"We are not here to make friends or families but we are here to dominate."

-Anonymous-


These 5 Mental Preparation Tricks Used By Special Forces Will Help You In Any Situation

The U.S. Army Special Forces, commonly known as the Green Berets, are masters of warfare, fitness, endurance, and preparation. Like the U.S. Army Rangers, the U.S. Navy SEALS, or the U.S. Marine Corps Special Operation Raiders, the U.S. Army Special Forces are an elite force with a mission that includes everything from attacks against enemy forces deep behind enemy lines to training foreign military forces to working with allied partners on disaster relief. While the public is often enamored with the sleek weapons, high-tech equipment, stealthy night vision devices, and arduous physical fitness utilized by the Special Forces, their mental preparation techniques — which include breathing and imagery exercises, among other things — can actually be used by professionals at all levels and in all industries with overcoming their daily challenges.

Breathe slow, breathe deep, and clear your mind.

One of the most difficult tasks in the Special Forces to do well is running, skiing, or climbing and then having to shoot a rifle or pistol accurately. During training, it’s not uncommon to sprint 100 yards to the firing line, ready your weapon and then immediately shoot at a target. Obviously, a heaving chest and wobbly arms do not make for an accurate shot. Green Berets are taught to slow their breathing, take several deep breaths, and then clear their minds to focus on the sole task at hand: shooting accurately. This technique can be of great service in the professional world, too. Before talking on the phone with an angry customer, presenting at a conference, or pitching a new customer, try the following: (1) Pause, (2) Focus and slow your breathing, (3) Take several slow deep breathes, (4) Clear your mind, and (5) Focus 100% on the task at hand. This process takes only a few seconds, but endows you with extraordinary control to tackle a complex task with clear mind.

Slow, step-by-step mental rehearsals create mastery.
We all know about the importance of practice and rehearsals from sports, dance, gymnastics, theater, and public speaking. Special Forces rehearse nearly everything — shooting, parachuting, speaking foreign languages, assembling radios — because they know they will encounter situations when time, resources, and security don’t allow for full, complete, and resource intensive rehearsals. This is where mental rehearsals, process in which you clearly imagine what the absolute perfect completion of your task looks like, can be very helpful.

Let’s try one example: imagine the act of hitting a baseball. See yourself walking up to the plate, hearing the soft crunch of gravel under your cleats, faintly smelling the cut grass, and seeing the glint off the top of the catcher’s helmet. Then, you step into the batter’s box, secure your feet, bring the bat back, and glare back at the pitcher. Now you see the pitch — a heater — and whip the bat around for swing for a clean single over the second baseman’s head. This level of detailed imagery, rehearsed over and over in your head, is invaluable for using mental discipline to master complex tasks.

Do the best you can for the next five minutes.

The Green Berets use a grueling three-week assessment and selection process to find the candidates with the correct combination of physical fitness, motivation, and determination to attempt the Special Forces Qualification Course. All together, the Special Forces Selection course, the Qualification Course, language school, and survival school is a nearly two-year intense training session just to achieve the minimum level of proficiency to be considered deployable on a Special Forces “A” Team. During this training period, fear of the unknown, incredible physical pain, and wavering determination can begin to get to even the most motivated candidates.

Rather than worrying about the future, candidates are taught to do “the best you can for the next five minutes.” I remember one grueling hike, a 12-hour slog where we were forced to carry filled sandbags, where I found myself dehydrated, demoralized, and exhausted. Blocking out discouraging thoughts of the hours ahead, I focused on doing the best marching I could for the next five minutes. When those five minutes had passed, I focused on doing well for the next five minutes, and so on and so on. By concentrating only on short periods, I mastered my own exhaustion and ultimately finished the hike. Next time you’re faced with a seemingly impossible task, try focusing on doing the best you can for the next five minutes, then repeat until you cross the finish line.

Put your mind on autopilot.

To ensure the success of their mission and the safety of their team, Special Forces need to be constantly in the present, even in the most trying situations. The best way to do this is to “switch” your mind to autopilot, focusing intently on the present and only the present. Don’t be concerned with what happened in the past or what the future could bring — you must live exclusively in the present. Focus on your surroundings, doing your job well, helping your team, and let go of everything you can’t control. Going on autopilot will help you succeed, regardless of the nature of the challenge in front of you.

Act and look relaxed — even if you don’t feel it.

One of the best ways to manage your own stress is to make sure you project an image of personal calm, serenity, and relaxation, even if you’re tangling with a really difficult situation. The mere act of looking relaxed, confident, and in command of the situation actually helps you control and reduce your stress level. This ability to look relaxed under the most stressful conditions is basically an Olympic contest between Special Forces members and those in other parts of the Special Operations Community. I once watched a U.S. Army Special Operations helicopter pilot fly through mountain valleys of Colorado at night — an extremely harrowing experience — with the same expression he probably had driving his truck to the grocery store. Remember, just the image of control helps relieve stress and injects you with a belief of your actual level of command of a situation.


Each day in our world brings its own trying situations, everything from household chores to work-related tasks. Learning and utilizing these techniques can help you conquer any challenge — whether it’s a speech to an important investor group or a trip with the kids to the shoe store — like a Green Beret would.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzYXid7tUk

"I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'"

-Muhammad Ali-

Pain is one of the most powerful weapons of war. Western Front soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon dubbed war a “sausage machine” because it tore through and crushed tissues and organs, and dismembered limbs. Popular novels and films also routinely portray the horrors of combat; men hit by shell fragments or high-velocity bullets screech, convulse violently, before uttering a last “♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hell!” or “I don’t want to die” before croaking; wounded men wail in unison, cup spilt intestines and grind teeth. They are no longer truly men, they are barely human.

