Dr. Krista Scott-Dixon - Mental Skills: Defining "Good Enough," Ep. 125

Welcome to the Building the Elite Podcast, where we discuss the physical, mental, and emotional aspects of human performance within military special operations, by looking at the principles that can help anyone thrive in chaotic and challenging environments. Dr. Chris Scott Dixon is a trained counselor specializing in the psychology of behavior change, with certifications including motivational interviewing, solutions focused therapy, DBT, CBT, and trauma counseling. She's the author of numerous books and accredited nutrition, sleep, stress, and recovery courses, and she's our go-to performance site for special operations, candidates, and active operators, and she works one-on-one with many of our clients to help them excel in selection and stay mentally and emotionally resilient throughout their careers. This is part of an ongoing series with KST, where we'll be talking with her about the specific tools and concepts that come up regularly in her work with special operators and how you can apply them in your own life. We are here with Dr. Chris Scott Dixon. Chris, thanks for being here. Always a pleasure to be here. So a lot of the work you've been doing with special operations, Canada, is lately, has been helping people assess and understand where they stand in a whole bunch of skills that broadly influence their success in selection. Basically, you're helping them address the, "Am I good enough?" question in an objective way that gives them something real to anchor toward. How do you do that? Well, I think this is such an important question for a lot of these folks because I think probably a huge proportion of your audience has some variation on "Am I good enough?" One of the things to emphasize is that unlike in civilian jobs, if you're in an office pushing papers, who really cares if you're that good at, let's say, selling insurance or making spreadsheets or whatever, but in these high stakes jobs, being good enough is actually really important. First of all, one of the things I like to start with is helping people understand that it's very realistic and practical to be worried about whether you're good enough, like this is actually a very adaptive quality to have. The problem is that people put, I'd say, most of their energy into just worrying about being good enough rather than stepping back and looking at it more like an engineering problem. And the beauty of these kinds of roles is that a lot of the time the standards are very clearly defined. It's not like being a good enough husband or dad or artist where some of those standards are not really well defined. In a lot of these roles, you know exactly what the standards are. I think that's actually very helpful because then the question of "Am I good enough?" starts to become more of an engineering problem where you're like, "Okay, what's the template? What's the standard? What's the requirement? What's the product requirement?" "The service requirement," so to speak, and then how close am I to that? And so a lot of the work that we do, one of the things I tell people is you can't solve a general problem like, "Am I good enough?" It's like saying, "Is this car good enough?" Well, like good enough for what, right? You live in Colorado, a Ferrari would be probably useless for most of the year, right? So that car is not good enough, but it might be good enough to rip down some highway in like southern Europe, right? So, "Am I good enough?" is just a useless kind of question. The question is, "Are you meeting the specific requirements?" And if not, how can we get you there? That's really like the work of coaching. And so the first job of this is to get specific, like the more you can get specific, and this is kind of true in life in general, right? The more you can get specific about exactly what you're trying to do, the more the problem starts to become solvable. So let's say you have to do this many pull-ups, okay, that's a known problem. Then you write your coach at BTE and say, "Listen, the standard is, I don't know, I'm making this up. 20 pull-ups, I can only do 15." Okay, cool. That's a very solvable problem. That's a much different problem than, "I'm not good enough." So the first thing we do is I sit down and I'm like, "Okay, look, exactly what tasks, and let's be as granular as possible exactly what tasks do you have to do? If you have to tie knots, exactly which knots? Exactly how big is the rope? Exactly under what circumstances? Are your hands cold? Is it underwater, right? Like let's get as absolutely granular as we can." And so this like usually creates some humongous spreadsheet where it's like this long list of tasks. And that can be a little bit overwhelming at first, but then the next step is to say, "Okay, how good are you at any of these right now? What's the impact of you improving this?" So for example, if you're already running as fast as or faster than the standard, getting better at running probably isn't going to help you that much because you're already over the hump. But if you're someone who is way behind in running, then improving it will have a significant impact. So what's the impact of improving this for you? And then how much effort is it going to take to improve this for you? So for me, I'm a terrible swimmer. I don't know why. I just sink. I'm dense, right? And this has been an issue my entire life. So for me, the impact of improving my swimming would probably be humongous, but the effort required would also be very significant, right? So then we start to make decisions and prioritize and say, "Okay, the magic formula is highest impact lowest effort." Right? So a good example of that, well, for some people, is something like hydration. If you stay hydrated, there's probably going to be a significant impact on your performance. Or if you're getting enough sleep, I know that's not a thing in selection, but I'm talking like during training. Right? If you're prioritizing your recovery during training, that's probably going to have a significant impact. And if it's just a matter of putting your phone down half an hour before bed, for some people, it could actually be pretty low effort to do. So that's the magic formula, right? This is going to have a really big impact, but it's going to take very little effort to improve. Then we can also say, well, maybe there's other things that aren't going to have a big impact, but are very low effort to improve. And so it feels like a win, right? You're starting to stack up the win and gain a sense of competence and mastery. And I think for a lot of people who are maybe in a more demoralized state, like maybe they've just failed out of selection. And so they're like sitting in a hole of depression and demotivation. Sometimes that's actually a better strategy is to say, look, just go tie some knots for a while. Tie some knots while you're watching TV, like whatever, right? Do some low effort, low impact thing that still gets you a win. So this is where the gift of the coach comes in, right? To sort of sort through these priorities. And then we create an action plan. Okay, here's where we're going to focus this week, next week, next month, whatever. But all of that starts to put it into a much more manageable framework. So now it's no longer this question of like, am I good enough, which is an unanswerable question and also very context dependent into what is the exact specific thing that I need to improve under what circumstances and what's the path towards that? Maybe we know right away. Maybe we don't. And then again, that's where the coach, the expert, the mentor comes in. That's where someone like you and John come in and say, train this way. Cool. Great. Now you've outsourced the thinking and the expertise and all you have to do is follow the program. So it just becomes a much more actionable framework than this like nagging sense of am I good enough? Something I really appreciate about the way you're doing this is that you're not just asking that question, am I good enough in a really simple way that measures your PT test scores because I think that's one of the main mistakes that a lot of people make in preparing for these courses is thinking that the PT test, that initial