The Learning Journey

There is something interesting that happens when we get new toys and want to play with them. We unwrap them with all sorts of anticipation. The excitement of the new experience courses through our brains and gives us little adrenaline bursts.

Just like a present, new and novel experiences light up our brains like candy.  Unlike that new gift, we may discover that learning something new isn’t always so easy.  All that excitement can be transformed into frustration, because becoming really good at the new thing doesn’t come so easily.  The exciting idea doesn’t always transmit into practical application.

I am thinking of myself here. I was so excited to build my website! I got my domain name with visions of sugar plums dancing in my head, only to be hit with the reality of using WordPress to build a website.  There is a real learning curve involved.  You can insert the new mastery of anything: WordPress, Marketing, any Adobe product, making friends, getting a degree, anything. We start off with loads of enthusiasm, and we might end up quitting because the new thing ends up being harder than we expected.

It’s important to know that there is a process to learning; let’s call it the “Learning Journey.”  The learning journey is made up of four stages, Unconscious Incompetence; Conscious Incompetence; Conscious Competence; and Unconscious Competence.  Understanding these stages will help you not feel less like quitting just because a hard new learning didn’t get instantly downloaded to your brain in 5 minutes.

Stage 1 – Unconscious Incompetence

This means that we don’t even know what we don’t know. Let’s say I see a beautiful photograph, I have no idea what went into making that picture.  I just know I want to make a beautiful photograph too.  What I may not understand is that the photographer had to understand how to use the camera, how to choose the shot, she may have had to use Adobe Photoshop (or some other software) to clean it up and adjust it.  But, I don’t know all that yet.  When I decide to get a camera and start taking pictures, I may find out my images aren’t as pretty, and I don’t know why.  So, I start to investigate, and find myself moving into the next stage.

Stage 2 – Conscience Incompetence

This is the stage at which we begin to know what we don’t know. It can feel like there is so much to learn.  This can be incredibly frustrating. We’ve begun to have a clear understanding of what’s expected, but we really don’t yet understand how to make that happen. In fact, this is the stage in which most of us give up. This can be true of a new skill, a new game or new software. It isn’t so easy to figure out, so we quit. Or, it can also apply to a new way of doing something, for instance, changing our diets or managing our anger. This is the stage that we have to start educating ourselves.  Reading books, taking classes, fiddling around and trying different things to see what we get.  It is truly the stage for exploration.  If we can persevere and make it through this stage, we will have the benefit of moving on the third stage of the learning journey.

Stage 3 – Conscious Competence

We now know what’s expected and we know how to make it happen. We have been learning, maybe teaching ourselves, reading tons of books, we have watched YouTube videos till our eyes bleed, taken classes and maybe consulted experts.  Camera’s are complicated and good photography is not just a quick snapshot.  It still takes a lot of energy to do the new task, but we are starting to feel confident.  Neuroscientists have taken P. E. T. scans of the human brain during stage 2 and stage 3. What they have found is that the brain uses a tremendous amount of glucose as it is learning and concentrating on new tasks. Your brain wants to attain mastery so it can do its thing with ease.  This is exactly what occurs in the fourth stage of the learning journey.

Stage 4 – Unconscious Competence

Finally, we no longer have to think too hard in order to do the task, but rather our brains can coast as we go into automatic drive. This is the stage in which we feel the most competent doing our task.  We have all felt this at times.  If you drive the same route to work every day, you may find that you left home and then arrived without noticing much of the drive; your brain didn’t need to focus on the skill of navigation, just on driving.  It’s also the stage that we always wished we started in, especially when we start a new skill.

Finally…

As we decide to learn new things or change patterns of behavior, we find ourselves moving through the first, second, and third stages again and again. The harder the thing we are trying to learn, the more frustrating it can feel.  It’s helpful to understand these stages so that when you find yourself learning something new or changing some behavior, you can recognize and understand what stage you will be in.  Then give yourself a break.  Honor that you are even trying something new!  It takes time and fortitude to become a master.  It will happen if you keep on pushing through the stages of the Learning Journey. Oh, as for me, I finally got my new website up – WordPress and all. Check it out.

