In the fall of 2023, Brent Gleeson was on a business trip in Dallas, his hometown, when he got the call that changed his life.
His father, David, was walking home from the gargantuan NorthPark Center shopping mall resting off U.S. Highway 75. No one knows why he was there. But what they do know is that David, a Vietnam veteran and local real estate titan, a man who taught Brent so much about life, work and business, took a fall on the pavement. He hit his head, and his brain started bleeding.
“He had heart medication and blood thinners that caused an inoperable situation, and he had a DNR,” says Gleeson, now 49. “So that was it.”
As he tells SUCCESS this story, Gleeson’s voice cracks. He’d been through Navy SEAL training and two deployments to Iraq, and he’d become a successful author and business titan in his own right. But in many ways, he felt unprepared for the flood of grief that slammed into him that fall.
So, he did what he knew how to do.
When writing his 2020 book, the bestselling Embrace the Suck, Gleeson read and researched as much as he could about resilience. He dove back into that research after his father died, turning his attention to great leaders and the ways they navigated life’s challenges. He learned and wrote about everyone from famed frontiersman Hugh Glass (immortalized by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant) to Miyamoto Musashi (“the GOAT of samurai,” as Gleeson calls him). He learned about Benjamin Franklin and Spanx founder Sara Blakely. Ultimately, he learned more about what it means to be truly resilient, and, combining that knowledge with his decades of success in business and the military, he wrote a new book: the late 2025 release All In: The Pathway to Personal Growth and Professional Excellence.
It’s not a sequel, he insists, but it builds upon what the many readers and admirers might’ve picked up from Embrace the Suck. This time, the frameworks he provides for building resilience are “more sophisticated, more specific,” he says. The book is more personal, too.
The book finds Gleeson addressing grief head-on in what he calls a “cathartic process,” and though it chronicles the exploits of some household names, the book shows how resilience is something anyone can accomplish.
“One of the biggest defining factors in success—not just in SEAL training, but in mental fortitude and resilience—is a deep degree of emotional intelligence,” he says.
As he puts it, developing resilience begins by asking yourself questions like, What can I learn from this difficult situation? What’s in my control, and how can I impact that?
“All cognitive bandwidth, all my emotional energy and strength goes into things that I have an impact on,” he says. “Therefore, I will move more quickly to that next level or overcoming that obstacle. And then you do it again, and you do it again, and you do it again.”
‘A High-Trust Environment’
Gleeson didn’t grow up dreaming of a military career. His father served in the Marine Corps Reserves during Vietnam, but he rarely spoke about it and never pushed service on his twin sons. For a time, Gleeson’s career looked fairly conventional: great high school in Dallas, college at Southern Methodist University, then a finance job after graduation. His typical work week could run 80 hours, so Gleeson looked for ways to maintain his fitness. He started working out with a friend who was preparing for SEAL training, and soon they’d often have long conversations about purpose, identity and the implications of pursuing one of the most demanding selection processes in the world. Gleeson began researching naval special warfare, devouring books on military history and leadership. He was fascinated by how elite cultures could arise and thrive under extreme pressure, and soon, he decided to join his friend. In 2000, after a year in the finance world, he wrote his parents a letter explaining that he was quitting his job and becoming a Navy SEAL.
Courtesy of Brent Gleeson
“They were a little bit shocked,” Gleeson admits.
Mathew Lehnig was a senior leader for SEAL qualification training at that time, and he became a mentor for the young Gleeson. Looking back on that time, Lehnig remembers Gleeson standing out.
“He was very meticulous in the way that he did things,” Lehnig says. “He would stay longer hours; he was always driving to be a little bit better. I gravitate towards those people.”
The two men would later deploy to Iraq together after 9/11. However, the rituals of SEAL life taught him more about resilience than any battle would.
