everybody's like, whoa, well, none of us know what we're doing on this boat except for that one guy, and he's not driving. So, you have to confide in each other. It changes constantly. And just like in most cases, 90 % of life is pretty smooth. It's 10 % of turmoil that happens and comes quick, and you just got to push through that. So, I think that we do a pretty good job of assimilating that on the river.
[00:45:12.500] - John S. Berry
Yeah. And I think it's interesting because sometimes those things hit home, but we know, too, eight people died. But it's like when you went to your airborne school, it's like, yeah, the odds of my parachute not opening are fairly astronomical. And yet I know a guy, I'm going to see him in December, who survived a complete parachute malfunction. Oh, wow. Yeah. So, a Range Regiment guy. And it was a scary time for him, but he survived it. And it's one of those things. It's a great story. Not my story to tell. But the point is, I think for most of us, we get scared to do things. Then we realize, hey, the results could be catastrophic, but what are the odds? Is it going to be bad? On the other side, in business, a lot of times, too, for Veterans and nonprofits, the odds of being successful are not great, right? Are not Great. But you do it anyway. And I think that that's one of the more difficult skills to develop is being discerning enough to say, you know what? I'm not going to fail because the statistics say I'm not going to fail, but I'm going to take a chance where I think I could fail, but I know I'm going to succeed because I'm going to do my risk assessments.
[00:46:17.950] - John S. Berry
I'm going to be prepared. I have faith in my team, my leadership ability, and leadership ability of my subordinates. We're going to go in and we're going to do this. And I think it's tough because on one hand, you should be scared. There's times in life where you just should be scared. If you're going to that river and you're not scared, there's a problem.
[00:46:37.580] - Jason Dickinson
Yeah. I gave you a PFD for a reason. So that when you fall out, because you will at some point in the two-week time frame, you're going to float and we will get to you. You got a bunch of people that really are invested in recovering you. We had a guy last year, fell out and he got pinned under the boat for about 15 or 20 seconds. Ended up having a, not a great moment for about the next 20 minutes until we pulled over for lunch. I had to go sit down and have big leadership challenge for me because he came up and he said, I'm not getting back in the water. I was like, okay, man, you don't have to get back in the water. Then we talked. He told me why it shook him up a little bit. When we got ready to leave for lunch, I noticed he was still sitting over there and he was waiting for somebody to come I pick him up, take him back. And I said, hey, Johnny, let's go. And he goes, I told you I can't get back in. I said, I'm not asking you to get in the river.
[00:47:40.060] - Jason Dickinson
I'm asking you to get on the river. You get in my boat. I got you. I'm going to sit right beside you the whole time. Fifteen minutes later, he's got in the boat. So, it's all like, hey, let's make this make sense for you. You've never quitted anything in your life. Yeah, that was scary. But now you got a cool story, bro. That's right. Yeah. That's the way I looked at it for him. And he's an awesome guy. I just found out that he registered for Warrior Week with Camp Southern Ground here and he's going to be going to do some more work down there in March. So awesome. I'm partnered up with Camp Southern Ground down in Georgia.
[00:48:23.480] - John S. Berry
So, I guess there are some rivers in Georgia. I don't know if you could-
[00:48:30.000] - Jason Dickinson
So, it started...
[00:48:31.170] - Jason Dickinson
The reason the Salida and Browns Canyon started was all because of the relationship that I built with the guy that taught me how to guide. And then that company, both of those two guys that own Independent Whitewater in Salida, Colorado, though. Their parents were military, and they didn't have to be in the military during Vietnam and beyond. So they feel like this is an opportunity for them to really give back, and they love having us on their property at a slow time of year for their normal business, because it usually June is when it picks up. And we're there and we graduate on Memorial Day every year. It's always Mother's Day to Memorial Day. And the whole city comes out, John. We had probably 800 people on the sides of that river last year for our four rafts to come through. We had a red, white and blue raft come through. Fire Department was there over the bridge when we came through the city. It was amazing. It's gotten bigger each year. We're super excited about the town that supports us. I'm in talks now with another former 75th guy who has a place. I don't want to give too much away because we're not officially partners yet.
[00:49:47.580] - Jason Dickinson
But on the Gauley River in West Virginia, he's got a place, and we're going to look at adding Veterans on there. Oh, nice. So we'll have an East Coast and a West Coast option.
[00:49:58.700] - John S. Berry
Oh, that's great. That's on the side. Of course, West Virginia. Was it West Virginia or Georgia where they filmed Deliverance?