screen test that really just buys you the ability to start selection is a significant correlate with your success rate. It does correlate, but it's a good heart's law thing in that that measure is not actually a useful target. So like in one study on Air Force candidates, if you were in the top 10% across the board physically, you had the highest odds of success as predicted by physicality, but your odds based on that alone were still only about one in three. So you have a 30% chance of making it based on being the top of the class physically, which means there's all these other things aside from how fast you run a couple miles or swim 1500 meters or whatever is tested on the specific test. The same ones happen in buds and other programs where yes, the people who are most physically fit in these really simple tests tend to do relatively better in the course than people who are less physically prepared, but there are so many other things that also matter. And if you want to push your probability of success higher to like 80 plus percent, you have to know all of these other variables and address those and be good enough in those. And the way you've been approaching this accounts for those things for lots of things aside from how fast can you run and how fast can you swim? So what are the more common domains that you assess? Like what other things do you typically look at? Well, it's a big context specific to the person, but I'll give you an example. So for one of them was the example of a long rock. And first of all, I think what you're saying is so important because it's not just physicality and even the ability to execute physicality depends on all these other skills. Like if you want to be team captain, you can't just be genetically gifted because you have to get yourself up out of bed, get your stuff together and go to practice over and over and over again. You have to be able to take coaching feedback. You have to be able to learn from mistakes. You need a high level of self-awareness. You need to be able to operate in a team. You need to be able to communicate effectively. So there's all of these other skills, even just if we're looking at the physical domain and we know that special ops is so much more than that, that go into physical performance. So even just the banality of that, you need to be highly self-structuring. When do you do your laundry? When do you do your grocery shopping? Can you feed yourself effectively like all of that stuff? So even if we're just talking about physical performance, there are so many other meta skills and abilities that go into that. So then let's take examples. So for example, the long ruck is a good example of, first of all, you need skills of navigation a lot of the time. A lot of the time you're not following an established trail. You had your guest who was like a rucking specialist talking about, like, you could be in the dark. You could be an unfamiliar terrain. You could be lost. You could be exhausted. You could be starting this ruck when you're starved and tired already. So there's all these other skills like land navigation, emotional regulation when you're lost, knowing what to do when you do get lost, all that kind of stuff. But even stuff like training the long ruck under ideal conditions, let's call it, there is a moment, and I remember this one guy specifically, who would meet himself at a certain point in the ruck. He would get to a point where the pain was so intense or the effort was so much. And it would immediately trigger this feeling of like, why am I hurting this much? This must mean that I'm not good enough, that I'm not strong enough, that I'm not cut out for this work. And that thought in the middle of a ruck, which probably comes to most of us, right? In his case, would send him into the spiral of just like, like, he just stopped being able to function. And so we had to work a lot on like, how do you process that experience of meeting yourself on the trail, so to speak? So yeah, maybe your cardiovascular endurance and your leg strength and all that kind of stuff, maybe your ruck packing is superlative, but it doesn't matter if you don't have the ability to meet yourself in that like dark moment of the soul. So that's one. Another one I hear quite a lot is with the shorter runs. The runs that are like not the sprint, but like the 3.2 kilometers or the, you know, whatever it is, two miles or even the 400 meters where the distance is long enough that you're really starting to hurt in the middle of it. I've worked with a lot of people on fearing that pain and how they pace themselves and they hold back. And even they have a lot of fear around training sessions because they wake up in the morning and you see that run in their training program. They're like, Oh, God, and they start to panic. They avoid it. They fake an injury like all kinds of stuff. So again, even if your sprint performance is really good or your running capacity is really good, you have to confront the fear of how much this is going to hurt and suck. So again, even if we're talking about the domain of physical performance, there are other skills in the mix that need to be addressed. Yeah, that's a good example. And it covers a broad range of things like if you're using the ruck example, how good are you at hydrating, managing respiratory function? How well can you keep your ribcage from locking down so you keep breathing efficiently? How good are you at foot care at not getting stuck in the draws at all of these other things? And then that is a specific psychological breaking point that you see in a lot of courses, like British or Australian SAS or the US Special Forces selection, that moment of being stuck in your own head, which a lot of people can be really unprepared for. Like we see that when we have clients sign up with us who are coming from failing a selection, that's often one of the things that will have gotten them where they thought they probably did have the physical pieces, but you were talking about very context specific applications of those physical pieces like they've probably trained that ruck where they had their favorite music, they had a podcast going, they were really well fed, they had all their favorite snacks, all of these other positive factors that they relied on. And then they did that long hard ruck in selection when all of that stuff was taken away. And so their assessment of good enough wasn't contextually accurate because they didn't fully account for all of the variables that are going to change in the selection environment. They didn't assess their ability to perform in that accurate context. Like that's one of the reasons especially if people get closer to selection, we'll have them play with fasted rucks sometimes just to get a sense of like I can do this and I'll be okay because especially US fitness culture is like you need to mainline sugar the whole time you're exercising. If you don't need a sack of flour soaked in gatorade, you're going to die, you know, and turns out that's not true. But we have to give people psychologically accustomed to the fact that their body can perform sustained aerobic work without eating and that's their capable of it. And then we'll have them take away their music, their podcasts, do stuff without their headphones, do it without a buddy. So they don't have anyone to talk to and they have to hear the voice in their own head. And then we'll start adding in things where like we give them a temptation to quit and make it easier to quit. So they have to actively fight that. And then the 3.2 K or two mile runs or one and a half mile runs other those short painful tests or test a bunch of specific mental characteristics in a different way that ability to really, really hurt and push harder into it anyway, which can be really intimidating. And yeah, you have to first like get through the day knowing that that's coming for you if it's in your training schedule. And then you have to like become comfortable or familiar with that pain and be able to tolerate that pain and be okay with it and let it sit with you as you go. And that can be a major determining factor for a lot of people. We actually will sometimes shunt people one way or another depending on where their strong suit is early in