 

 

images from BigStockPhoto.com: stairs bestdesign36 and woman photographer olly2

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Authenticity.  It’s about being real. It’s about knowing yourself. It’s about courageously confronting the parts of yourself that don’t fit with your vision of you.  Authenticity can be a moral compass that directs your actions toward your own true north.  It’s a feeling of being comfortable in our own skin.  Yet as much as we understand this in theory, being authentic is one of the hardest things to do in practice.  Think about how many people you know who are in your mind truly authentic.  If you’re lucky, there are a handful of people who you can name.  Now think about times when you have felt authentic.  You may be one of the special few, who always feel confident in your ability to interact with the world from a solely authentic place, but most of us have to work at it regularly.  There are areas where we shine our authentic selves like a bright light in a dark universe, and if we are being authentic, we also know that there are places that we still need work to grow the light.  Most of us still have the dark closet or corner where our fear gets triggered.

Like any other trait, authenticity is an aspect of ourselves that we can develop.  Part of that development comes from acknowledging who we are and that we want to become more authentic.  When I was 18, I looked at myself and saw a person that I didn’t like.  I saw a lot of negative qualities in myself and I focused on them. While I wasn’t a mean or bad person, I wasn’t very compassionate, or forgiving, I was often afraid, I was at times reactive and this didn’t fit with the type of person I really wanted to become.  I pretty consciously decided that I needed to determine what sort of person I did want to grow into.  I began to develop a picture of who I wanted to be.  This included an inventory of my values and these values became the map I actually wanted travel by.  These are not the values that we may say to other people because we think they are right or appropriate. These are the values that live in our truest hearts.  I decided that I wanted to be an authentic person, honest about who I am and courageous enough to share that.  The more I worked on authenticity, the more I needed to have compassion with myself, and the more I shifted my negative self talk. The more I could explore my strengths, the more clearly I saw myself honestly, and the easier it was to act or respond in ways that deepened my ability to be authentic.  It was a positive growth circle.

I taught anger management for years and one of the hardest things I saw people struggle with was the willingness to be honest and vulnerable.  We spend so much time worried about other people’s judgments of us, and fearing that we might be taken advantage of, that we stop ourselves from being fully present in relationships.  The truth is that we often judge our insides by other people’s outsides, yet it’s our own opinions of ourselves that matter.  Our view of ourselves is the guideline that every other person will use with us too.

There are steps that will put you on the path, as you journey, you grow.

Steps to developing your authentic self:

1. Knowing yourself

• Understanding your deep values
• Recognizing your triggers
• Developing compassion for yourself and others
• Focusing where you have influence

2. Willingness to be vulnerable

• Ability to acknowledge your feelings
• A willingness to not know everything
• Giving yourself permission to let go of yesterday and its mistakes
• Learn to clearly speak to your truth
• Being willing to let go of the idea of perfection
• Recognition that you are courageous

What developing your authentic self gives you:

• A feeling of empowerment in you life and your choices
• Breakthrough’s that allow you to push through resistances (fears)
• Ability to trust yourself and then to trust others
• Map to find your tribe of people

My favorite people to work with are the ones who want to forge themselves.  Are you a person who is willing to be brave and face your life with authenticity?

In the Words of Buckaroo Bonzai…

no matter where you go… there you are.

It seems to be a theme this week; I’ve been talking with clients about the idea of them wanting their lives to be different by either running away or having things magically change.  The underlying idea being, maybe if the situation changes, it will be easier for them.  Let me start off by saying, there is nothing wrong with leaving a situation or changing it, if you recognize that you take your baggage with you.  Leaving the situation can give you a break from whatever rut you find yourself, but if you have a pattern or habit of behavior or thinking, most likely you will find yourself running around the same tree very soon.  In order to break a habit or change a situation, you need to start with yourself.  What do you need to be aware of in order to really change whatever situation you find yourself in that you don’t like?  That’s the big question.

One question to think about is: Is there a pattern here?

Awareness can make a huge difference in outcomes.  In fact, Awareness makes ALL the difference. With awareness, we can begin to understand our patterns and what motivates us to behave, speak, fight, and make choices, etc in certain ways.  With this insight, we can begin to choose with clarity.

Another question to think about is: Where do I want to be in 6 months or a year?

Awareness let’s us know what’s going on, but in order to know what to choose, we have to have an idea of where we want to go. In his book, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, Steven Covey says to begin with the end in mind, and that’s the truth, we definitely need to have a direction.

