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Aug. 15, 2024
Navigating Chaos Through Stoicism with Kristofor Healey
Ever wondered what happens when a federal agent blows the whistle on corruption and turns to ancient philosophy for guidance? Join us as Kristofor Healey, a former award-winning DHS special agent, shares his gripping narrative of standing up to a corrupt superior and navigating the ensuing turmoil with the principles of Stoicism. His journey from anthropology to federal law enforcement post-9/11 and his impactful work on tele-fraud cases along the U.S. southwest border provides a unique backdrop to understand the deep-rooted issues within law enforcement leadership.
Through the teachings of Marcus Aurelius, Kris offers a fresh perspective on how Stoicism can empower law enforcement officers today. He delves into the mental resilience required to uphold their oath amidst conflicting directives, illustrating how focusing on controllable factors and relinquishing external stresses can lead to personal and professional growth. The discussion extends to the wealth of leadership resources available, stressing the importance of selecting practical and valuable advice for strengthening leadership skills.
Kristofor doesn’t just talk the talk; he walks the walk by integrating Stoic virtues into daily life. Highlighting the importance of courage and truth, he shares actionable tips like cold showers and early rises inspired by Admiral William McRaven's famous speech. Wrapping up our episode, we delve into his books, "Indispensable Tactical Plan for the Modern Man" and "In Valor: 365 Stoic Meditations for First Responders," and announce an exciting giveaway of signed copies. Prepare to be inspired as we explore how small, consistent actions can build resilience and fortitude in turbulent times.
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Transcript
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I actually blew the whistle on my special agent in charge, who was involved in a criminal conspiracy.
00:00:05.953 --> 00:00:08.970
I became aware of what he was doing.
00:00:08.970 --> 00:00:10.005
I blew the whistle on him.
00:00:10.005 --> 00:00:15.071
Long story short, the condensed version is he ended up going to federal prison for 37 months.
00:00:15.071 --> 00:00:17.487
One of my other colleagues went to jail for a year.
00:00:17.487 --> 00:00:21.367
Several of my another one got fired, another one got forced into early retirement.
00:00:21.420 --> 00:00:39.322
So there was this ripple effect throughout my agency and as I was going through that, knowing I'm the whistleblower right, I've got a target on my back from my own chain of command, my own agency, because I blew the whistle on illegal conduct in my office, and then all of this chaos going on around me, I really found that stoicism was a centering thing for me.
00:00:39.322 --> 00:00:47.496
It allowed me to recognize that dichotomy of control there's the things you control, the things that you do not, and you need to focus on doing the things that you control.
00:00:47.496 --> 00:00:49.701
And that stayed with me throughout my career.
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It really allowed me to accomplish more in my career than my brain power probably should have allowed me to.
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Welcome to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates, where leaders find the insights, advice and encouragement they need to lead courageously.
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Welcome back to the show.
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I'm so honored that you're with us here today and you are going to love today's guest.
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Today's guest is Kristofor Healey.
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He's a former award-winning special agent who spent more than 15 years investigating large-scale tele-fraud and public corruption cases for DHS.
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He's now an author and professional speaker.
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He shares daily Stoic quotes, relatable stories and journal prompts in his new book it's excellent, by the way In Valor 365 Stoic Meditations for First Responders, and on his free Substack channel he shares similar stories.
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It's called the Stoic Responder.
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He is available for speaking through the Teen Never Quit Speakers Bureau.
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Christopher man, thanks for being here, man, I'm so excited to have you.
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Thanks for having me.
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I'm excited to be here.
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It's fun.
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Well, man, you look like a young man to me.
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You've had an incredible journey so far in life.
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Just kind of tell us how you got here today doing all the things you're doing.
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Yeah, I'm mid-40s, believe it or not.
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I'm a little bit baby-faced, but time's been fair to me, I suppose.
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But yeah, I started out with DHS kind of in the beginning of DHS right.
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So post-9-11, I was in college, actually got an anthropology degree.
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9-11 happened when I was taking a gap year between college and graduate school.
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I was actually doing archaeology work for one of my professors.
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9-11 happened.