the training process. If someone's going to or wants to go to a course like say buds where there's a lot of anaerobic suffering and it's terrible versus SFA S or a rock based program where it's terrible in a different way where you just have to be able to move at a 14 minute mile for an entire day with a 50 pound rock on your back. And people will be good at one or the other and when we first start working with someone, if they're looking for any input on what program to do, that's one of the things we'll look at is like what kind of pain are they good at tolerating and we'll try to shunt them one way or another because they'll be more likely to be successful if they're in the kind of suffering that they're good at. And then if they're set on a path, then we just have to make sure they can tolerate it that they have those specific skills. But yeah, there's so much more to it than are you good at exercising, you know? Yeah, and I think you've just hit on such an important point which is suffering versus performance. And I think that many people's idea of what's going to happen on these courses is that I'm going to perform really well and my instructors are going to be very impressed. And that's not the job of the instructor is to be impressed by you. Like it doesn't matter what you can do when you come in, they will be unimpressed by you and they will find conditions to make themselves unimpressed by you. Like the goal is to make you fail so that we can unpack you and see what you're made of, right? I think this is such a key conceptual shift. And I mean, it's kind of a silly movie that's just come out, but War Machine has just come out on, I think it's on Netflix. And so it's kind of a silly like sci-fi action film, but basically it's like, you know, Murr robot from outer space goes after a gang of Rangers on their final training leg. And the value of this film actually is you see the value of the training, like where all of the skills are deployed. So long carries over uneven terrain, tons of like long slow distance work, even not tying and rope work, especially under stress, like they have to, you know, rope down something really quickly. And so you see like being able to perform fine motor tasks under stress, rucking, obviously, swimming. So it's actually kind of a really good movie for showing you these skills in action. And one of the key features is just like relentless endurance. I mean, it's a little bit over the top ridiculous, but like the premises, like these folks just have to go for days and days and days effectively, like, you know, while getting shot at by evil alien robots. But like it shows you the suffering that is part of it. And the makeup department does a pretty good job of like, you know, beating everybody up and making everybody look terrible by the end. But it really does epitomize what much of the actual work could look like, which is this very unglamorous kind of stuff. And you said something earlier around the boredom piece. And I think that especially for young guys right now, the world is, I mean, there's an enormous amount of effort going into monetizing the attention of young men in particular. There are huge industries around like ensuring that young men in particular never have a moment of unstimulation. And so this is something I see a lot with folks. They're struggling with like video games and their phone and all this kind of stuff. And like every moment is full of like high, high below. losty stimulation. And so unfortunately, this does not prepare them to do this kind of work where like you say, it's boring, it's crappy, it's suffering. And so sometimes with some of my clients, we actually work on letting them be bored. You and I were talking about this, there's a fun social media thing where there's a guy who runs a 5K every day in the most inconvenient places, like on the top of his fridge and in a bathtub. And I think he did one in the trunk of his car. And the idea is that like this represents in a way the work to be done where you have to do a thing repetitively, boringly in a way that's painful and awkward and difficult. And like you said, with temptations to quit a lot of the time. Like it's one thing if you rub 10 kilometers out in the middle of nowhere, then you're stuck. And the only way back home is to get back, right? But it's another thing. And I also assign this to clients. Go do a rub on a treadmill where the quitting is as simple as stepping off. Right? And go in there and feel like crap, you know, be fast, it'd be whatever. And all you have to do is step off because that also stimulates-- Just fight that urge the whole time. Yeah. In a lot of these selections, there's like the truck, right? With the warm drinks and the blankie. And they're like, hey, man, wouldn't it be so nice to just come and sit in this nice warm truck, right? That's also part of the courses. So fighting that easy quit option when it's right there is a crucial skill. Yeah, yeah, it is. Our version of that in open-ended workouts, we have a few. But it does accurately represent the specific challenge that you're going to face. One of the ones we'll use is having people do laps. Unlike a long, heavy rock, where you might rock 12 miles. But every mile, you're going to come back to your car. And so the temptation to quit is always right there. Because yeah, if it was six miles out, six miles back, as soon as you're like fast, close to halfway, all you can do is keep going. And there's like some kind of, it's easier that way, psychologically, than giving a breaking point every single lap. This is what you're going to deal with in selection because they give you those outs on purpose. And it's really funny, too. Like in the NSW pipeline for Buds and Swick, the instructors will mill about and take up collections and have like $150, $200. And they try to offer it to students to quit early on in the pipeline. They come up with all kinds of things, just to mess with people. And the other one we'll use is stopping an open ended workout, midway through, or they don't know exactly how far they are. But they'll do a bunch of terrible things that have just gone on forever. And you never know what's coming next. And then you stop and have lunch. You get really comfy. And we will mandate like this has to be at least an hour long lunch. Like you can't just wolf down some food while you're standing next to your car or something. Like you have to sit down and get comfortable. Maybe take a nap, get in the warm sun, you know? Like really settle in. And then when that timer goes off after the hour has passed or whatever, you have to get back up, go figure out what's coming next and go start it all again, knowing that it's probably gonna be similar to this terrible morning that you already had. And you have to fight that urge to get up past lunch and do it again. And if you look at the way people quit in a lot of these programs, in a lot of cases they don't quit in the peak terrible moments. Like in the shouty, yelliest beat down when there's hoses and bull horns and everything's really, really loud and scary. People quit on like Sunday night when they've just had an entire weekend off to themselves to think and to be in their own head. And they start anticipating the entire week that's coming at them. There is comfortable and warm and dry as they're ever gonna be in that moment. But that is when they will quit because they're thinking ahead and they're getting overwhelmed by their imagination. So we try to first help people understand that that is a thing. Like you're going to be tempted to quit not just in the really, really hard moments, but when those moments are in your imagination and you're anticipating them and you're at breakfast or you're at lunch or at Sunday night and you're about to go to sleep and wake up four and a half hours from now because your day is starting super early and starting an entire week that is the worst week of your life. And we give people that challenge. Like we help them understand that is the challenge. Not the fact that you have to run four miles or whatever the physical test is like that's a given. But that the physical or the real challenge of it is what you do in your head to process that specific stressor. And that skill is the thing