Silvercore Podcast 132 Building the Elite with Craig Weller

https://www.buildingtheelite.com

[00:00:00] Travis Bader: I'm Travis Bader, and this is the Silvercore podcast. Silvercore has been providing its members with the skills and knowledge necessary to be confident and proficient in the outdoors for over 20 years. And we make it easier for people to deepen their connection to the natural world. If you enjoy the positive and educational content.

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[00:00:58] Travis Bader: I'm joined today by a special warfare combat crewman. Who has dedicated himself to helping countless thousands understand and achieve peak performance. He's a coauthor of building the elite, the complete guide to building resilient special operators. Welcome to the Silvercore podcast, Craig Weller.

[00:01:18] Travis Bader: Thanks, 

[00:01:18] Craig Weller: Travis. Thanks for having me. 

[00:01:19] Travis Bader: Totally. Well, I've, I've been looking forward to this one for a while. You know, when we were chatting back and forth, he said, you know, I'm, I do a lot of work with the military and, and helping people achieve their goals, getting through selection. And, you know, a lot of these programs, they'll have a hundred, 200 people come on through and they're all vying to be selected and they'll have an attrition rate of like 60 to 90 percent of these people being cut.

[00:01:45] Travis Bader: Yet the people that go through your program that you've helped. Consult who read your book, which is essentially the Bible to being physically, mentally, emotionally fit. Um, they've got a 90 percent success rate, over 90 percent success rate, which is just mind boggling. And the one thing that you threw and he says, well, you know, your audience, the outdoors people and you know, hunters, I can help them with their buck fever too.

[00:02:13] Travis Bader: So I thought, well, that'll be an interesting one to explore. Um, yeah, so I figured we'll talk about a few different things. Uh, I'll hold up the book here. If anyone's watching it, as opposed to listening to it, here's a book. It's available. You can get them on Amazon. They've got a Kindle edition. They've got a, they've got a, uh, soft cover, which I've got here.

[00:02:32] Travis Bader: Apparently, apparently you've got a hard cover, Craig. 

[00:02:36] Craig Weller: Yeah, it's out of stock right now. The last time we did a print run, they just couldn't make hardcovers for whatever reason. So they're all soft cover right now, but the goal is to keep those big ones in hardcover. 

[00:02:48] Travis Bader: Nice. Well, I'm looking at it right now.

[00:02:50] Travis Bader: Apparently it's such a hot commodity. The hardcover version, Kindle edition, 3568. This is on the canadianamazon. ca, paperback 182. 16. Have you seen what the hardcover is going for? 

[00:03:02] Craig Weller: Isn't there one on Amazon for like a thousand dollars? 

[00:03:04] Travis Bader: Uh, no, 5, 710 dollars and 99 cents right now for the hardcover version.

[00:03:10] Travis Bader: That's 

[00:03:10] Craig Weller: weird. Yeah. I've seen a few of those. I, uh, yeah. You better, you better jump on those. The next time we do a print run, we're hopefully going to be able to get more hardcovers. Yeah. 

[00:03:22] Travis Bader: Well, clearly people find it valuable enough that it's a commodity that they feel that they can go onto Amazon and they can sell it for over 5, 000, almost 6, 000 for it.

[00:03:33] Travis Bader: And when I say it's like a Bible of, of being mentally, physically, emotionally fit. It's a roadmap. Um, but let's back up. Let's talk about you. Enough of me talking. How did you get into this? Tell me a little bit about your background and, uh, uh, why you decided to dedicate so much of your life to helping others achieve these goals.

[00:03:57] Craig Weller: So I was in the special operations community. And if you looked at my background, I Like while I was going through the training pipeline, I shouldn't have been. Um, I grew up in a tiny town in South Dakota, didn't have access to a swimming pool, didn't know how to swim when I joined the Navy and volunteered for selection into a special ops unit and decided I just figure it out along the way.

[00:04:20] Craig Weller: So I learned how to swim while I was in the selection pipeline. Um, and statistically that I shouldn't have made it like, like the odds of me being successful there were. Tiny. Um, and it took me a total of two and a half years to make it through a pipeline that normally takes like six to nine months for most people, probably if you factor in bootcamp and all that, um, maybe a year, uh, I was about two weeks from graduating my first selection course and I failed a time swim.

[00:04:50] Craig Weller: Got rolled out. So I was a SWCC, a boat guy, um, special warfare combatant crewman. That's what I was in selection for. They rolled me out of the SWCC program, being my swim buddy to a BUDS program, which is SEAL training. Um, as an experiment, we were the first two that they had done this with, but they saw that we were far enough through training that we had the mental raw material, we weren't going to quit.

[00:05:10] Craig Weller: We just didn't know how to swim. Um, and I was at that point a year and a half in, and the only, you know, The coaching I had besides from, besides, aside from the minimal amount that I had to pass the screen test by seven seconds on my last try was just try harder. Everyone, all the instructors who saw me struggling in the water just told me to put out more, to get, to get fitter and, and try harder.