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It totally changed my career arc.
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I decided I wanted to get into law enforcement.
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After that, like a lot of people, I didn't know where to go.
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I didn't know anybody in law enforcement.
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I figured I wanted to go federal because we had just been attacked by people who had violated our immigration system.
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So that was naturally where I saw myself going and there was a big shutdown at the time.
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So a lot of people were, you know, talking about standing up this new Department of Homeland Security, creating this new thing to focus on borderrelated issues and bring all these kind of agencies from across the government under a single umbrella.
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And so I had to wait a couple of years and as soon as they opened up hiring again, it took about two, two and a half years to get the department stood up and then they had to cross-train and retrain a bunch of people with new job duties and then they started bringing new guys in.
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So I was one of the first new guys who came in under DHS and I grew up in New England.
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They sent me 2,600 miles from home down to the Rio Grande Valley, down to the southwest border, spent 10 years of my career down there between ICE and then later with DHS Office of Inspector General, which is the internal affairs component, and along the way I discovered that I had a bit of a knack for not just public corruption investigations, but the Office of Inspector General was in charge of anything that was impacting that had a fraud, waste or abuse nexus to the department.
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So it could have been procurement fraud, grant fraud.
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And then when we started getting telephone calls from individuals in the country on visas who said they were getting scammed by people threatening them with deportation, we took on that as well and that's how I ended up leading some of the largest telephonic cases in US history against call centers in India was by looking into people who were impersonating DHS.
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So my career kind of ran the gamut.
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I spent most of my time on the border and then eventually kind of worked my way to Houston.
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As most feds try to do at some point or another, they try to get where the pay is a little bit higher.
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I ended my career in Houston and now, as you said, I'm a trainer and a speaker and I try to share some of the wisdom that I learned along the way with others, because I think that exactly what you're doing is the right move, for when people move on from a law enforcement career, it's to turn around and give some of those skills, pass them back to the people who came up behind us.
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Yeah, yeah, Very important.
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You know you're never really out of that game, right, but it's your job to sort of leave that legacy and to educate people behind, and you're doing a lot of that now and that must be super interesting.
00:05:00.745 --> 00:05:06.701
You were involved early in DHS and of course they're in the news today.
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You know I talk a lot about leadership.
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I know you do as well, Chris, but just talk about the importance of when leadership fails, what happens within organizations.
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Yeah, well, let's talk.
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I mean, if you want to talk about that in terms of what's happening right now within DHS, you know you could actually argue that leadership isn't failing.
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No-transcript at some point.
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No matter how altruistic an organization is, no matter how publicly focused they are, an organization will eventually develop a protective bubble around the people at the top of it.
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Right, they will create a almost two-tiered organization.
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I think we see a lot of that.
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The best leaders in DHS, in my opinion, the people that I came up with, that I worked with, are going to be the people who don't necessarily have stripes or bars on their shoulders.
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They're the guys who have been in the field doing the job, that have the respect of their fellow agents.
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They're the people that everyone turns to, especially in tough times like this, when you are seeing record-breaking numbers crossing the border.
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You're seeing a complete failure from the top down.
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You're seeing the head kind of rot from the top down.
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That's when the leaders in the field, the people that are shoulder to shoulder with you, who just maybe have a little bit more dirt on their boots, maybe a little bit more dirt under their fingernails, maybe a little bit more time in grade, those are the guys that are stepping up and leading right now and thank God for them, because there's a real morale crisis that's coming from that top-down failure of leadership.
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Yeah, I can't imagine what it would be like inside their organization.
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And you're right, leadership has something to do with rank.
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We really get that wrong, as you know, and there's no question, from the middle on down, you have incredible people doing all they can to keep them riled up, but talking about two different dichotomies on mission, and of course, that's not any different than a lot of local law enforcement agencies.
00:07:12.408 --> 00:07:22.644
What you described is very, very similar to what I've seen across the country, where you've got the line level officers that know what the mission is, but they're not being supported by that mission.
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At the top, of course, dhs is at a completely different level at this point and it's hard to even imagine I don't want to spend too much time on it, but it's hard to even imagine having that philosophy where almost you're not trying to enforce the law, you're enabling people to break the law, even though you're a law enforcement agency.