I was talking to a client the other day, she gets into patterns in relationships where she is in financial crisis and wants someone to ‘save’ her.   But, people don’t tend to want to financially rescue other people for free, so she ends up with the cost of what she has to do to keep the savior engaged in saving her.  She then begins to feel bad about what she has to do, or put up with, and ends up hating her savior.  She had to take a good hard look at the pattern, now that she knows it’s there, she has to start to develop the idea of what she want to move towards.  “I want to feel safe and like I don’t have to worry that creditors are knocking at my door.”  My thought to her was, “If you want to truly be ‘safe’ you’re going to have to deal with the financial drama you create.  Creating a different dynamic in that regard will allow you then to choose the people you actually want to spend time with, based on liking and respecting them, not because you have to put on a show to get them to do what you need… like save you.”

We do this in jobs too.  “I hate my job, but I can’t quit.”  Well, why not?  I realize that people have expenses, kids, homes, cars, insurance, etc.  But, if you really hate a job, why can’t you start to think about what you want to move toward?  Feeling stuck and choosing to stay that way is most likely a pattern too.  There are times, that with good reason, we need to stay in a job, even if we don’t love it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be planning a change down the road.  It may mean we need to take a look at what skills we need to develop, education, etc.  The pattern is just the easy place we can get stuck; it doesn’t mean we have to stay stuck forever.  Someone once said, the only difference between a rut and the grave is the depth… ruts are easier to jump out of, death is terminal.

If we have the courage to pay attention and stop running away from our stuff, life gets a lot less complicated. It’s sort of like that quintessential picture of the newlyweds driving away in the car looking over waving at the crowd with little cans hanging off the back, those little cans are actually baggage, the cans say things like: problem managing anger, commitment issues, fear, wants to be saved, and I’m not feeling so confident. The problem with the little cans is you’re dragging them along with you and until you can see them, you can’t toss them in the recycle bin.

One of the problems of life is that we can’t really hide from ourselves, no matter where we go… there we are.

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Here are 10 truths that will change your life, your career, and help you meet your dreams?

There are so many mindsets that are important to create success, but these are the 10 Mindsets that I believe are among the most important.

1. Open Your Mind. Open any closed doors in your mind and allow that there are many different ways to be successful. Some people will focus on careers, some will focus on relationships, some will pursue a mountaintop, an idea, write a book, or work to have a positive impact on the world. But, any of these areas can be an aspect of your personal success. An open mindset doesn’t limit you to just one idea. In fact, you don’t have to limit yourself to one area of success, you’re allowed to be successful in all the areas that matter to you!
2. Keep Learning. The coolest thing in the world is to know you can learn, recognizing that you can develop tools to do anything. Our brains are capable of learning new things till the very day we die. You are walking in the footsteps of giants and most of them have either been written about and you can learn from them, or they have written a book about what you want are interested in. Learn all you can from the people who have gone before you. Find the people you admire and then consciously work to learn from them. But, for that matter, create a mindset of learning from every ‘mistake’ you feel you’ve made. Squeeze all the learning out of every experience, both positive and negative. Life is a big school and everyday is a school day if you’re doing it right!
3. Develop Self-Awareness. Notice when you’re on the right path, notice how it feels, learn to hear your gut. You will feel it in your body. It might show up as a bad feeling about something, or a buzz of excitement, or a settled calm that that moves through your heart. Listen to your guts; develop your trust of yourself. Start small, but start listening to what your truth is. The more you develop the mindset of insight, the more powerfully you will move in the right direction. The more you learn to trust yourself, the better able you will be to leap off tall buildings and fly.
4. Set goals. Begin with the end in mind. This doesn’t mean you have to know exactly where you are going. But having a clear goal significantly focuses the journey. Clarity means that you have an idea about where your want to go. Having short term, mid term and long term goals can help you stay on track. We lose energy and direction when we work for a long time towards an intangible idea. The mindset of having a goal means you bring your compass out into the open and then set a clear destination.
5. Visualize. See yourself being successful. Work to create as full an image of what that will look and feel like. What do you want your life to look like in 1 year, 2 years, or 3 years. What kind of job or career do you want to have? Visualize roadblocks and then visualize yourself working through those roadblocks. See yourself becoming what you want to be is an incredible tool and a brilliant mindset.
6. Work. I don’t know that you have to work hard, but you do have to work consistently. There is no movement without action. You must plug away at your goal relentlessly. Each day ask yourself, “Is what I am about to say, think, or do, going to take me closer to my goal or farther away?” Create a mindset that pushes you, prods you, and sometimes forces you to get off your ass and get moving. Those goals aren’t just going to come knocking on your door, unless your out there working on making them happen.
7. Persist. Success often comes to those who hold on, and don’t give up when it gets hard, or boring, or scary. Life will toss you and spin you and send you spiraling out into the universe. Your job is to find good places to hold tight and hang on. Recognize fear, learn to breath, keep a clear direction and then hold tight. It takes a mindset of making choices, allowing mistakes, practice, practice, practice, perseverance, and patience to muddle on.
8. Develop Confidence. Don’t worry about what other people think about you. There will always be people who don’t agree with you, or don’t think that your direction is a good idea. They are often loud and you will hear them. But, hearing and listening are different. Someone once said, “Your opinion of me, is none of my business.” It’s a hard thing to learn to do. But, develop the mindset that you are good enough and your dreams are worthy. Worry less about other people’s expectation of you, than you worry about your own expectations of yourself. Haters gonna hate, but who cares?
9. Don’t waste time. The only wasted time, is the time we spend wishing the past was different, or blaming some situation, some person, or some circumstance for why we haven’t been successful. The past is an interesting place; it’s the moment that this moment, now this moment, now this one, is done. I don’t have Mr. Peabody’s “Way Way Back machine”, neither do you. The mindset of letting go of the past means that you shift your focus on influencing the future. You will have a lot more success when you’re looking forward.
10. Breathe. Take time to clear your mind and breathe. Allow yourself to be uncertain and then breathe through the uncertainty. Take walks, meditate, pray, read, develop your tools to maintain your internal calm. Find people who will support your idea of your healthy self. Sit in moments when you’re feeling good, calm and happy, breathe in those moments, and then learn to carry the feelings over as you breathe into more difficult experiences. Breathe through every fear that marches by.