But such horrifying evocations of pain are in striking contrast to the ways many soldiers in past conflicts describe the sensation of being wounded. In fact, war-wounded men are more likely to say that the initial sensation of being hit by a missile is similar to being struck with a stone or a lump of mud. My research uncovered one pilot who observed that being struck by a shard of shrapnel “felt like a prodding finger”, while another admitted that his only thought was “that’s funny … I’ve been wounded”. A fighter pilot whose shoulder was shattered by a 20mm shell described the feeling as nothing more than a sense of being “gone” and “completely disassociated” from his arm as “a monkey on a stick”. Other soldiers simply recalled that they felt nothing except intense relief. “I do believe I’m going to survive this war after all,” said one.

Such perplexing responses to wounding in combat have been observed throughout history. Even the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius recorded how when “the scythed chariots, reeking with indiscriminate slaughter, suddenly chop off the limbs” of men, the “eagerness of the man’s mind” means that “he cannot feel the pain” and “plunges afresh into the fray and the slaughter”. Or, as influential surgeon A. Copland Hutchinson decreed in Some Practical Observations in Surgery in 1816, every soldier and seaman whose limbs he had to amputate without anaesthetics told him, “at the time of their being wounded, they were scarcely sensible of the circumstance, till informed of the extent of their misfortune by the inability of moving their limb”.

Most war surgeons simply explained the absence of pain as due to the men’s “great excitement”. Agitation, elation, enthusiasm, ideological fervour: all these states of mind diminished (or even eliminated) suffering. Others claimed that the “psychological effect” of the “booming of the guns” was similar to the “continued drumming of the dervish dance” – in other words, the deafening sounds of battle had a hypnotic effect.

It’s clear when trying to understand the relative absence of severe pain when wounded in combat that both anecdotal evidence and sensationalist media representations can be flawed. But what if a scientist went as close as possible to the frontlines and actually interviewed wounded men? This was what American physician Henry K Beecher and his team did during World War II.

In 1943 and 1944, Beecher, who was described by friends as a street fighter in the field of medicine, travelled to the Venafro and Cassino fronts in Italy, where he questioned 215 seriously wounded men who were waiting on the beachfront to be evacuated by boat to hospital. He concluded that the anecdotal evidence was correct: there was no necessary correlation between the seriousness of any wound and men’s expressions of suffering. In fact, three-quarters of wounded soldiers claimed that they weren’t experiencing significant pain and didn’t ask for pain relief, even when offered it. One third claimed to feel no pain at all, while another quarter said they were experiencing only slight pain.

Beecher initially wondered whether these war-wounded men were generally insensitive – for chemical or hormonal reasons, for instance. However, this turned out to be untrue since even badly wounded patients who claimed not to be in pain cursed medics who were rough when giving them an injection. Instead Beecher concluded that the best explanation for the men’s lack of pain involved their emotional state. They were not suffering because their wounds represented an escape “from an exceedingly dangerous environment, one filled with fatigue, discomfort, anxiety, fear and real danger of death,” but because they provided them with “a ticket to the safety of the hospital”.

In contrast, suffering a similar kind of injury in civilian contexts (a car crash, for example) was excruciatingly painful because it heralded “the beginning of disaster”. Beecher confirmed anecdotal evidence that being wounded was viewed as good luck: wounds enabled men to escape “this hell with nothing more perhaps than the loss of half a foot”, as one World War I soldier put it. Emotions and expectations affected physiological sensations.

A gate for control
Beecher’s work was profoundly influential in the science of pain. He went on to conduct research on the placebo effect, as well as medical ethics. In the mid-1960s, prominent scientists Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall elaborated on his findings in their famous Gate Control Theory of Pain, which introduced the idea of a “gating mechanism” in the dorsal horns of the spinal cord that allowed perception of pain to be modified.

Although their theory has been modified since then, it had a direct impact on the most dominant clinical definition of pain used today – one adopted by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) in 1976-77. The association concluded that pain was “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage”. Crucially, the theory and the IASP’s later definition insist that sensory, cognitive, affective, and motivational processes influence people’s experience of pain.

In more recent memoirs emerging from the conflicts in Korea, and later Iraq and Afghanistan, pain in war is not only something to aggressively fight but is itself an incitement to violence. As one soldier put it, pain filled him with a desire to kill those “♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bastards”.

What all these commentators recognise – from the philosopher Lucretius to the scientist Beecher, and to the Marines fighting in wars today – is that emotion matters in war, and the fear of pain is as much a weapon as physiological wounding might appear to be. Controlling fear, emotions and enhancing endurance has in recent times become medicalised by the military.

Psychopharmacology is a significant area of research, and among other things has included “go pills” in the US, which contain the stimulant dexamphetamine and enhances endurance. Other research has included the so-called “anti-remorse pill”, aimed at eradicating fear of engaging the enemy as well as guilt arising from killing. As Leon Kass, chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, said: “It’s the morning-after pill for just about anything that produces regret, remorse, pain, or guilt.”

In advanced militaries today, it isn’t only service personnel who recognise that emotions affect the way people feel pain; the military itself knows this and, in their bid to more effectively maim and kill, seek to eradicate such emotions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OCqDDSuePY