that is going to get you through as long as you have the requisite physical ability. So back to the whole point of this, like am I good enough to really answer that question? Well, you have to accurately answer that question good enough at what, which means you have to accurately understand the full scope of the stressors you're facing and that good enough isn't just can I pass the PT test or can I do this simple physical activity? Is can I do all of these things in this context? Do I have all these requisite skills necessary to display the physical fitness that I have? And also while compensating for skill degradation, right? So maybe you need to have the skill at a certain level. So it's OK if you're losing 10, 20, 30% off that skill confidence in the moment. Bootcamp itself is that. Like that's one of the-- there's sort of like a-- if you're a civilian, maybe, and you've never-- you know, familiar with the military. People think of bootcamp as like this thing that you go to where you get fit, like you get in better shape, and you'll come out of bootcamp like all jacked. And that's not true at all. Like bootcamp is largely just this like a negative stressor of unnecessary sleep deprivation and terrible food and actually generally pretty limited physical activity. If you're a fit person, like if your bones are made of mountain dew, it's physically challenging. But for the kind of people who are going to go into a special operations unit, bootcamp is a terrible obstacle that significantly reduces your fitness. So that's one of the things that we have to account for. You have to have that surplus like you described. You need like 20% to 30% on top of what you're going to have when you get to the other side of bootcamp. And then you do what you can to recover and get back to your previous baseline. But if you go in just like just walk in the line of good enough when you start bootcamp, then by the time you're on the other side of it and you get to go to your real courses, you've already lost so much that you're in a hole. So yeah, we have to-- like the system is designed to weaken you from the moment you start. Like civilians going in, going through bootcamp, going through that pipeline, have a lot of advantages in that their preparation prior to bootcamp is uninterrupted in a way that active duty personnel don't have. You know, like active duty guys have deployments and field time nonsense jobs where they're doing all kinds of things that interrupt their training. Where if you're like a college kid, you have eight hours a day to do nothing but work out and eat. But then you have to go through this huge obstacle of bootcamp and a lot of follow-on schools that kind of waste your time and degrade your fitness. You know, there's another piece there that as you're talking came up for me, which is continuing the theme of like if you're someone who's-- I don't want to use the word elite-- but like seeking to operate at a higher level of competency. There are experiences that you will have that will feel like skilled degradation, right? But the other piece that I've also heard from folks wanting to go into a special ops pipeline is the social piece of that, which is I am someone who wants to operate at a higher level. I am someone who seeks challenge and growth and mastery and excellence. And I see where I want to go. I see the people that I want to work with, or the people that I imagine will be part of special ops groups. But now I'm stuck with all these boobs, all these idiots, all these Nimrods, like all these goofs, these mouth-breathing idiots. Now I'm suffering. And for a lot of people, they-- I don't want to say they get insulted by it, but it feels like a diversion from the real work that they will be doing in the future. I mean, I totally understand. No one likes to be surrounded by idiots, right? But the work to be done here is to develop that social chameleon skill, where you're able to work in a team. Like if you just get air dropped into a team, you have to figure everybody out. You have to figure out how to work with them. You have to work with varying level of competency and interest and skill. This is also the work. So I think sometimes people who want to go in the pipeline feel like everything that they're doing is a diversion from the real work that they will get to when it happens. But you're in it. The reality is, all of this is the work. It's kind of like how people are like, oh, I'm just going to put off doing anything meaningful to me until I retire. That's-- Five. Or 70, right? And then you're totally unequipsed to do anything meaningful. So whatever you're doing is always the work to be done. So working with people who are less interested in excellence than you is also the work. And it's hard. It's incredibly isolating to be that only person that really cares about stuff. But that is also the work. And so I think that a key mindset piece is to not feel like, oh, well, this isn't my real practice. My real practice will come later. Yeah, it'll be different practice later. Sure, it will probably be more relevant. But the skills that you're developing here will somehow come into play. You just don't know how. Or see it necessarily. Yeah. Like Edmund Don Test wouldn't have become the counter-monicrisso without the prison. Like you can see it as an opportunity to develop these capacities that-- you realistically, yeah, you do need that ability to be the adaptable social chameleon. Even once you're an active special operator, because you're not just working entirely on your own We're only with people who are just as cool as you. Like you're still going to have to integrate with a bunch of other units, often from other countries, and you're going to have to work with people who are not special operations, and you still have to get along with them and understand them and relate to them, and get them to like you enough to help you. And that's where a lot of even active soft guys get themselves into trouble by being arrogant and alienating everyone else around them who helps them do their job. And then they're constantly hindered and they're not entirely sure of why. And then it's like we talked about this one-on-one client of mine, the guy who got bamboozled into taking a job. He's supposed to do construction work or something like the Caribbean, and turned out he ended up living in just like a wooden shack with no running water or electricity surrounded by cockroaches. And the entire experience was terrible, but he viewed it as an opportunity to develop different characteristics, like his ability to become comfortable with suffering and get done what he needed to do anyway. And he saw the entire thing as just a development practice, like as something that he could learn something from, and he used it to prove to himself who he was under bad conditions. And then he got himself out of it after a while and it became unproductive, but he didn't just whine about it and give up, you know, sitting in the sand and pout. Like he saw it as the opportunity that it was or saw the opportunities that he could take from that situation and maxed those out to the best of his ability, which is one of the reasons I took him on as a client. Like that guy has the mental raw material to do well in bad conditions and to get what he needs to out of them and still accomplish the goal that he set out for despite all kinds of discouragement and setback. Or if someone is only happy here, only feels like they're getting what they want when the lights are all green at the same time and everything works out perfectly for them, then they're never going to make it past their first setback, which is what you see in the first week or so of most selection courses when everyone is faced with relentless uncertainty and negative feedback and they don't know what's happening and no one proves of the job that they're doing and it turns out they're not actually that tough. A lot of them go away. And then there are the people who are like, I'm going to suffer until this is over and they just find a way through, but yeah, it's not about finding the best conditions. It's about being good at working through any sort of conditions. And being able to accept reality, like one of the metaphors I like to use is let's