Drownproof: Eight Life Lessons to Keep Your Head Above Water

Drownproof: Eight Life Lessons to Keep Your Head Above Water

From Veterans Radio by Veterans Radio America

July 20, 2026 · 57 min

About this episode

In this episode, host Shelly Rood interviews retired Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf about the importance of asking for help and the personal costs of high-performance cultures.

You’ve built your whole identity around what you accomplish, and it worked, until the day it didn’t. In this episode, host Shelly Rood sits down with a fellow Veteran – a retired Navy SEAL – who says the strongest people he’s ever known are the first ones to ask for help, and who’s still working out what it costs when you didn’t. Andy Stumpf has spent seventeen years as a Navy SEAL, six of those on SEAL Team Six. In February 2005, an insurgent shot him at close range on a deployment in Iraq; doctors weren’t sure he’d walk the same again. He came back and later set two world records skydiving from 36,500 feet to raise $750,000 for the Navy SEAL Foundation. His book, “Drownproof: Eight Life Lessons to Keep Your Head Above Water,” is a New York Times bestseller with a foreword from Jocko Willink. In this conversation, Andy talks candidly about why asking for help gets treated as weakness in high-performance cultures when it’s actually the opposite, why money is a tool to say no rather than a way to acquire things, and what his own career cost his marriage and his kids the first time around. We also get into a live, unresolved question: what happens when the label you’ve earned…

People in this episode

Host: Shelly Rood

Guest: Andy Stumpf

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Navy SEAL Foundation

Books & works: Drownproof: Eight Life Lessons to Keep Your Head Above Water

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