Building the Elite Podcast

SOF selection is an equalizer. It's an egalitarian machine designed to reveal what's inside each candidate when suffering. It's in this suffering that your character - the raw material that determines whether you have the potential to become an effective special operator, is revealed. The suffering is the point. It doesn’t matter how good you are. You can't out-exercise the machine. You must know and expect that you will, at some point, hit rock bottom. You must train for this and plan to move forward through that moment. The skills you have at that moment will be those you practiced in the years leading up to it. Don’t be so arrogant to think that you can prepare well enough to avoid this reckoning, or it will catch you unprepared and you will become another statistic. 

When we fail to examine our expectations, and they don’t become a reality, we can have strong feelings of disappointment, resentment, anger, frustration, discouragement, or resignation.Expectations are another word for predictions. Our senses of predictability and control are the primary variables determining how strong our stress response is within any situation. A higher degree of both equals a smaller stress response.Conversely, our stress levels increase when our predictions don’t come true. Negative emotions stemming from faulty predictions often lead to decreased motivation.So, we can shape our stress response and performance in challenging situations by understanding and analyzing our expectations.In this episode, we talk about expectations: why examining them is so important, and how to manage them when they arise. 

In this episode, we talk about stress, training, and adaptation. This is a big topic, so we’ve broken this into a two-part podcast.This is part two of that series, so you might want to check out the previous podcast if you haven’t listened to it yet. We wrapped up part one by discussing why and how you manage stress to ensure you adapt to your training. In this episode, we discuss what specific capabilities you should target to get the best results over time. 

In this episode, we talk about stress, training, and adaptation. This is a big topic, so we’ve broken this into a two-part podcast.To understand programming, you must first understand how and why your body responds to training. When you understand that framework, things like how much running to do, how fast, and how often become much easier to program and adjust.Like programming, adaptation is a complex subject that people study their entire careers. This episode will discuss the principles you must understand when coaching yourself or others.If you're interested in why certain programs work well while others don't, or you're looking to develop a deeper understanding of adaptation and training, this podcast is for you. 

Exploring the concept of fear and pain in military special operations, focusing on using pain as a guide rather than a hindrance. Discussing how emotions like fear can intensify pain perception and the importance of mental resilience in endurance activities. Delving into paradoxical intention as a method to confront fears and break harmful cycles, emphasizing the need to navigate pain for personal growth.

Dr. Karin Nordin, expert in learning strategies for special operations, discusses the importance of good study habits for success in intensive courses. She shares insights on optimizing brain performance, self-regulation, and realistic planning. Practical tips using Bloom's Taxonomy, fun learning techniques, and brain dumps are highlighted to enhance memory retention and comprehension.

Explore the complexity of motivation and the significance of underlying processes. Understand the unique personal meanings attached to words. Learn about balancing dopamine circuits for enhanced performance. Discover the role of personal ethics in sustaining goal pursuit. Dive into managing pain, fatigue, and belief systems for motivation. Enhance motivation and resilience through mental skills like compartmentalization and stress control.

Darkhorse Benefits is a special operations veteran-owned charitable organization. Many of their members are former medics who are actively involved in the tactical medicine community as instructors.Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine, Darkhorse medics traveled there to train, advise, and assist people ranging from soldiers to schoolteachers in tactical medicine. They’re helping to bring in life-saving equipment like tourniquets and first-aid kits, and they’re training people to use them. In this episode, we talk with one of those medics, a former US Navy SEAL and SOCM medic named Kevin.In our conversation, Kevin discusses things like the work Darkhorse is doing in Ukraine, what the conditions are like, and some of the most common injuries that they're seeing with both soldiers and civilians.You can learn more about Darkhorse and help them bring much-needed medical equipment and training to Ukrainians by going to darkhorsebenefits.comYou can also follow them on Instagram at @darkhorsevets to see updates on their work in Ukraine. 

Injuries happen. Even if your training program is well thought out, sometimes you’ll run into small issues or you’ll injure yourself playing your sport or doing your job. These inevitable setbacks, while annoying, don’t have to crush your fitness and lead to long periods of doing nothing followed by the long slog just to get back to your baseline. Fixating on your limitations is the same thing as surrendering to them. Don’t do that. Every path has obstacles. The most successful of us are simply better at finding our way past or through them. Over the past twenty years we've had our fair share of major injuries, and helped hundreds of clients work around them.  In this podcast, we discuss the lessons we've learned and how you can more effectively work through your own injuries. 

The goal of programming is not to develop specific abilities, but to develop specific skills.The difference might seem trivial - it isn’t.An ability is the raw capability to perform a task. It means you have the physical tools to run five miles at an 8-minute per mile pace. A skill is the capacity to predictably display that task in a specific environment. This means that you can run five miles at an 8-minute per mile pace regardless of the situation. We don’t care how fast you can run if you aren’t also reinforcing an ideal stress response, psychological and tactical strategies, and moving with good enough technique so that you won’t break down over the course of months of repetitive work. Your run times matter, of course, but they’re only one part of a much more complex set of skills that need to be developed. The main problem that any skill solves is how to produce a consistent outcome in different situations. This may seem obvious, but most trainees preparing for a SOF selection assume that if they can ruck a long distance, run a fast 2 mile, tread water and do water comp drills during training, they can just replicate that in selection. So, why is this so often not the case? Because a selection environment selects individuals with a set of skills, not just physical or mental capacities. Think of the difference between shooting a basketball on an empty court with no one defending you vs trying to make a shot in a game in front of 30,000 fans and some freakishly athletic guy sprinting to block you.Training is the empty court, selection is the game.