“We’re very specific in our intention on how we train and how we build culture,” he says. SEAL culture is rooted in psychological safety, he adds, as well as “deep levels of personal accountability, and therefore, that translates into collective accountability, which translates into a result of a high-trust environment.”
In his eyes, it helped that SEALs spend the majority of their time training—even when they’re deployed. If they weren’t on a mission, Gleeson’s SEAL team was engaged in some type of exercise or a carefully designed recovery regimen. This consistency opened his eyes to what words like “grit” and “resilient” really mean.
People often assume that grit is forged only through hardship, he points out, or that resilience is the byproduct of a challenging circumstance. But Gleeson realized that experience alone doesn’t create resilience. Intentionality does.
“We’re not talking about a departure from your core values; we’re talking about a refinement of those values, making those values more measurable,” he says. “Identity transformation is about breaking bad habits, forming new intentional habits through purposefully designed routines, and aiming those efforts towards specific desired outcomes in your personal life and well-being, in your marriage and parenting approach, in your work and your objectives with your career.”
To be “all in,” he adds, is to narrow your focus.
Leveling Up
After his military service ended, Gleeson became a successful entrepreneur. He started a consulting business and penned Embrace the Suck, which turned him into a coveted public speaker. But regardless of his accomplishments, he was still the guy who, as Lehnig noted, was always trying to be “a little bit better.”
“I’ve achieved some degrees of whatever you want to define as success, but there’s always ways to refine, always ways to level up, always ways to be a better husband, a more present dad,” he says. “Every six months, I want to look back and be like, ‘Not quite good enough, not quite good enough.'”
The sudden loss of his own father made him sharpen that focus even more. He poured a lot of energy into his new book, but he was also thinking about mortality, about the time he has left and how he wants to spend it. Naturally, he thought about how to save some of that time. He cut alcohol out of his life, and it was “an absolute game changer.”
“I know for a fact that I could not have taken my business through the transformations we’ve gone through over the past two years if I had some of those other habits and activities still lingering there,” he says. “This goes back to the fundamentals of being intentional and developing mental fortitude: identifying what to get rid of, what to lean into, and what to enhance.”
In a way, his business is all about focus, too. In recent years, Gleeson, now based in San Diego, transformed a consulting and executive coaching company into a B2B enterprise software business called EXCELR8. He and his team help organizations who are overwhelmed by too many disconnected tools and dashboards and who, in turn, are wasting valuable time and energy. By unifying their clients’ data in a single, AI-powered system, EXCELR8 improves focus, productivity and, yes, resiliency.
Alex Bard, a venture capitalist who knows Gleeson well, says the former SEAL’s business success is the result of high integrity, high ambition and an ability to be comfortable with the unknown.
“I really believe you’re the average of the five closest people to you,” Bard says. “And so you want those people to be exceptional because they raise you up. And I think Brent’s one of those people.”
This idea—cultivating a community of people you trust and admire—is deeply important to Gleeson, too. That’s why he hired Lehnig to join the EXCELR8 team. In a fun twist, his former Navy SEAL mentor is now his employee.
Lehnig chuckles when he thinks about the 180-degree turn their relationship has taken, but he’s happy with how much they’ve learned from one another.
“I used to look at resilience as a growth mechanism, and now I look at resilience more as a strategy,” Lehnig says, and he gives Gleeson some of the credit for that mindset shift.
Gleeson, too, says he is still learning from his former SEAL instructor. That’s what happens when you’re consistently reflecting on your connections. For that same reason, he also finds himself reflecting about his first mentor: his father.
“He was very passionate about his work, but yet found this incredible way to do all that work [and] also always be present. It comes down to saying no to stuff that doesn’t align with those core goals or initiatives or values that you really want to pour all your time, talent and energy into.
“I still don’t really know how he did it,” Gleeson adds, “but I’m starting to learn.”
Featured image by KieferPix/Shutterstock
This article was first published in the May/June 2026 issue of SUCCESS Magazine. Get your copy here.
