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We show up to the assignment prepared to cut line,
prep structures or charge a hose.
We're likely up to the physical stress the job demands.
Are we also prepared for other forms of stress?
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Stress is a part of life.
It's not uncommon to experience stress in our home and work lives.
Stress, at times, can keep us sharp and up to the task,
but what really is stress and at what point does it encroach
on our quality of life, change the way we see the world,
or just wear us down?
Here we'll dive into the world of stress, explore its
effects and present steps to prepare for it.
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To be resilient you have to build mental toughness.
When I was going through the Navy SEAL training, there's a great mentor of mine,
Navy SEAL Master Chief Will Guild who taught me a really important mental
toughness technique called segmenting.
Now segmenting is a fancy word for taking something
that's really big, looks really scary, and breaking it
down into really small and attackable pieces.
And we saw, at the hardest moment of the hardest
week of the hardest military training in the world,
why segmenting was so important.
So what happened was we were going through hell week.
And hell week is considered to be the hardest week of
the hardest military training in the world and over
the course of that week, they've got you doing things
like physical training on the beach with logs that weigh several hundred pounds.
They have you running races with your teams in and out of the ocean.
They have you running the obstacle course, running down
the beach, swimming in the ocean.
It's a week of intensive physical training and the hardest
moment of that week comes at the beginning of the
second night.
So for a lot of people, their adrenaline carries them
through the first night, carries them through the
next day and then we arrived at the beginning of the
second night and you're thinking to yourself,
I am more tired and more exhausted and more beaten
than I have ever been in my entire life.
What happened then was that the instructors brought
everybody out and they had us watch on the beach as
the sun was setting.
As the sun was going down, the instructors came out
and they got on their bull horns and they said,
"Say goodnight to the sun."
We're all watching the sun go down.
"Tonight is going to be the worst night
"of your lives."
We're all watching the sun go down.
And I can remember, I was standing there, and I saw
out of the corner of my eye that something
broke in the class.
People started running for the bell.
Running for it, and you could hear it doing off,
ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, as people quit
our class.
Now, what was amazing was, after all of the difficult
things that they'd asked us to do in the SEAL team
training, swim 50 meters under water, swim down 50 feet
and tie a knot, tie your feet together and your hands
behind your back and make you jump in the pool.
Who would've thought that the hardest moment of the
hardest week of the hardest military training in
the world would come when all they had actually
asked us to do was to stand on the beach and watch
the sun set?
But what happened then and what happened throughout
the training was that what made people quit was when
they were thinking about how hard something was gonna be,
how painful something was gonna be, how difficult something
was gonna be.
What Master Chief Will Guild taught us was,
all you can do to be courageous is to master this moment.
That's all you can do.
So be strong, be focused on doing what you need to do
right now.
And if you build that mental habit of segmenting,
and you build that kind of toughness, you'll become
more resilient.
- Let's say Sam shows up for an assignment.
Suddenly an unexpected event unfolds.
The event is the stressor.
And quickly many of Sam's senses are heightened.
The pupils dilate, sharpening Sam's vision.
Blood vessels to the muscles dilate and the heart
rate increases in preparation for possible intense physical demands.
Blood vessels to other areas that are less of
a priority are constricted.
Sam may take a moment to assess the situation
or there may be a rapid physical response.
This experience is often identified as the fight
or flight response.
Let's say Sam does what it takes to escape a
possible threat.
After the event has passed, Sam is in a critical place
for stress management.
It's possible that Sam can quickly recover from the event,
it's also possible that the event may continue to weigh on Sam.
Ultimately it will take resilience to manage the stressful
event and optimize well being.
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- We all worry.
And when you're worried, a lot of people will tell you,
"Don't worry."
That's usually terrible advice because you're gonna worry anyway.
So now you just feel bad about the fact that you're worrying.
If you care about what you're doing, you're going to worry.
That's a good thing.
The key is to learn to worry productively.
And the way to worry productively is to engage
in a practice called mental rehearsal.
In mental rehearsal, you imagine things that might
happen and then you imagine how you'll react.
You imagine your way through difficulty.
Stoic thinkers often called this the premeditation of evils.
Seneca said, "Everyone approaches a danger with
"more courage if he is prepared in advance how to confront it."
Resilient people know that life if going to be hard,
so they prepare themselves for hardship.
Go ahead and imagine bad things that might happen.
Imagine that you misplaced your notes when you stand up to speak.
Imagine that you've lost your job.
Imagine that you've lost a loved one.
Imagine that you're broke.
Then, imagine what you'll do to make it through.
A Navy SEAL Master Chief mentor of mine, Will Guild,
taught us that when you are ambushed by hardship,
you can easily be overcome by events.
When you're ambushed and unprepared, you often don't react well
If you're going to spend time thinking about bad things
that might happen, then use that energy for a purpose.
Instead of wallowing in your worries, imagine how you'll respond to them.
If that happens, I could do this.
When you mentally rehearse, don't imagine success
falling into your lap, imagine everything.
The tingling at the back of your neck,
the fear in the pit of your stomach.
Your mind is built to prepare for problems.
The goal of mental rehearsal isn't to fill your head
with happy thoughts about the future,
but to prepare yourself to succeed in the real world.
The naive mind imagines effortless success.
The cowardly mind imagines hardship and freezes.
The resilient mind imagines hardship and prepares.
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