[00:50:04.650] - Jason Dickinson
That was Georgia. But the Chattooga, you were talking about rivers in Georgia, right? The Chattooga River in Georgia is amazing. And we haven't been able to find the right partner yet to try and pair up with the Chattooga because you have to be able to have a pretty good flatwater section to train on before you start going into the whitewater. So we want to do that. And it's the same thing like you're talking about with the E4 The E4 Mafia, they got to have some garrison time before they start going into the thick stuff. It's the same thing. You got to do the training first and then get in it. And by the way, at about the same time you come off of the smooth water and go into the whitewater, that's about the same time that we finish up with the super personal assessments while you're doing that. Then when you get into the harder stuff, we start talking about job preparedness and how do you interview for new jobs? Are you resume ready for what you now think that you want to do and all that stuff. So the curriculum is matched up really, really well with the way that we operate on the river.
[00:51:11.580] - John S. Berry
That's great. Yeah. I guess you can do hard things. The hard things don't seem so hard anymore, right? That's right. When we're in the middle of something dangerous and scary. All right. So this takes us to the after-action review. Your examples of great leadership and poor leadership. But don't have to name names. Let's start with the great.
[00:51:29.480] - Jason Dickinson
Great leadership. Leadership. I will tell you that, so 2015 and '16, I was in Kuwait. I was sent there to be the G2 for the 335th Signal Command, forward operations. And I had a chief of staff, I won't mention her name, but I had a chief of staff at the time that when I got there, everybody was telling her, Hey, we don't need a G2. We get our G2 from Third Army and we'll be in good shape, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She said, Yeah, we don't need a G2, so to speak. We had this conversation and I told her, I said, Ma'am, give me 60 days to figure out what it is we need on the intel side and how we can help the mission. We ended up forming what is now called the decoyce, which is defense cyber operation support to intelligence. We took intel people and taught them how to operate intel stuff in the cyber environment for 335th Signal Command, which for those of you guys that don't know, 335th Signal was all of the network for Southwest Asia.
[00:52:49.020] - John S. Berry
Wow.
[00:52:49.560] - Jason Dickinson
That's the forward operating piece. I got this. I said, hey, ma'am, I need $150,000. I need to go to Korea and Hawaii to do some training, and I need you to find me four people. Her guidance, instead of saying no, was, I can't get you any more people. I can get you a meeting with the general about the budget, but it's going to be on you. You have my support 100%. We went through this whole thing because the budget wasn't hers to give away. That support that I needed at the time is an example of great leadership to me. It's like somebody saying, oh, you've opened up your Swiss Army knife, and now you want to use these two tools let's go take it to the boss and see if that's the tools that he's okay with. We got the money. I formed an island of misfit toys that came because I would go over and I'd be like, hey, do you got any soldiers that are cyber savvy, that you're not really? Sure enough, this unit gives me one. This unit gives me one. It says, you can have a mopcon.
[00:53:54.040] - Jason Dickinson
Next thing you know, we have a whole cell, and we're actually producing actionable intelligence in the cyber environment. So it was really cool. That was great leadership. Poor leadership. I was still a second lieutenant when this happened. I'm in Hohenfels, Germany, second lieutenant. That's living the dream, first of all. We're on an operation out there, our FTX. You go to the field for three weeks or whatever, the equivalent of NTC. Cmtc. Cmtc, that's it. We're out there, and I had I'm a former Marine enlisted Marine that was now my battery commander. I'm in an artillery unit at the time. We're doing multiple launch rocket systems. We get out there. I had been drilling my guys. I had just had a platoon FTX the week prior to us leaving. So I knew everything there was to know about my guys, their statistics and the stuff that happened. We had a mission to switch from missiles to rockets by a certain time. The expectation was The unspoken expectation was that we would start this process and phase it in a few hours in. Well, we had just been the hot platoon, which means we had to be time on target, prepared, all this stuff for a while.
[00:55:18.260] - Jason Dickinson
The battery commander went and checked on my platoon and they were sleeping, except for the one loner that was doing what it was supposed to be doing at that time. He came in my platoon operations center and just lit me up. I said, Sir, yeah. I told him to sleep. They've been up for 30 hours running these missions. They're doing this stuff. We had a guy that broke track and had to... If you're a mech guy, you know, breaking track is not as a half day activity no matter what. And he did in the middle of the night, put it all back together in the middle of the night. I said, Here's the deal. Those three squads that you just went and checked on, this guy takes 8 minutes and 15 seconds on average to switch. This guy takes 7 minutes and 50 seconds. I said, There's no reason for me to have them awake, waiting for me to give them a call. I gave them a time. The poor part of the leadership there was, I don't care. He was like, And now for the rest of this field training exercise, you're going to carry these five-gallon water jugs around so that you understand the importance of and being somewhere with your mission.
