Tag: special operations
quit tomorrow
February 26, 2015

Self Herding – Quit Tomorrow

“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.” – Marcus Aurelius In The Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariely talks about a concept called self herding. Herding refers to the tendency to act based on the behavior of other people whom we don’t know well. Self herding is when rather than doing what a bunch of other people in a public place are doing, we refer to our actions in the past for subconscious guidance. In a chapter titled, The Long Term Effects of Short Term Emotions, Ariely provides the following example: “Imagine that something happens that makes you feel happy and generous – say, your favorite team wins the World Series. That night you are having dinner at your mother-in-law’s and, while in this great mood, impulsively decide to buy her flowers. A month later, the emotion of the big… read more »

Craig Weller No Comments , , , , , , , , , , ,
Do you want to receive updates from us? Fill in your name and email.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
The Why HOG Tooth

The Why

I received an email recently from a young Special Programs candidate about to enter selection training. He had sought advice on how to make it through the process from a number of others who had been there, but the advice he had gotten was frustratingly simple, “Just don’t quit.” That advice though, is really the only advice that matters. Of course there are little cool tricks like how to hide recovery supplements so you don’t get caught with them and how to cut slits in your uniform so that water drains from it faster when swimming, but those will make only a marginal difference. What really matters is the same guiding principle that I got from my mentors when I asked that question almost a decade ago: “Just don’t quit.” What a statement like this leaves out, and what principles like “Eat meat and vegetables, the fewer chemicals the better… read more »

Craig Weller No Comments , , , , , , , , ,
Do you want to receive updates from us? Fill in your name and email.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Commitment, Control and Challenge

  A recent area of research of mine is in the psychological concept of “hardiness.” Hardiness, put simply, is the ability to withstand and perform well under stress. The concept was initially defined in the late seventies when a guy named Kobasa began studying the psychological profiles of men working as executives for AT&T during a financial crisis in which many of them were losing their jobs. Kobasa found that certain men portrayed specific characteristics which, over the course of the five-year study, kept them emotionally happier, physically healthier and at a higher level of job performance. Since then, this concept has been refined and tested in many “high reliability occupations:” Those in which demands are high and failure can be catastrophic. The military is, of course, full of such jobs and the Special Operations Communities have been studied intensively. The biological markers of stress-resistant individuals have been identified earlier… read more »

Craig Weller No Comments , , , , , , , , , ,
Do you want to receive updates from us? Fill in your name and email.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Combat Psychology and Sports Performance

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” — Mike Tyson Picture a large plastic zip tie, about an inch wide. The smaller versions are sometimes used to tie garbage bags; soldiers and police officers use the large ones to restrain people. Anyone could figure out how to thread a zip tie: You put the little end through the hole and pull on it. In 2001, psychologists from Yale and the U.S. Army imposed this task as part of a scenario conducted in a study with a group of Army Special Forces soldiers. During the scenario, the soldiers who had not pre-threaded their flex cuffs in advance found themselves almost incapable of using them. What went wrong? Surely this wasn’t an inept group of men. They’re some of the toughest, most highly trained in the world; the reason for their failure couldn’t possibly be inability. Something beyond… read more »

Craig Weller No Comments , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Do you want to receive updates from us? Fill in your name and email.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

The Third World Squat

Originally published on TMuscle.com   The sun wouldn’t be up for another twenty minutes or so. But already the class was gathered under the feeble glow of a single streetlight, on a concrete slab that at one time had been the foundation of a building. It was now our gym. Piled in the red, volcanic soil off to the side was a rusty stack of weights and three Olympic bars. This was our equipment. We wouldn’t need them today. Today was sandbag day. Each student, at the beginning of training, had been given a sandbag to fill with gravel. One smart-ass brought his back stuffed with a pillow. There’s always a smart-ass. “Listo? Abajo! Uno… Dos… Tres…” I called out the commands as my fellow instructors and I walked the rows, checking form. They were knocking out rock-bottom overhead squats with excellent technique. “Buen forma, senor.” This was the second… read more »

