Building the Elite Podcast

A recent study on BUD/S students looked at the roles of mindsets around stress, willpower, and failure.The primary focus of the study was "stress mindset." This is whether you view stress as either enhancing (stress helps me perform) or debilitating (stress is bad and should be avoided).Those who view stress as a necessary and welcome part of coping with challenges did better. They had greater persistence through training, faster obstacle course times, and fewer negative evaluations from peers and instructors.A second focus was on the perception of failure. Researchers made a test with questions like “Experiencing failure improves performance and productivity.” Students who scored highly on the "failure-is-enhancing" assessment had lower persistence, were less likely to complete first phase, and were slower on the O course.That second finding may seem odd - that people who thought of failure as a helpful tool didn’t perform as well in BUD/S. In most settings, those who seek to learn from failure and embrace negative feedback are more successful, especially in the long term. However, when we look at a career, most of the time we're not in a testing setting. We're practicing, training, and developing. We can learn from failure, come back, and try again.Embracing failure is beneficial in *learning* environments. But, it can be harmful in *testing* settings.In this episode, we discuss differences in psychological strategies depending on your environment - whether you're in a setting of testing or training. We look at this through the lens of an idea we've been talking about lately with our clients, that pain during intensely difficult events comes in three stages, and that how you manage those stages plays an important role in your mindset, coping mechanisms, and resilience. 

Edith Eger, an Auschwitz survivor turned author and trauma therapist, has a saying:"Trying is lying. You're either doing it or you're not.""If you say, 'I'm trying," she writes, "you don't actually have to do it. You're letting yourself off the hook. Stop trying and start doing."With that as our foundation, we'll discuss how to reframe the concept of effort and to more effectively think about making changes in your lives. 

In this episode we have a conversation with Casey Glass, who has been a strength and conditioning coach at an active duty special operations unit for the past eight years. Alongside helping the operators she works with to excel in their training workups and deployments, Casey also manages their preparation training for selection into tier one units. On this call, we discuss the framework that she and the rest of her human performance team use for training special operators, viewed through a model she calls the big five. These five categories make up the biggest pieces of a successful training process. If you’re an active duty special operator, or trying to become one, this is a really helpful model that you can use to evaluate or design your own training process. 

This this episode we talk about how our stress responses and pain perceptions work, how they’re affected by training, and how we can develop our capacity for productive suffering. 

You don't know somebody until you've seen them make hard decisions.It's easy to be kind when kindness is easy.It's easy to be generous when generosity is easy.Until doing the right thing is also the hardest thing to choose, you don't know what kind of person someone is at their core.

In today's podcast we  talk about coping and solving problems instead of ignoring them. Problems go away when you solve them. Yes, this seems obvious. However, much of the background stress or anxiety that we experience comes from problems we are avoiding.

In this episode we  talk about impulsivity, quitting, and how your training and mindset affect what you’re capable under stress. 

In this episode we talk about the most common framework we use to categorize training phases and how to apply this concept.

In this episode we talk about one of the most useful mental skills that our clients use to succeed in special operations selection courses, and how it can be applied in your own life, no matter what your occupation is.