[00:56:35.220] - Jason Dickinson
Being a prior service guy, I just looked at them and we had a conversation off to the side after that. Because I said, I'm not carrying around water jugs. These are the same guys you're asking me to take into combat next week. You're going to have me walk around with water jugs? No, because that could happen. I understand your point, but it's no. He and I became really, really close after that, and I became his head platoon leader, and then later became his XO. But that example of poor leadership has stuck with me forever. It's just like handing out a punishment just because, and then also not you saying somebody, I want you to take charge of your unit, but when they took charge, but it's not the way you wanted it, you give them a consequence for it. Hey, no, you need to be able to give people liberty and leadership. You have to have liberty and leadership. Otherwise, you're not letting them lead, you're letting them manage. To let you lead, I have to give you that freedom to make some mistakes. What was going to happen at CMTC? I was going to not shoot my telephone poles at the thing at the right time.
[00:57:44.380] - Jason Dickinson
Nothing was really going to happen, and that would have been a life lesson that I carried with me. Well, it turns out I carried it with me no matter what. But that's my number one and number two, I think.
[00:57:55.540] - John S. Berry
Yeah. And the part of it is, too, we all know, hey, if you're on a fire watch or you're a patrol base and you're pulling security, well, then you got to be awake. But if there's downtime, you want your people to perform at their best. They need to get sleep. You need to take care of my bed. Hey, yeah, of course they're asleep. They're not doing a mission right now. Yes, of course they're not. Hey, tomorrow when it's go time, I expect them to be all in. But for now, because I found that as a leader, when you would try to set stuff like, you always have people. It's like the recruitment photos, right? The Marines always talk about it. They don't see. You see the guy in the uniform, but they don't see everything else. It's the same thing. It's like, you want that guy in the uniform to look pristine, this is what it takes to get there. And you want my team to perform tomorrow to standard or to exceed the standard? They need rest. And we're not going to do stupid stuff just to do stupid stuff. And I will tell you, I learned that lesson early because I was that bad leader.
[00:59:00.860] - John S. Berry
But then when I ran the Officer and Warrant Officer Canada School in the National Guard, all of a sudden, I realized a lot of the stuff that was happening before was hazing. But we wanted all the streamers. So I'm like, all right, all the dumb shit stops today. We're going to score highest on academics, highest on landmark. We're going to win the ruck march. All the tests, we are going to be number one, and we're going to train for the test. And some of the tack officers were like, hey, sir, what do you mean? And I said, hey, look. Each class, I think it was like 50 minutes long. It was a 10-minute break. I'm like, in that 10-minute break, you can make them do a thousand flutter kicks. I don't care. They're going to spend the time because we're going to be the best. We're going to be the best. And that was like an eight state region. I'm like, We're going to be the best. And the way we get there is we stop doing dumb stuff. And When we start doing the stuff that's going to matter. And so, I mean, yeah, did we do a ton of ruck marches?
[00:59:50.000] - John S. Berry
Yeah. Did we do a ton of land nav? Yeah. But it wasn't like they were doing... They said this thing called the Bridge Across the River Kua, where they would take the... You know what I'm talking I do. I don't know what they're getting into. But they would take stuff out of the barracks, and you'd have to... But the thing was that that was... I mean, at the end of the day, there's probably some lessons there, but that wasn't going to get results. That was not going to get the... And I'm like, Hey, if you're going to be an officer, you need to be a high performer. Period. And how many dirtbag lieutenants did you see when you were an enlisted soldier?
[01:00:22.530] - Jason Dickinson
Absolutely.
[01:00:23.360] - John S. Berry
So you're going to lead by example. As a young lieutenant, look, the only thing you can control are... I mean, you were prior service, so you're a little bit better. But most of us, it was, I can control my physical fitness. I can control the way my uniform looks. Back we had that stupid idea of starching and pressing uniforms. But I'm going to control my physical fitness. The way my uniform looks, and my attitude. I'm going to come to work every day and I'm here to learn and I may get beat down, but I'm here to learn and I'm here to win. And so that's what I was trying to teach them. I was like, Guys, it doesn't matter if getting them up at 3 in the morning and messing with them, let them get their sleep and let's build champions here so they'll lead their people this way.
[01:01:04.000] - Jason Dickinson
Yeah. I want to add a humbling moment to this because my first Company Command, I want to talk about just a quick story with that. Yes, please do. For my first Company Command, it was a basic training Company Command at Sand Hill, Fort Benning. So we're out and we had always done... We were a top performing company. I had amazing, 13 amazing drill sergeants. And my My first sergeant was a E8 first sergeant, Infantry, no ranger tab, had been mech his whole career, most of it in Korea. But he was this cool Southern mountain of a man. We get out to the BRM range. Basically, my Infantry guy is whispering in my ear, my two infantry drill sergeants are whispering in my ear, this This is the way we need to do it. Instead of shooting three rounds to group, three rounds to adjust, and then three rounds to zero, we need to shoot all nine rounds at the same time, and then we'll be able to group faster. It made sense to me. I call everybody in and I tell them that that's what we're going to do at the beginning of the day.