Craig Weller No Comments , , , , , ,
Do you want to receive updates from us? Fill in your name and email.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

On Appreciation

The sun rises every day, but how often do you take the time to notice it? Have you ever felt like it was something so far away as to be nearly impossible? I remember once, in the early portion of my training in Naval Special Warfare, being led by the arms from my cell down a few steps and across a courtyard of some sort. I had counted the paces off to every area that I walked to and knew that I was about 20 steps away from the interrogation rooms. Through a hole in the bottom of the black hood tied over my head, I could see that the snow was beginning to catch rays of sunlight. At the sight of the first golden rays of sun glistening off the ice, I felt waves of relief, even elation. It meant that meant that another night had passed and I… read more »

Craig Weller No Comments , , , , , , , , ,
Do you want to receive updates from us? Fill in your name and email.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

A Physical Life

On living a physical life – Erase the line “A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” –        L.P. Jacks, Education Through Recreation, 1932.   In the same way that one can generally identify a frat house by the presence of empty beer cans in the yard and random Greek letters affixed to the entrance, an easy way to know that a building is occupied by military personnel is that somewhere nearby one will likely find a pullup bar. Whether on a remote island off the coast of Central… read more »

Craig Weller No Comments , , ,
Do you want to receive updates from us? Fill in your name and email.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
on attention

On Attention

We were standing in ranks on the beach in Coronado, California, in front of the Naval Special Warfare Center. We were about to start an open ocean swim, and each student was being inspected. Along with the mask and fins, we each carried an SRK dive knife, emergency flares and a UDT lifevest. The vests were simple gray inflatable rubber contraptions, worn around the neck and in emergencies inflated either by popping a CO2 driven actuator or by inflating them by mouth through a little tube. Along with the SRK, which was made out of some sort of steel that rusted almost immediately when placed in salt water, these vests were a source of a good deal of failures on swimmer inspections. My swim buddy was across from me as the instructors went over his equipment. In one hand he held his knife, and in the other his CO2 cartridge…. read more »

Craig Weller No Comments , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Do you want to receive updates from us? Fill in your name and email.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
February 25, 2015

Simplicity

Is this what one used to dread? “Once you have rid yourself of the affliction there though, every change of scene will become a pleasure. You may be banished to the ends of the earth, and yet in whatever outlandish corner of the world you may find yourself stationed, you will find that place, whatever it may be like, a hospitable home. Where you arrive does not matter so much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there.” – Seneca, Letters from a Stoic Eleven years ago on this little island, a wealthy local mayor started construction on a large mansion. The mansion was constructed entirely of concrete, three stories high, set amongst a coconut-palm tree grove and overlooking the ocean. Halfway through construction, the mayor died. The mansion now sits unfinished in the care of the mayor’s niece, slowly crumbling apart. Looters have destroyed anything that wasn’t solidly… read more »

Craig Weller No Comments , , , , , ,
Do you want to receive updates from us? Fill in your name and email.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

It Doesn’t Matter

Throughout most of my two and a half years going through Naval Special Warfare selection training, swimming was my Achilles heel. My intense dislike for it was equaled only by my monumental lack of talent at it. That was all part of the plan, really. A challenge was my goal and throwing myself into something that I was inherently bad at seemed like a good way to find that. I didn’t even learn how to swim until boot camp. I’d never be fully prepared for this anyway, and if I didn’t do it now, I probably never would. During the first week of boot camp, the same day as the basic swim test, a series of four videos are shown about each of the special programs available to volunteers. Along with a handful of others, I raised my hand, put my name on a list and volunteered for selection. Shortly… read more »

Craig Weller No Comments , , , , , , , , ,
Do you want to receive updates from us? Fill in your name and email.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Do you want to receive updates from us? Fill in your name and email.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.