say you get, you know, air dropped metaphorically or physically into a terrain and you've been given a map and in my head, it's always like the crusty burger map that they that in that episode of the Simpsons where they become castaways and they only have the crusty burger locations map. But you know, so let's say you've been given a crappy map that's like out of date or I don't know, maybe there's been a flood go through recently or something and the terrain has changed and everything looks different. But basically, you know, you're put into a situation where the map is not an accurate reflection of the conditions on the ground. Right. So what do you do? Do you sit down and like, you know, call your command and complain like this map sucks or like, no, you get to work addressing the reality of the conditions as they are presented to you. And I think that's something that's intuitively understandable to most folks. Like they understand that you have to adapt to conditions. If I'm making a sniper shot, right? Like I have to adapt to the environmental conditions. So that's something people understand in relation to the actual work. They just don't necessarily take that concept and bring it over to other domains. So there's a lot of like kicking and screaming against reality, right? Well, it's not supposed to be this way or this is different than I thought it was. Well, okay, like that sucks. At the same time, these are the conditions that you are now working with. So you've got to get in there and accept some reality rather than kicking and screaming against it. You know, like this tree is supposed to be there. Well, it's not freaking there anymore. Right. So figure it out. And once I say that, people are like, oh, yeah, like they get it. It's really more like they haven't taken the concept from this place and put it into a different place. But accepting the reality is such a crucial skill. And I know it sounds obvious and people listening are like, well, of course, I accept reality. But like, do you? Do we? A lot of times, no, we don't like it. Mm-hmm. That's kind of a lot in a lot of our recent writing that people who survive these the most difficult moments are the ones who are able to most rapidly recognize and accept the reality of their situations and respond accordingly rather than trying to contort their perception into a reality that they'd prefer. And that's a finding across the surprisingly broad field of research from like how collisions at sea happen in ships to who survives wilderness disasters to who is more successful in a soft selection. Like the person who most quickly recognizes accepts an ax on the unpleasant reality versus trying to interpret it in a more positive light is usually the person who performs the best. I had a question for you on the skills assessment. You know, we talked about identifying all of these variables and all of the different things that you should objectively be good at. Good enough that to know with certainty that you have a good chance of being successful in selection. Where or how do you draw the line between knowing all of the variables involved in your selection, not going in blindly and thinking that because you're good at running two miles, you're going to become a great special forces candidate or something. Between that and the person who is an ironically obsessed over every specific detail of their course and thinks that unless they know every single thing that's coming and they have tested and prepared for every single part of the course that they're unprepared, like the information squirrel types of getting my point across here. Like in general, you are pretty well the majority of your preparation is kind of generalized. Like you may not know exactly how much the ammo can ways that you're going to be carrying or if you're carrying an ammo can or a log or a rock, but you know that you're going to have to carry heavy stuff around. And that's a pretty generalized capacity. You can be prepared for heavy carries, but you don't need to know that it's a 52 pound ammo can from a mark 19, you know, like you don't need those details. So where do you draw the line in understanding the broad scope of the things you must be ready for? Like you should know how to do land have and having memorized the entire course in advance that you're going to be navigating on. I love this question because we do live in the age of so-called optimization, which I can't think of very many contexts in which optimization as a priority is necessarily even a great approach. It's hard to think of situations where that could be true, maybe some kind of detailed surgery or something, but like, so I use the metaphor of something like a radio dial or a spectrum, a zone where we clearly define what is good enough and then what is in a relevant detail. And so for the folks who really over focus on the details, it's like the radio knob is turned up too high on the detail orientation. And one of the things about detail orientation, the way that brains work is over fixation on details makes you much worse at things like discernment or prioritization or strategic thinking. And over focusing on details, again, unless you're like a calligrapher or like, you know, doing open heart surgery on newborn babies or something like that. Like there's very few situations in which over focus on details is helpful. And so for all of the skills we talk about what's the sweet spot for this? Like what is good enough? And what are the details that do matter? Like in not tying, for example, well, some details matter, right? The rope has to go this way and not that way. But the exact angle doesn't really matter so much as like, you know, make this shape with the rope kind of thing. So we kind of go through and say, okay, like which details are kind of important and then which details are really not that important. And I think walking through and pre deciding that with people is quite helpful. But we also honor the desire to know the details because fundamentally it's a desire for certainty. Some people's brains just work that way. Like some people are very highly detailed oriented people and their flip side of that ability is that they're not good at strategic thinking most of the time or big picture thinking. They know that they struggle with prioritization, right? So we want to honor that ability and that superpower when it is useful, right? Like attending to details great when you're reading the map, awesome. Go ahead and do it, right? But also helping them understand and most people will have some kind of experience that makes this relatable and understandable for them. Help them understand that this is just one tool in the toolbox. And we always want to choose the tool that serves us, right? So most people have some kind of experience of like, oh yeah, I over focused on details and then some disaster happened, right? Oh, I was trying to optimize my sleep and I gave myself insomnia because I worried so much, right? So you can kind of find some story that illustrates the concept of like over focus on details is not helping you and they'll go, oh yeah, okay, you know what, good point. So I like to talk about the balance between big picture and detail orientation. And again, we can walk through the specifics and say, okay, does this matter here? or not or to what degree does it matter. And I think for a lot of people, of folks, it's less about like I must master the details and more about like I don't actually really know what is truly required here. And then once I have a grasp of actually what tools I need for this job, it's more like I'm, you know, I was going back to social media, but like there's another kind of meme video of like girl tools, right? And you know, so it's like you need to hammer to picture and you're like, I don't want to go find the hammer. It's like, what do I have? I have a shoe. I have a coffee mug. I got the end of a screwdriver, right? And so it's kind of this joke of just like adaptive tool use, right? Having that conversation around adaptive tool use is helpful. So when do you need exactly the correct tool? And when can we be more expansive with it? And so I think as long as these detail folks have a recipe, like if this then that, if this then that, if