Jason Redman and the Five Words That Get You Off the Floor

On September 13, 2007, Navy SEAL Lieutenant Jason Redman led an assault team outside Fallujah into a well-prepared ambush — heavy machine gun fire from a fortified position his team hadn’t seen coming. He was shot through both arms and took a round through the face. He and his team fought their way out. He survived, but the road back involved dozens of surgeries and a face that would never look the way it had.

Redman is well known for a sign he hung on his hospital door at Bethesda, refusing pity and demanding that visitors bring optimism instead. It’s a good story. It’s also, on its own, not that useful — most people don’t have Redman’s constitution, and “just decide to be tough” isn’t a method.

What he built afterward is more useful, because it’s a method. He calls it REACT, and he developed it by examining what he and other people who function under real pressure actually do, not what they say they do. Read down the bolded letters and the name of the framework spells itself out:

1. Recognize your reality — stop lying to yourself about what’s actually happening.
2. Evaluate your assets — what you’ve survived, what you still have, what you’re actually capable of right now.
3. Assess your options and outcomes — not every option, just the real ones.
4. Choose a direction and communicate it — pick, out loud, so people around you know where you’re headed.
5. Take action.

It is deliberately unglamorous. There’s no step in there for feeling better first. Redman’s own experience, and the pattern he later found in interviewing SEALs, generals, and other people who’d been through catastrophic setbacks, was that the feeling-better part comes after you move, not before — waiting for it first is how people stay on the floor.

You do not have to want to get up. You only have to recognize where you actually are, then do the next honest thing.

Most of what stalls people isn’t the size of the problem. It’s the refusal to look at it plainly, followed by paralysis about which of a hundred imagined options to take. REACT collapses both problems into five words, in order, that anyone can run through in a hospital bed, a bad meeting, or a Tuesday that’s falling apart by 10 a.m.

What’s the reality you’ve been avoiding recognizing this week?