     

    There are thousands of steps that go into being successful and your mindsets are key to the steps working. Keep adding to your list.

em⋅pa⋅thy [em-puh-thee]

Empathy is a interesting word, the dictionary definition is:

1.	the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

2.	the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.

Do we need empathy in our lives? Empathy is often a word we use in respect to other people and our expectations of them with comments like “they don’t have empathy” or “they need empathy”. Sometimes it seems we don’t have a deep understanding of what empathy even means to ourselves, let alone what it means to others. For me, short verse, empathy means: being able to put myself into someone else’s shoes. It’s the ability to feel or imagine another person’s experience.  It often requires that we learn to suspend judgment and work to understand the other person’s perspective. This becomes most especially important, if you don’t agree with or like the other perspective.  Empathy isn’t about feeling sorry for another, but rather it’s the ability to feel compassion for what their experience is.  It’s finding a way to recognize “the me, in you”.

Empathy comes off sounding ‘soft’ or unnecessary in business, but in reality, empathy is a big part of Emotional Intelligence and it is the process by which we improve relationships.  In relationships, we often start off with positivity.  Then, due to the daily hazards of interacting with others, those positive feelings can erode. We develop habits of interactions, conversations, expectations, and arguments.  We build walls against the annoyances, the hurts and disappointments.  As we build walls, see ourselves as different than others; we can tend to lose the ability to care.  It’s this ability to care that allows us access to the other person’s emotional landscape.  This loss can cause no end of problems. We might see others’ motives maybe more harshly or negatively than we would have if we had kept our openness toward them.  In an University of Michigan,  August 2010 study lead by Sarah Konrath, she found that empathy is on the decline and that while we are hardwired to care, social and cultural impact can negatively affect our ability to empathize.  This hurts relationships, it hurts work atmospheres, and it impacts the bottom line, as wreckage takes time and resources to fix.  One positive take away, is that what can be unlearned, can also be relearned.  It just takes awareness, intention, and practice.

