US Navy Seal veteran discusses his journey to the elite at October’s Business Forum

Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is summarized by the equation E=mc². Scott Daly isn’t a scientist, but the veteran Navy SEAL and master trainer places a premium on the E+R=O equation as a formula for achieving elite personal and organizational performance.

The Es in Daly’s equation are the events of life, and the R is our response to them, which then leads to the O, which is the result of our responses to those events.

“I don’t control the events of life, but I do control how I choose to react,” Daly said. “And the quality of the results you get reflects the quality of your answers. If you want better things, don’t blame life events. Choose a better R.”

Daly offered his insights on what it takes to be an elite organization in the October episode of the 21st Century Business Forum, a webcast that features monthly one-on-one interviews with some of the business minds and leaders in most eminent opinion in the country.

The training director of leadership training organization Focus3 in Columbus, Ohio, learned a little something about overcoming life’s events when he broke his neck in freestyle wrestling at age 15 .

“I had my own pity party for a while” as he lost hope of potential college wrestling scholarships, Daly said. But he found inspiration in his mother’s words from when he was little when she told him, “There’s nothing you can’t do.

“It’s funny when that self-made thought permeates your life and you believe in it,” said Daly, who argues that it’s how we react to setbacks and challenging situations that defines who we are.

“Did you step up or did you wither?” he said.

It is Daly’s belief that an organization’s performance “rises and falls on human behavior,” which makes coaching the most critical element in creating a winning culture.

“How I coach, develop and empower people” against the cultural plan the organization has developed and articulated determines whether it will be adopted, and it’s a process that needs to be ongoing, the leadership coach said.

Daly said it’s alien to most leaders to coach behavior. But, he added, “If I consistently recognize (among my peers) the behavior I want to see, I will get there.”

On the other hand, Daly said, one of the biggest culture killers in an organization “is BCD – blame, complain and defend.”

“We blame others for why we don’t succeed, constantly complain about our situation, and defend our personal behavior no matter what,” Daly said. All three are useless, he noted.