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Yeah, and just think about how disappointing and difficult that is for the guys who again take that oath to protect and defend this country.
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It's the same exact oath that the people at the top of the chain took.
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The only oath that is different really is the presidential oath of office.
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Everybody else pretty much takes the same exact one, whether it's the secretary of DHS or the first fresh out of FLETC GS-5 landing on the Southwest border to go stand his watch, we all take the same oath.
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And so to understand and know that, hey, my job says that I am to detain these individuals, my job says that I am to protect this border, and then to have somebody coming and telling you not to do your job is tremendously difficult.
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And again, I live in the Houston area.
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I see this happening in PDs around here as well.
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I see it happening where judges, where prosecutors, where others are kind of having that same sort of impact on the day-to-day officer in the field, just trying to do their job.
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And that's where I think resiliency, mindset, work, the kind of stuff that you talk about.
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The stuff that I talk about can make a big difference in the lives of the day-to-day officers, because so much so long as you do the right thing, the rest does not matter.
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You have to continue to show up and do the right thing every single day and not get caught up in the things that you can't control, that are above your pay grade.
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We've described as just small snippet of the chaos that surrounds America today.
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I mean, you just have to watch the news to see all the chaos.
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But you found stoicism at some point in your career.
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I'm really curious.
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I found it about seven years ago.
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That's what drew my attention to you and your excellent book.
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You actually sort of stole an idea I sort of had.
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I'm glad you did it.
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That was a lot of work, 400 plus pages and so when I saw your book I go that's good, I don't have to do it now.
00:09:15.748 --> 00:09:21.427
I can just buy Chris's book and recommend his book, because we've all written books and we know the lift that is.
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That is not easy.
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So congratulations on an excellent, excellent product.
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We'll put the link in the show notes for everybody to go grab that.
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But you found this at some point.
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Kind of explain.
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I have my story how I found it.
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But tell us how you found this and then what it did for you early on into today.
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Yeah, I think I came around to it the way a lot of people do.
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I took a college philosophy, course 101.
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Well, you were paying attention in college.
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I didn't have any idea about it when I was in college philosophy.
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I don't know that I paid attention so much as there was Plato and Socrates and Marx and Foucault and all these other things and concepts that are thrown at you, that are very academic and scholastic sort of philosophies.
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And then you get your hands on Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and it's a journal.
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It's the most powerful man on earth writing a journal to himself, reminding himself not to be stained by the color of the purple that he wears, in other words, not to let leadership go to his head, to remember who he serves and what he serves.
00:10:16.710 --> 00:10:21.633
And it's such a powerful tool because you're seeing philosophy from a very practical standpoint.
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When you're reading Meditations.
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You're seeing how he's actually implementing the ideas of his philosophy in his daily notes to himself, and that really struck me.
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Now, of course, you know like you read that and you move on to the next class or whatever.
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It really wasn't until I picked it up over time at various times, but I really leaned into it in about 2014.
00:10:41.682 --> 00:10:47.783
I actually blew the whistle on my special agent in charge, who was involved in a criminal conspiracy.
00:10:47.783 --> 00:10:50.789
I became aware of what he was doing.
00:10:50.789 --> 00:10:51.832
I blew the whistle on him.
00:10:51.832 --> 00:10:56.871
Long story short, the condensed version is he ended up going to federal prison for 37 months.
00:10:56.871 --> 00:10:59.365
One of my other colleagues went to jail for a year.
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Several of my another one got fired, another one got forced into early retirement.
00:11:03.184 --> 00:11:15.068
So there was this ripple effect throughout my agency and as I was going through that, knowing I'm the whistleblower right, I've got a target on my back from my own chain of command, my own agency, because I blew the whistle on illegal conduct in my office.
00:11:15.561 --> 00:11:21.113
And then all of this chaos going on around me, I really found that stoicism was a centering thing for me.
00:11:21.113 --> 00:11:25.722
It allowed me to recognize that dichotomy of control centering thing for me.