that's not available, here's your plan B, that I actually think is the job to be done. I think that's what most people are seeking out of the detail piece. I want to feel certain. I want to know I want to have a clear decision making rubric. And I think we've talked with this before, but like ironically highly detailed oriented people tend to make really bad decisions or they're not strong with decision making because all of the details feel equivalent. They are not able to distinguish which details are more or less relevant. So having a decision making rubric actually kind of eases that anxiety that a lot of detail people have. So you can't just say to them like don't worry about it because that doesn't honor the value of the details. So we want to, you know, step one is kind of like honoring the value of the details for you. Like what are you, what are you trying to accomplish with the details? What feeling are you seeking with this? Okay, cool. Let's honor that. See if we can get that in some way. And then very clearly identify when does it matter and when does it not or when does it matter like to what degree and I like to use scaling questions on a scale of zero to 100. How much does this specific thing matter? Yeah, that's really that's really useful. And to your point about decision making for highly detailed oriented people that is backed up in research. There's a field called neuro economics, which sounds a little bit made up, but there's a subset of that call fuzzy trace theory where they looked at decision making between experts and not amateur is but people who are just fresh out of training kind of thing. And one of the populations they looked at was medics. And they found that when people are new and less experienced, they make slower decisions because they start by evaluating absolutely everything. They look at every detail. Like if you're a basic trauma medical memorized acronyms that help you not forget anything. Like breathing airway trauma shock is one of them. There's really long ones for different fields. And if you're an amateur, that helps you because you don't miss anything. But it also means that you're evaluating a lot of things that you probably didn't need to. And the people who are more experienced better medics make faster decisions by evaluating fewer criteria from the very beginning. So they instinctively discard a lot of things that they know will be irrelevant. And then they make their decision from a much smaller subset of variables on like what I need to treat or what I need to tend to first. So yes, as experience and skill improves, you do pay attention to fewer details. But it's because you're discounting irrelevant details immediately or reflexively. You know what matters and what doesn't. And then you can more quickly analyze the things that do matter. And it also reminds me of like Admiral Harward, we had him on the podcast a while back. One of the most accomplished seals in history. And he was talking about a friend of his who started Hell Week who had just come from I think a baseball game and was like at least a little bit drunk still in the in the 10th starting before breakout before Hell Week started. And the guy was like, I had a great time. Anyway, we're going to go do this thing for the next week or so. We'll figure it out. And the guy like, I'm sure he had a loose idea of what was coming. But he also didn't really care because he used that phrase. It comes up all the time with people who are successful in like the special operations world, which is I'll figure it out. Like he had done the work he was physically fit. He probably been good at suffering or doing hard things a lot in whatever he did in his previous life. So he just had this generalized confidence that whatever was coming his way, he was going to figure it out. And and you see that a lot as well. People who aren't unprepared, but they're also not obsessed over knowing every single detail of what's coming their way because they have a general sense of self-efficacy that whatever it is it's going to happen, they're going to find a way through it. Like when possible in the training cycle, think about breadth and diversity of activities as well. There's time for focusing, right? There's time when you just have to kind of eat, sleep, live, preparation. But at other times, there's a lot of value to including diverse skills and activities. And because that broadens your base, right? Like where possible, very rarely is it the case that you want to over-specialize. Much of the time, this kind of work rewards breadth and diversity and depth of skills and experiences. Maybe you speak a handful of words in a few languages or even more. Maybe you have a hobby that's completely unrelated, but somehow, you know, prepares your brain in a way that is helpful. So when it's appropriate in the training cycle, it's probably also a good idea to think about doing other things that give you a much more flexible, open, expansive set of abilities that can then be broadly applied, right? And actually language learning is a good example because language learning can be very hard and you can feel like such a dummy and you can be convinced that you're not getting anywhere. Like it's a very comparable process. It's just not so physically grueling. But having that experience is, can be very helpful. You're like, okay, I feel like an absolute brain damage moron right now. But I know that if I keep going and suffer through the shame of saying words wrong or the wrong word or whatever, it'll all work out, right? And that is a very broadly applicable attitude. There's probably also something in your brain that changes when you learn languages or music or whatever it is. But yeah, like heck, take up knitting for like knitting and crocheting. Hey, that'll probably help with your knot tying and your fine motor skills and that kind of stuff. So it's also worth thinking outside of the special ops bubble sometimes because that gives you a broad sense of competence and confidence that is really like a kind of intuitive felt sense that has nothing to do with specific metrics. It's kind of just like a vibe that you bring in to the experience and that vibe like the story can make or break you. If you're rolling like, listen, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm sure I'll figure it out. That can be everything in certain situations. It's a surprising how many people in the special ops community have had really crappy jobs in the past that often involved a lot of rejection because it helped them develop that tolerance for discomfort or being told you're not good enough for that sense of shame or whatever it is. I knew so many guys, it was a weirdly like disproportionate number of people who had like jobs and sales being like used cars salesmen or selling co-knives or doing something where like someone's just going to slam and door in your face a hundred times a day and you just get numb to it. And the people who developed that sort of tolerance for discomfort who just didn't mind it do much better emotionally in the selection environment. And you could think of that guy I mentioned who was like stuck on an island in the Caribbean like people who who have already in a different domain learn to tolerate suffering in some way of doing something awful over and over for a long time. That skill set does transfer. And even athletically like that's what's like a David Epstein's book The Sports Gene and Range. Like that is another thing that's actually pretty well rooted in research. Like better athletes have more diverse athletic backgrounds. They've done a lot more things because it's physically important and it affects the adaptability of your brain, like your ability to recognize patterns and respond to a novel situation. Yeah, I think that the point is really well taken and I think that sometimes and even stuff like emotional skills like I suspect now a lot of folks don't realize how many of their emotional skills they have actually outsourced to someone else or something else. And so when they are forced to rely on their own emotional skills, they suddenly discover that they don't have that reservoir of it. And it's tricky because so much of it is invisible, right? Like if you're a young guy today