[01:02:18.680] - Jason Dickinson
Two of my drill sergeants were like, Sir, I've tried that in the past. It's not the way I have results. I said, Just try it this way anyway today. Do it. He starts to complain again. My first sergeant said, That's it. You heard the commander. They went out and they did exactly what I told them to do. As soon as the BRM range fired up, my old first sergeant puts in a big old dip of Copenhagen. He goes, Hey, sir, why don't you walk with me for a second? I said, Okay, so I'm all happy with things, rounds going off everywhere. I'm feeling good. He goes, So basically what you just told two of those drill sergeants at a minimum, you said it to everybody, is that even though the manual tells you to do it this way and the standard is this way, you want it done different. Is that what your intention was? I was like, No. He's like, So let me tell you, the ones that want to do it your way were already going to do it your way anyway. The ones that now are trying to do it according to regulation, you just told them to break the regulation.
[01:03:25.760] - Jason Dickinson
Good job, Company Commander. Then he just turned around and walked off and I was like, Oh, my God. He wanted to see what I was going to do. I'll tell you that what I took from this is I went straight to the tower. We ceased fire, all drill sergeant report to the tower. I retracted my statement. I apologize for the statement. My two Infantry Drill Sergeant, both, came to my office at the end of the day and said, first time I've ever heard an officer apologize for a decision that he made. I just want you to know that we got your back and we appreciate it. I I was like, so to me, that's when the word humble came into play ever for the first time, because there's a little bit of when you're a young enlisted guy and you're in some cool units and some things like that, you got a little bit of swagger that comes with you. But that little piece of humble pie as a company commander, I've carried that with me for my entire career after that. It was like, okay, so you really do. You said discernment a second ago, right?
[01:04:30.180] - Jason Dickinson
The number one skill sought after for executives by Fortune 100 companies is the skill of discernment. Pretty interesting.
[01:04:39.800] - John S. Berry
Yeah, tough one to build.
[01:04:41.900] - Jason Dickinson
It is. You got to make mistakes to build it. That's the key.
[01:04:46.280] - John S. Berry
Well, Jason, as this brings us to the close of this Veteran On The River episode, where can Veterans learn more about you and your nonprofit, Veterans On The River?
[01:04:57.980] - Jason Dickinson
So just like it sounds, www. Veteransontheriver. Org. We're also on social media, all one word, #Veteransontheriver. Everywhere on there, as soon as you get to the website, the second tab you can see on the website says apply. So, you can go on there. There's donate buttons all over the place. And we try to do a pretty good job in the off-season to keep the social media decently active. But it's really intense. The month prior and the month after and the month of because we get so much material that we crank through at that point. And the only people that are doing my social media for me are interns that are coming from universities that want to support Veterans. So, yeah, if you want to find us, just Veterans on the River.
[01:05:51.420] - John S. Berry
Awesome. And once again, the big lesson here is the leadership by example, because a lot of people, especially Veterans I talk to, say, I want to have nonprofit, and I want to build this thing, but I also want to have this civilian career, and you've done both. And it's one thing to talk about doing both, but you've actively done it and continued to do it. I would say this for Veterans looking to follow in your footsteps and do the same thing, what is their biggest challenge going to be?
[01:06:17.800] - Jason Dickinson
The biggest challenge is going to be is to take a small bite. I started off working in the Atlanta area, volunteering for nonprofits. Then the next thing, I'm noticing that I'm spending 2 hours a week with a nonprofit, and then I'm spending two hours a week with two different nonprofits. So, I think the biggest thing is your idea doesn't have to go from zero to 60 overnight. Veterans on the River, surely didn't do that. If six people the first time was a pilot, and believe it or not, my wife was the one that told me to do that. She was like, Simmer down. You don't have to go all out. You don't have to go. I was applying for grants, and I didn't realize that some of the grants that I wanted to apply for and I was getting told no. I found out I was getting told no because I didn't have three years of tax returns. So, you got to have a couple of years under your belt, spend some time and don't be scared to fail at it. I look at my job and I go, I'm really... Maybe something that you're doing with your job or career right now can translate.
[01:07:22.200] - Jason Dickinson
And there are Veterans that need that help in some capacity. So, I look at it as an opportunity for you to just Start off measured and be relentless. Just keep after it. Keep after it.
[01:07:39.300] - John S. Berry
Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we seek to help Veterans build an even bigger, better future after military service. Unfortunately for some of our Veterans, the roadblock to a better future is that they are not receiving all of the benefits that they earned. If you need help appealing a VA disability decision, contact Berry Law.