Always do the right thing. Yes, there is always a right and wrong way to act and react. If you are having trouble figuring out which course of action to take, you’re either ignoring the innate feeling inside of you that is a direct link to your morals, values, and/or your faith; or you hear it and need to learn …
The Primal Switch: How Developing The Ruthless Mindset for Surviving Hand-to-Hand Combat Could Save Your Life
Chances are you’re never going to find yourself in a situation where you are forced to engage in hand-to-hand combat. However, as I’ve said time and again, the one thing you should always expect and train for is the unexpected. In his doctoral dissertation, my friend and current director of the United States Special Operations Command’s (SOCOM) Human Performance Program, LtCol Pete …
The Ironic Process of Mental Control
Have you ever noticed that when you try to block something out of your mind, it just seems to keep coming back? It sometimes seems that no matter how hard we try to control our minds; we are often met with an inordinate amount of failure. Whether we want to stop a worry, concentrate on a task, go to sleep, …
Beware of the False Finish Line!
Imagine that you are climbing a very difficult mountain and you are pushing hard up a ridgeline towards the summit. After many hours of difficult climbing you reach what you believed to be the summit only to realize the true summit was out of sight, hidden behind the false summit. You are now facing many more hours of difficult climbing …
Don’t Feed the Amygdala!
In 1985, while making the very difficult descent after summiting the 21,000 foot Siula Grand Mountain in the Peruvian Andes, two British mountaineers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates ran into a catastrophe when Simpson suffered a broken leg. Simpson’s injury was basically a death sentence above 19,000 feet on the completely uninhabited, snow-covered mountain in Peru. Simpson had to do …
Rise to the Occasion or Sink to Your Training
Under extreme and stressful conditions, humans don’t rise to the occasion, they sink to their training. Extreme environments are characterized as those situations which place a high demand on the physiological, affective, cognitive and/or social processing resources of the individual. Extreme environments strongly perturb the body and mind, which in turn initiate complex cognitive and affective response strategies. Different types …