and you have the resources and the means to you know maybe go to university or whatever like there's a really good chance even being an athlete. There's a really good chance that there are parents, there's a family, there's money, like there's stuff supporting you and doing what you're doing. Like who does your laundry? Who makes your food? Who drives you places, right? Like so there's this whole vast apparatus of support people and systems that allow you to perform at the level that you can perform at without you having to worry about a lot of stuff. And then when you're suddenly confronted with the requirement of having to do this yourself. You're like, "Oh my God, I don't. How does this. I have to feed myself now, I have to regulate myself emotionally now." Like, "What the hell's going on?" So it's really worth taking a look at your life and saying, "Where am I supported in ways I don't even realize by these kind of invisible people and systems to whom I've really outsourced a lot of this skill development?" I mean, hey, listen, maybe you're living by yourself in an off-grid cabin and you're killing your own deer with your bare hands for food. Like, "Okay, you're probably fine." But when I talk to a lot of these young guys, a lot of them have moved from relatively stable middle-class family environments to then some kind of post-secondary education, where again, that's funded, right? And situations where someone is structuring your days, like, for example, I remember one guy in particular comes to mind because he's quite recent is like, he was like a high-level varsity athlete and literally everything was done for him. And when so he was at university, it was like, "Okay, we're going to do this. Now you get fed in the cafeteria." Like, he was almost like a zoo animal in the sense. I've seen lots of guys like this high-level varsity athletes. They're like zoo animals where everything is done for them. And then they get into this special ops environment. They're like, "Ahhh, like, it's just. I can't do anything." They realized they're skill deficits. Now, luckily, it's just skill deficits, so all skills can be improved. But it's very jarring. And I think this is also what brings up a lot of the not good enough feelings because you are suddenly confronted with a skill deficit that you have never really engaged with before because maybe previously was kind of invisible. It's like, it's like in most of North America, where we turn on the tap and water comes out. Like, we don't really sit around thinking about who or what makes that possible, right? It's kind of the same idea. So it might be worth doing a little bit of like a life audit to say, like, "How have I been supported in other areas in which that has made me a little bit more. not a week." Like, I don't mean that in a negative way, but like, where I've atrophied a little bit in that development. That's something that you see really dramatically, like in the early stages of the military. And even in, like, say in the US, most selection courses, you're in there pretty young, most people, for they're like 18, 19, 20-year-old kids. And you see this huge range of function because you have to take care of yourself. Now, there's a lot of background noise in selection of just getting your laundry done and things like that because having clean, dry clothes is a really nice thing sometimes when you're in the course and you have to just keep your room clean. Like, there are inspections and you know nobody wants to be around the smelly kid. There's one guy who is my roommate for a very brief amount of time in my selection pipeline before he quit in like two days, but he didn't know how laundry worked. Like, he smelled awful. Everything around him smelled awful. And his solution to that was a locking plastic tupperware box. And he threw all his disgusting clothes in this box, sprayed it with febrees and then stuffed it under his bed. And that was his solution for his disgusting clothes. And like, fortunately, inevitably, that guy went away in like a couple of days. But like, there's a surprising number of people like that or like the varsity athlete, often rich kid, who's back on the East Coast vising family of my wife's for a while. And there's this woman who is like my wife's cousin sort of. She just graduated college. She's like really high-functioning. She's a nurse and she started dating this guy. And the dude made it all the way through college. He was one of the things he had to learn somewhere in like his second semester. Was that you had to wash bedsheets. He didn't know. Not that he didn't know how. He didn't know that it was a thing. Like, he didn't know that anyone washed bedsheets or that that was something that you did because his mother had done it for him for his entire life in some way. There was entirely outside of his awareness. Like, he didn't even know that it was happening. And so he was somewhere into his second semester of college living by himself when someone managed to communicate to him that he needed to wash his bedsheets and that he had to do it himself, which when he had to figure out how the washing machine worked and all that stuff, which is like you'll also see that in almost any military barracks where you have these like, feral kids coming through who have never taken care of themselves who don't know how to work washing machines. So all of the washing machines are always broken. But that is yeah, not an uncommon finding when you have people who are released into the wild in the military for the first time and realize that they can't care for themselves in basic ways. And yeah, if you're looking broadly at this, like, am I good enough to continue them or assessment, basic life function, like, can I feed myself? Can I take care of myself? Is also one of those things that matters. Like, those are also the guys getting weird skin infections a lot of the time in selection courses. Yeah, basic cleanliness and hygiene. And I've learned that there's like a weird stigma and like a lot of straight guys around like basic hygiene, like if you wash your butt, that's gay. My heart goes out to all the people dating these guys, right? But even just like from a cognitive standpoint, the more skill base you have, the less your your brain isn't getting drained by having to figure this stuff out on the fly. So like courses are hard enough. You shouldn't also be having to learn how to do laundry, right? Or whatever, like, feed yourself while while you're doing it. So as much as possible, like, let's get some easy wins of basic skill competency under your belt. So that you can free up the mental real estate to focus on the truly difficult skills. Cause like, some skills are very simple or they're they're just composed of very simple segments. And this is also something to emphasize. Like I always think of your guy who was like the pistol shooter champ, right? But it was because he was so consistent with repeating all of the components of, you know, drawing your weapon and so forth. And so like the vast majority of skills are actually quite simple when you segment them. And then you just rep out that segmentation over and over and over. So like unholster, unholster, unholster, unholster, right? Or whatever it is. And so I think that's the good news. There are very few skills that are so complex that you can't break them down into these small segments and rep them out. And so that's part of the work that we do is like figuring out what is the smallest segment that makes sense for something. And then how do we just get you to rep it out a thousand times so that it's in your body. And this is actually maybe one more piece to mention. The value of the felt sense and the way that I would distinguish this is like, it's the riding a bike thing, right? Riding a bike is in your body. Now it's obviously in your nervous system. But the experience of it is that it's in your body. It's embodied cognition, right? The second you start really asking yourself about how a bike works while you're riding it is like the moment you start to doubt it all and then you wipe out, right? Because you're like, oh god, how is physics keeping me on this bike? Right? So the feeling of it has to be in your body. And that's the difference between