00:11:25.722 --> 00:11:29.220
It allowed me to recognize that dichotomy of control there's the things you control, the things that you do not, and you need to focus on doing the things that you control.
00:11:29.220 --> 00:11:31.509
And that stayed with me throughout my career.
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It really allowed me to accomplish more in my career than my brain power probably should have allowed me to.
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It allowed me to be more resilient in my personal life.
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I started doing endurance racing, I started doing Ironman triathlons and ultra marathons, and a lot of that I drew from the strength that I got from that philosophy that was really teaching you to focus inward, focus on what you control.
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Let go of your anxieties, let go of the things that are outside of your control and focus on what you can do every single day to live in virtue, and if you do that, you're going to have a better life.
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You're going to have a better work-life balance, you're going to be a better employee, you're going to be a better husband, a better son, a better father all of those things just by focusing on those things that you do control.
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Isn't that amazing?
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We live in this day and age where there's never been more leadership resources in history, that's put out even on an annual basis thousands of books and resources and classes.
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Of course we're in that game, chris.
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We know all those that are out there.
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Most aren't something I would probably recommend.
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I certainly would recommend what you do, but there's a lot of inundation and leadership.
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But when we talk about stoicism, this is getting back to the basics Old school, thousands of years old school, and it's powerful man.
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It's more powerful than most of the trainings I've been to.
00:12:43.707 --> 00:12:52.136
Isn't that ironic that in a day and age with all this technology, when you talk about stoicism, it still works to a T today?
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Yeah and I think I actually may have written this for your website when there's that quote that's made the rounds recently about how strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and that kind of cycle just perpetuates itself.
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Right, and you can ask yourself where are we in the cycle?
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And I think we all kind of have an idea that when the chaos increases, that maybe things have gotten too weak as a society, and I think that that's true.
00:13:16.554 --> 00:13:27.729
I mean, we're in a society where it's Amazon Prime and DoorDash and Uber Eats and all of that stuff has made us less accomplished in a lot of ways, and that's when people tend to drift back to Stoicism.
00:13:27.729 --> 00:13:32.231
And I think the important thing to know about Stoicism is that it came out of times like that.
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It was built and born in the Hellenistic period and for those who know their ancient world, their history, that's the period about 300 years before the birth of Christ, right after Alexander the Great has died.
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He's this incredible military conqueror, this incredible leader.
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He dies young and that kind of is, as the end of the Greek era dies off with Alexander the Great, the beginnings of the Roman Empire.
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That's where this philosophy comes from.
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Is this period of incredible chaos in the ancient world and the stresses that they were facing, that people like Marcus Aurelius, you know, in the first century, second century AD, is facing, and Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, is facing.
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Those stresses are the same for law enforcement and law enforcement leaders today.
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Think about what Marcus was facing in the second century.
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He's facing a pandemic, the Antonine Plague, which was a smallpox pandemic that wiped out 7.5 million Romans.
00:14:22.315 --> 00:14:30.585
Right, we've just the last four years we've been dealing with our own pandemic and the fallout of that and everything that goes with that.
00:14:30.585 --> 00:14:31.967
From a public policy perspective, marcus was dealing with that.
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He's dealing with wars against the Parthenian Empire on his eastern border, which is present-day Iran.
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We've still got some problems in the Middle East today, don't we?
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He's dealing with a war on his northern border with the Germanic tribes.
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We've got some problems with people crossing our border illegally too.
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So there is a lot of common ground if we go back 2,400 years in our history and look at the Emperor of Rome's journals telling himself how to lead in these chaotic times that we can draw from today and you said it absolutely right.
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If you look at a Jocko Willink or David Goggins or some of these guys who are presenting that sort of attitude about going out there and seizing life.
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That's stoicism in a very practical way, and so there's nothing new in this philosophy.
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But I feel like there's not enough, directed at our law enforcement and first responders, to tell them to look at this, open up your eyes.
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There is value in this and for me, writing the book was.
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I didn't want people to have to do what I did, which is read 15 volumes of all the different philosophers and everything else.
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I just wanted to try to give them a little bite-sized, entry-sized nugget into it that could give them some mindset tools to use on a daily basis.
