Brandon Webb is talking the way parents do when their kids aren’t around—tallying their strengths and foibles, failures and wins, and the extent to which his own shortcomings as a father may have contributed.
Much of this self-appraisal is detailed in his tenth book, “Puddle Jumpers: Powerful Mental Techniques from a Navy SEAL Performance Coach and Father of Three,” which comes out next week.
About halfway into the conversation, over Zoom from an Airbnb in the French Alps, it becomes clear that two of those kids, Jackson, 24, and Madison, 21 (both pseudonyms used in the book), have been flitting in and out of the room the whole time. They occasionally pop on screen to fact-check or elaborate on their father’s responses to questions.
“This was the most fun and fastest book I’ve ever written,” Webb, 51, says. The author of the memoir “The Red Circle” and “The Killing School: Inside the World’s Deadliest Sniper Program,” never imagined he’d write a parenting book. “I cried three or four times while writing.”
What made him cry? “Just these vulnerable moments with my kids,” he says. Madison failing to pass her purple belt test in Taekwondo. His son Tyler (also a pseudonym), now 19, getting kicked off the basketball team. The letter Jackson wrote to his parents explaining why he was going to the prom despite being grounded over an incident the family dubbed “Operation Weed.”