The founder of Barefoot, Craig Weller, was a member of a special operations unit in the Navy. Becoming a member of a special ops unit requires going through a “selection” process – a grueling ordeal that can last for months or even years, designed to filter out almost everyone who volunteers until only a handful …
So long as you carry the sources of your troubles about with you, those troubles will continue to harass and plague you wherever you wander on land or on sea. – Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 4 BC – 65 AD One of the benefits of being in a maritime Special Operations Force is that sometimes the places …
“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 …
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 …
Stephane Roberts interviewed me a while ago along with Mark Twight, Martin Rooney and Dan John to contribute for a TMuscle article called Pushing the Limits. He asked me for my thoughts on the “test” workouts to push mental and physical capacity to a breaking point. Here’s my portion of the interview: “I don’t like most …
Within Naval Special Warfare, a foundational principle is that one leads from the front. True leadership brings greater responsibility, not more privilege, and this is reflected not only during missions, but in one’s everyday actions. I was on a deployment with my SWCC detachment and we had spent several weeks running maritime interdiction ops and …
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 …
“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: …
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 …
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 …