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A little bite-sized, entry-sized nugget into it that could give them some mindset tools to use on a daily basis.
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If you're just now joining us, we're talking to Christopher Healy.
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He's the author of the excellent book In Valor 365 Stoic Meditations for First Responders.
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The link is in the notes.
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Be sure to pick that up.
00:15:49.524 --> 00:15:52.289
And you talk, chris, about comfort.
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Comfort is dangerous.
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I do something every year.
00:15:54.802 --> 00:15:55.945
I'm sure you do something similar.
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You've already described some hard things.
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You do, I do hard things.
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I make commitment every year in January to do hard things, to learn new hard things.
00:16:02.725 --> 00:16:05.091
One year I started jiu-jitsu at age 50.
00:16:05.091 --> 00:16:05.902
That was interesting.
00:16:05.902 --> 00:16:06.764
Still is interesting.
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I'm still bruised each and every day.
00:16:08.408 --> 00:16:11.765
One year it was to learn to play the guitar because that looked very easy.
00:16:11.765 --> 00:16:12.929
It's actually not very easy.
00:16:12.929 --> 00:16:20.585
So every year I try to pack on those hard things.
00:16:20.585 --> 00:16:26.443
Talk to our audience about why it's so important as a leader to not get comfortable, to continue to push yourself to do those hard things and how that can target harden you.
00:16:27.506 --> 00:16:29.171
I absolutely love that question.
00:16:29.171 --> 00:16:31.046
I love that you do that and you practice that.
00:16:31.046 --> 00:16:34.542
And again, this is something that goes back to the ancient Stoics.
00:16:34.542 --> 00:16:39.282
Seneca used to take a cold bath in the aqueduct to start every new year.
00:16:39.282 --> 00:16:41.912
So this whole idea of a polar plunge isn't even new.
00:16:41.912 --> 00:16:47.030
We all do that, right, but Seneca the Younger was doing that back in the first century AD.
00:16:47.030 --> 00:16:49.880
So no, I think that's incredibly important.
00:16:50.201 --> 00:16:52.086
I started doing ultra marathons.
00:16:52.086 --> 00:16:53.811
I started doing Ironman triathlons.
00:16:53.811 --> 00:16:56.225
I've done bodybuilding shows, crossfit competitions.
00:16:56.225 --> 00:17:06.493
I really don't excel at these physical tasks, but I do them so that I can teach my body not to be disobedient to my mind.
00:17:06.493 --> 00:17:11.559
Seneca said that too, that we should be rigorous with the body so that it doesn't disobey the mind.
00:17:12.101 --> 00:17:31.226
You have to create adversity in your life so that when moments of adversity come up, you are prepared, you are trained to deal with adversity, so that voluntary, that cultivating voluntary adversity makes you better prepared for the involuntary adversity that every leader, every law enforcement officer is going to face at some point in their career.
00:17:31.626 --> 00:17:43.545
I have drawn so much from that well of experience when I have had things happen in my life and in my career that have been challenging and difficult, when I've had a child get sick, when we've completed two international adoptions.
00:17:43.545 --> 00:17:44.469
Those are not easy.
00:17:44.469 --> 00:17:51.132
If I didn't have the experiences that I had created through voluntary adversity, that sort of involuntary adversity might have broken us.
00:17:51.132 --> 00:17:57.265
It might have caused us not to be able to go through with it, but to create that well of experiences that you can draw from when things are tough.
00:17:57.265 --> 00:17:58.807
It makes you stronger mentally.
00:17:58.807 --> 00:18:04.405
It makes you better able to be the voice, the calm voice in the storm that everyone needs.
00:18:04.405 --> 00:18:07.826
It makes you better able to be that guy where there's chaos all around you.
00:18:07.826 --> 00:18:13.970
You can calm the scene because you know in your heart of hearts that you can handle this, because you've handled harder things in the past.
00:18:14.680 --> 00:18:20.830
Yeah, I don't know if someone said it or just talked to my head, but you know, hard men can get through hard times and it's it's.
00:18:20.830 --> 00:18:21.192
It's.