acquisition, skill acquisition and skill learning. They make this distinction in language learning. Language acquisition is when you just absorb it. And maybe you're consciously learning it. You usually have to to some degree. But what you want is the acquisition so that it is in your body and it just is natural. So you look at something and you think of the name of it because of course, why wouldn't that be the name of it? Right? The name is just naturally there and experienced. Whereas learning is much more effortful, conscious, you know, okay, what does the grammar say about this? Let me go back to my grammar tables. Like it's very cognitive. Most of the time we want these skills to be in our bodies. You want your hand to reach for the weapon in exactly the same way every time so that you're not thinking my hand needs to be here. It's just there and you can't even really fathom a different way of reaching for it. It's like, you know, when you try to brush your teeth with the other hand, you're like, this is weird. Yeah, that's, I think that's really important point. And like with pistol shooting weapons work in general. And I think that applies to a lot of other skills. It's usually the basics that get you. Like when people make really bad mistakes with a weapon, it's not because they got something slightly wrong on a super cool YouTube trick. Like shooting seven targets in two seconds or whatever is that they forgot to keep their finger off the magic button. It makes the bullets come out. Like that's usually what people screw up. It's like really basic awareness, like muzzle awareness, trigger awareness, like reloads, things like that that get people. And to become proficient in those things just requires a ton of repetitions under feedback until it becomes, as you said, a felt sense that that you no longer have to really wonder what your finger is doing and where that trigger is because you know and you don't have to worry about it or you know where the muzzle of your weapon is pointed and you have those basic things automated. And that's what gives you the cognitive bandwidth to do more complicated things. But until you've put in the time on those more basic things, you won't have the ability to reliably do complicated things under stress because the basics are going to get you. And that's where you're going to make a mistake and that's where you put around through your foot or whatever people do. Sometimes it's a lot worse than that. Okay, so to wrap this up, like going back to the primary subject here is how to know with reasonable certainty that you are good enough that you have what it takes to go through a selection course with a pretty good probability of success. So how can you try this at home? How does somebody go through this process in the way that we've described and assess all of the variables involved more or less in their course? Like the important things that matter that aren't just running two miles fast. And how do they then put that into a framework that allows them to identify what they should focus on or not? - Yeah, so I mean, I'm a big fan of very, very basic tools. And because I work online with folks all over the world, I have to use tools that are easily shared. So I like spreadsheets. I'm a spreadsheet gal. I know that everyone's, I feel like there's actually two kinds of people in the world, spreadsheet people and not spreadsheet people. So I like to use spreadsheets because I think it lays it out really nicely and I like to color code everything. So it creates a very quick reference visual tool, right? So people can look at the spreadsheet, see the list, and then immediately see the cells adjacent to it like are these cells red, green, or yellow, right? And so they can get a very quick visual assessment of like, okay, where am I bad, where am I good, what's high impact, what's low impact. I advise doing it in a visual way as much as possible. So like get out your writing stick and write a list, draw stuff, draw skill maps, like that's something else. Sometimes I use flow charts because sometimes more complex skills need to get broken down, right? Draw a mind map, take a complex skill, right? Write it down on a piece of paper, draw a circle around it, and then draw arrows and other circles to say, okay, like the pistol example, right? This is composed of behavior A, behavior B, and a behavior or an action is something super, super simple, like a one second, five second, 30 second, five minute, like very segmented action. So map it out visually or get some post it notes, put one post it note core skill and then like segmented actions all around it. I think people are now getting more familiar with prompting GPT and like other AI LLM tools where you realize that you have to explain to this dumb thing what to do, right? Write me an essay, I need to have five paragraphs, like people are getting better at prompting and so it's kind of the same thing. Imagine that you're trying to teach a robot or an alien to do this skill. So whatever visual tool works for you, again, I like to use spreadsheets, I like to use colors so that it's very quick reference, draw it out as a flow chart, whatever method works for you, but keep it very simple. Like do not optimize this for God's sake, right? Like if you're spending more than five minutes figuring out which tool to use or you're creating like an elaborate notion apparatus or whatever, like you're doing it wrong, right? As much as possible, I highly recommend you use pen and paper, like super basic pen and paper. This does not need to be complicated at all. So whatever visual method works for you, like you know, get out the whiteboard, right? Post it notes on the wall. I remember a friend of mine when she was competing in Jiu Jitsu competitions, she had her game plan on Post it notes and they were color coded. So it was like this one is a setup, this one is a submission, this one is some key detail. And she had this whole flow chart like on the wall. So every day she would be looking at it. Another client of mine who just went through for a medic course did the same thing with flow charts of medic skills, right? So that he could walk into his apartment and see immediately the flow chart or where he was prioritizing. So you know, play around and find a visual system that works for you, but also find a way to keep it top of mind. Don't just write it in a notebook and then abandon the notebook, right? Create something with pen and paper, ideally. And then put it somewhere where you are constantly referring to it. So that might mean you know, post it note on your bathroom mirror, post it note in your fridge, like whatever, like reminders on your phone, like as much as possible, keep your core actions top of mind, especially once you've decided on your priorities for the week or the next couple weeks. Find visual reminders to keep those top of mind. If you're working on your not tying, leave your piece of rope by the TV, by anywhere where your hand would fall, especially if it's instead of your phone, put a piece of rope where your phone would be. So create visual reminders for yourself that forces or encourages you to engage with this skill repetition. But that can look very different. So the key principle is make it visual if possible or make it experiential, something you're doing. And keep it simple. Like the system is not the point. The action repetition is the point. So find it, you know, find a way to keep it as low friction light weight as possible. And then in terms of which actions to choose, like I said earlier, focus on either high impact, low effort or low impact, low effort. Or if you're like absolutely incredibly powerfully motivated for like a period of time, which is highly unlikely. But whatever, maybe it's January 1st, right? Go ahead and tackle that high impact, high effort one, recognizing that it will be more effortful and just kind of like mentally preparing yourself for it. Well, this is really helpful. KST, thanks for your time. Always a pleasure. [MUSIC PLAYING] That's it for today. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. You can learn more about working directly with KST at buildingtheelete.com/performance-site-coaching. And we'll put that link in the show notes. [MUSIC PLAYING]