At this point in my life, I have come to believe everyone is a sale person.  I don’t care what you do for a living you’re selling something.  Some people sell cars, others sell widgets, or apps, some sell stories, others sell how to think, or learn, and some sell ideas.  I personally sell ideas and how to think through situations in order to be more effective.  So how do you sell your product?  What are the internal and external guides that direct you to buy this car, or that widget, or another idea?  Often it comes down to relationships, with a person, a business, a feeling, a need, and/or an idea.  We are motivated along these lines.  So, let’s say I am a nice person, but I don’t read cues well, and you end up feeling like I don’t get you at all.  Are you going to want to give me your business?  Maybe once, but to build a brand or to build a business, hopefully we are thinking a little farther than one sale.  Relationships are key to success and empathy is key to relationships.

Daniel Goldman talks about how in a growing global market, misunderstanding can arise and people need to be able to either not do damage or know how to read problematic situations, so they can fix it.  Also, how do leaders retain talent if they stomp all over them?  That only works if you’re so wildly successful that people will put up with you, are you that kind of successful?  If not, pay attention.

It’s not only about listening to your employee’s or your customers, but it’s about the ability to weigh needs.  Good employers take others feelings into account as they are making broader decisions.

 

So, what’s a person to do to increase empathy? Increasing empathy requires several key elements.  

Awareness.  In a nutshell, it’s time to wake up.  This means seeing ourselves with clarity.  We all feel things, and awareness means that I need to understand my own emotions.  If I understand that I’m happy, annoyed, distracted, angry or hurt, I can take steps to take care of myself.  Shifting from an egocentric perspective about my feelings into one of insights that allow me to access the idea that other people are feeling something too.  Our understanding of our emotions helps us to read and understand other peoples’ emotions.   Think about it; businesses often treat customers in ways that no individual would enjoy being treated.  It isn’t rocket science, it’s actually common sense.  If I were treated the way that I am treating others… how would I react?

Be Interested.  Have you ever had a boss or a co-worker, or heck even a friend, who was terminally set on “output”? It can shut people down if all we do is talk at them.  We show empathy by actually showing interest in what someone else is saying, not just about what we are saying.  Take time to ask questions, work on developing an understanding or who they are, remember peoples’ names, remember their families’ names.  Showing interest in people matters.  I recently read a book called The Charisma Myth, by Olivia Fox Cabane, and she talked about this very thing.  Charismatic people show interest in others.  You feel like maybe you’re the only one in the room, because they are looking at you, listening to you, and responding to you.  We don’t remember what people do, we remember how we feel.

Willingness to Listen.  Steven Covey called it the dialog of the deaf, when everyone is talking but no one is listening.  If you walk through the world and don’t care about the experience of others, then reread the above paragraph.  Empathy is grounded in listening.  We need to be willing to suspend our own voice, perspective, or opinion long enough to really listen to the other person.  Hearing someone is not even close to the same thing as agreement.  So, I am not necessarily agreeing with everything they say, when I listen to understand.  I am just working on really understanding what they mean and where they are coming from.  Listening is as important a tool as being able to read or write.  Many of the biggest issues I have seen in organizations and systems, stem from misunderstanding and a dearth of listening.

Presence. aka. Nonverbal Body Language.  This really fits with listening, in that we project our feelings by all sorts of nonverbal cues.  We can say, have a nice day, and mean very different things based on tone alone.  Our posture can communicate annoyance or interest.  Especially on the phone, we can hear distraction a mile away.  Yeah, yeah, what, what did you just say???  When we are paying attention and have a goal of curiosity or interest, we communicate that clearly with how we hold ourselves, the types of questions that we ask, the reactions and responses to what is being said.  All this, wrapped up in a bow, is presence.

Openness.  People have different perspectives. We come to life situations from different cultures, experiences, and belief systems.  If I care about xyz, and I want a team or an organization to be successful, I want to hear all the perspectives.  Some call this brainstorming, but successful leaders learn to use these differences to make powerful changes.  It’s important to ask the quiet folks to speak up too.  It’s really easy to get all the extroverts to share, in fact they will at times over share, but getting lots of people to share takes paying attention.  Whether we are talking team members or customers, openness means that I want to hear many perspectives, ideas, insights, and opinions.  This enriches our organizations, our teams, and helps us stretch ourselves past the limits that we can create by not entertaining enough ideas.

Basic psychology 101 says, we like people who like us… Say that a few times, because it’s important.  Empathy is easy to overlook, but we do so at our own peril.  We all want to be liked, we all want to feel like someone gets us.

This is a repost from my other blog, I’m moving posts over to Creative Human, as I move forward.

