Errol Doebler graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1991 and led SEAL platoons at SEAL Team One and SEAL Team Four. After the Navy, he spent 13 years as an FBI Special Agent working counterterrorism, serving on the New York SWAT team, and deploying to Afghanistan alongside the 75th Ranger Regiment, where he earned the Shield of Bravery, the FBI’s second-highest award for valor.

That is the resume. The book exists because of everything the resume hid.

In the late 1990s, two training accidents nearly killed him. A ten-foot headfirst fall onto concrete. Then a thirty-foot fall from a snapped caving ladder that shattered his elbow and ended his SEAL career. A medical review board looked at a man with no missing limbs and told him he looked fine.

He said “I served,” and then said nothing else about it for twenty years.

What followed was two decades of undiagnosed traumatic brain injury: depression that arrived without warning, sleepless nights, emotional volatility, a voice in his head insisting he deserved none of his success. He refused to attend the ceremony for his own Shield of Bravery because he did not believe he had earned it.

Through those years, Errol did the only thing he could: he studied his own decisions. Every good one traced back to a single skill, awareness of the emotion before the action. He built a process around that skill, added the breathing and cold-exposure work of the Wim Hof Method (he became a certified instructor in 2018), and practiced it manually, hour by hour, because his injured brain could not make it automatic.

In 2021, a brain scan finally named the problem: severe TBI, alongside a brain functioning like a lifelong meditator’s.

Twenty-two veterans a day are lost to suicide. Errol should have been one of them. The methodology in this book is the reason he is not.

Errol is the founder of Ice Cold Leader, where he coaches CEOs and leadership teams using the same five-element process: emotional awareness, cultural awareness, guidelines for behavior, the SMACCC planning process, and meeting the Resistance. It was not formulated by academics in a sterile lab. It is literally born of blood.

He writes a weekly series, Leadership Moments in History, teaches his SEAL planning process through a free workbook and coaching newsletter, and works with organizations through corporate coaching and keynotes.