00:18:21.192 --> 00:18:29.163
It's funny to me because we have people in law enforcement that when the mobile data terminal goes down, they don't think they can work anymore.
00:18:29.163 --> 00:18:45.569
Right, and and I think it's so important for everybody listening to this to understand that if you are comfortable, you're doing something wrong, Because when you go through hard times, every time you go through additional hard times, you're right, you can navigate that a little easier.
00:18:45.589 --> 00:18:54.388
I can think back in my last 30 years in the profession, you know, and what I thought was really chaotic three years on was nothing by the time I got done, because you sort of learn.
00:18:54.388 --> 00:19:03.410
So we train in everything in law enforcement, chris, you know firearms, defensive tactics and all this stuff, so we can, when it happens, we can perform.
00:19:03.410 --> 00:19:08.247
What advice would you give the law enforcement professionals listening to this to go.
00:19:08.247 --> 00:19:08.869
You know what?
00:19:08.869 --> 00:19:10.226
Maybe I am a little too comfortable.
00:19:10.226 --> 00:19:14.890
What could they start doing today so when those hard times do come, they can succeed?
00:19:16.019 --> 00:19:21.365
Yeah, the easiest thing that you can do today if you want to add some, some, some voluntary adversity to your life.
00:19:21.365 --> 00:19:23.720
Take a cold shower, Get it, get in there.
00:19:23.720 --> 00:19:28.092
You don't have to do the cold bath, the ice plunge and all the stuff the influencers online are doing.
00:19:28.092 --> 00:19:34.981
Just set that shower to cold and force yourself to breathe through it for 30 seconds or a minute, but do that every single day.
00:19:34.981 --> 00:19:38.006
Do that for 30 days and you'll be amazed at the resilience that you gain.
00:19:38.026 --> 00:19:41.250
You'll be amazed at how much You'll have the dopamine.
00:19:41.250 --> 00:19:41.632
That happens.
00:19:41.632 --> 00:19:42.814
Dopamine helps too.
00:19:42.834 --> 00:19:45.602
Dopamine helps too and hell, we're getting older.
00:19:45.602 --> 00:19:49.132
It helps with muscle soreness and the bumps and bruises you're talking about with jujitsu.
00:19:49.132 --> 00:19:52.690
So, no, but that's, that's the easiest thing that you can do to introduce that.
00:19:52.690 --> 00:20:00.373
Set your alarm 30 minutes earlier, start getting up a little bit earlier, start doing things to introduce your day.
00:20:00.373 --> 00:20:04.227
There's a great book that I'm sure you've read, one of the great leadership books and one of the smallest leadership books you're going to read.
00:20:04.588 --> 00:20:09.832
It was based on a speech that Admiral William McRaven gave at the University of Texas, called Make your Bed.
00:20:09.991 --> 00:20:19.535
He talks about how everybody wants to change the world, but the first thing that you need to do is get up and make your bed, and that first task that you do every day sets you up for success the rest of the day.
00:20:19.535 --> 00:20:21.166
That's the first domino falling.
00:20:21.166 --> 00:20:27.353
So if you do something hard to start your day, imagine how much easier everything that happens the rest of the day is going to be.
00:20:27.353 --> 00:20:28.441
I know guys.
00:20:28.441 --> 00:20:34.814
There's a guy named Bill Morrow who, if you follow the Stoic Cop on Instagram, he wrote a great book called the Stoic Cop.
00:20:34.814 --> 00:20:44.066
He has done for 365 straight days it's probably more.
00:20:44.066 --> 00:20:56.631
Now he's gotten up and done the Memorial Day Murph workout every day for a year, and then everything that he does on the job day after day seems a heck of a lot easier after 35 minutes of suffering, and so if we can introduce that voluntary adversity into our lives early enough in the day, the rest of the day becomes a lot easier to handle.
00:21:01.579 --> 00:21:02.261
Yeah, man, that's great.
00:21:02.261 --> 00:21:02.962
That's a great advice.
00:21:02.962 --> 00:21:04.728
You don't need apps for that, you don't need challenges online.
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Just get up and do it.
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