What the Navy Seals Know

I was watching a show on the history Channel called “The Brain.”  It was a fascinating program for several of the pieces that they documented.  The program really looked at how the brain operates under different circumstances. One of the segments of the show was a piece on training the Brain to manage stress, and specifically how the Navy is working to improve the passing average in the Navy seal program. What they found was about 25% of the troops in training the program were passing, but the Navy found that there were 5 to 10%  of each group of men that should have passed the Seal’s training, yet didn’t.  Some of these men quit in the last week, last days, or hours of the training.  So, the Navy set out to find out what key things these men needed in order to be able to pass the training.

What the Navy found was there were four areas that needed to be addressed and taught to the men, so that these 5%-10% of men might be successful in the Navy Seal training program.  The four areas that they discovered needed to be addressed were: Goal Setting; Visualization; Self Talk; and Arousal Control/Breathing.

Goal Setting: What the Navy found about goal setting was this, people needed to have very clear short-term, midterm, and long-range goals. What I mean by short-term goals is this, the person might need to be saying to themselves, “I can make it through this next minute,” “I can make it to lunch,” “I can make it one more step or I can make it one more mile.”  Midterm goals might look like, “I can make it to the end of this training day,” or “I could make it to the end of the week.” What long-term goals are, is the ability to remember what the greater purpose is, of any action. For instance, “I want to be a Navy Seal.”  And, for mere mortals, we might have a long term goal of being an Artist, or Writer, or own our own business.

Visualization or Mental Rehearsal: I’m using the terms, visualization or mental  rehearsal, interchangeably. But the Navy found was it was very important, for the person, to see themselves practicing training successfully in their mind. For instance, one of the images that stands out for me, was the underwater test. A Seal trainee, would be in a pool and their trainer would swim down and mess with their air supply. This would trigger a primal fear of drowning. The trainees, who visualized how to handle this situation successfully, tended to be far more successful in actual practice. Another example of this is something I saw most recently the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver Canada, while watching the downhill skiers, you might see them practicing turns or jumps in their heads moving their bodies around as they visualize themselves competing on the course or making a complex jump.

Self talk: They mentioned in the piece that the average person says between 300-7000 words per minute to themselves.  If the majority of that self talk is negative, it’s really no wonder that we can freak ourselves out of completing tasks.  Part of making self talk manageable is to first become aware that you are actually saying so much crap to yourself and then working on challenging the negative words and beliefs.

Dr. Amen of “Change your Brain – Change your Body” talked about asking 2 important questions when you were flooded with negative beliefs.  1. Do I know that this self talk or belief is 100% true?  and 2. What do I know that contradicts the negative self talk or belief?  So, for an example:  “I totally can’t finish anything I start!!!”  Question One: is this 100% true? I don’t know, maybe… maybe not.  Second question: what do I know that contradicts the thoughts? Well, I finished the laundry… I finished brushing my teeth… I fed the dog this morning… I finished this blog article…  Ok, it cannot be 100% true.

Breathing/Arousal Control: When we are having a stress reaction or Arousal Response to a situation (getting scared, anxious, nervous, angry, worried, etc – any strong negative emotion) our brain can have an amygdala trigger, flooding our body with the chemicals Cortisol and Adrenaline.  There are some other chemicals that the body also produces, but these two are very powerful.  We may notice that our hearts start to beat really hard, or our breathing gets quick and shallow.  Our bodies may start to shake or tense up, ready to Fight, Flee or Freeze.  Unfortunately, when we are in the middle of a intense arousal response, our ability to think through the situation is lost and we become very reactive.  What the focus on breathing does, is shift our attention away from the situation and as we work to normalize our breathing, we can calm our responses to situations.  This then will help us stabilize our brain back to a place where we can start thinking again.  Creating the wiring in our brain to calm ourselves in a stressful situation will help us make more effective choices, be less reactive and ultimately help us to survive the situation as best we can.

The Navy has the Seal’s train for stressful often combative situations over and over again.  These men learn skills and develop strategies to manage their reactions in the most intense and deadly situations.  As a quick aside, I am so humbled by how much they do in a days work.  And, I appreciate what they do for me each and every day.  But, the coolest thing we can learn from their training, is that we, mere mortals, can work on training our brain’s reactions and responses to be better!

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This is a nice video about some key aspects of success.