[00:05:35] Craig Weller: And once I rolled into the BUDS program, they had an actual coach, like a performance coach who knew how to teach people how to swim. And it changed my life. Like the guy who watched me swim, me and my swim buddy, we did, I think it was a thousand meter swim test the first day. Uh, we simulated the swim that we'd failed.

[00:05:53] Craig Weller: So we swam in boots and camis for a thousand meters and I got out of the water and he told me that it was my, or my parents fault for raising me in South Dakota instead of somewhere with water and that he could fix it. And he gave me probably 10 specific, measurable, quantifiable things that I could do better And then he gave me immediate feedback on that while I was swimming two hours a day, two miles a day, roughly in that pool.

[00:06:19] Craig Weller: So, you know, roll my torso like this, put my head in this position, bend my arm like this, do all of these specific things. Instead of trying harder, he gave me ways to do it better. And within two months, I had failed that the swim that I failed when I got rolled out of my first selection course, I failed by a minute and two seconds.

[00:06:39] Craig Weller: And within two months of coaching with this guy, I passed that swim by over 10 minutes. Um, two more months in that program. And I was one of the fastest guys And it was just because I had the fitness and I needed the skill and I got the skill. And so I went from there back into the SWCC program, graduated finally after two and a half years.

[00:07:00] Craig Weller: And I'd always been interested in human performance kind of stuff. And that selection environment specifically, uh, made me really interested in what it was that made some people successful and pretty much everyone else not. Like, I, I literally saw thousands of people show up, try, and usually quit. Um, and, and the factors that made them quit weren't just physical skill or physical ability.

[00:07:25] Craig Weller: Uh, because of physical ability was the factor that I never would have been there. And the same held true for a lot of the other people I saw graduate. They weren't the best athletes, you know, they weren't the gifted college water polo players, the D1 athletes. They were like farm kids. Um, they were people that just weren't going to give up and they, you know, put together the skills well enough to make it through when they had all those other like non cognitive traits.

[00:07:51] Craig Weller: But I was really interested in how all those things came together. And in helping other people do that, um, so that other people who have the basic raw materials could be successful in those programs. Because it's a massive waste of, of lives, of manpower to have people show up who have the pieces. They just need small amounts of skill or the right coaching, the right process, and they can be successful.

[00:08:18] Craig Weller: Um, and the way those programs work a lot of, in a lot of cases are basically a lottery. Like, You're either lucky and you show up having had the right background and the right skill training from some other setting. Like you went through a college swim program or whatever, and you have it or you don't, but it doesn't have to be that way.

[00:08:37] Craig Weller: And it can be systematized and you can know all of the, the capacities or skills that you need to make it through these processes. And you can develop them. Like every single one of them is knowable and learnable and developable, developable, 

[00:08:51] Travis Bader: developable. It's a perfectly common 

[00:08:53] Craig Weller: word. Yeah. And, and so that's what we set out to do is just identify all of the pieces and how they work together as a system.

[00:09:01] Craig Weller: And, and how can we assess where somebody is and where they need to go. And if you give someone a long enough timeline and they're willing to go through the work, they can do it. Um, you know, like that's another thing that people that we train that are successful. They're successful because they usually spend multiple years preparing for one of these courses.

[00:09:18] Craig Weller: They treat it as professionals. They treat it as part of their job and the people who are not successful. I mean, we get emails from them all the time. They're like, I'm going to special forces selection in two months. Should I try rucking? Like they're. They're, you know, like they, they treat it as a tryout, not, not a job interview.

[00:09:37] Craig Weller: They think they're going to show up and it's the, the sword in the stone myth. Like they're going to show up and just have this special thing, this sparkle in their eye that the cadre will recognize. And they'll, they'll have something that wasn't really due to their work. It's just something that's innate to them.

[00:09:53] Craig Weller: And that's not how it works. It's. Either you've done the work and you've done the work intelligently or you haven't, and that's all that's being tested in these, these courses. Um, the thing is that that simple thing is also very hard, like just doing that work for one to two years before you show up. Is really daunting.

[00:10:13] Craig Weller: It's boring and tedious and it's not fun. Um, and that's what ultimately separates the successful people from the not, you know, like how much they're willing to pay to get the thing that they want. 

[00:10:26] Travis Bader: You know, it's gotta be pretty encouraging for somebody to hear that. That there is a path that they can take.

[00:10:32] Travis Bader: It's not like they're just born with a certain gift and I'll be it. There's going to be people who have backgrounds and abilities that they might be born with, or maybe you have been nurtured into them that might give them a leg up. And there might be some that their abilities that they're born with or how they're nurtured, which may play against them.

[00:10:52] Travis Bader: But the fact that there is a roadmap in place that can get nearly everybody with the, uh, basic physical aptitude and cognitive abilities to be able to, uh, meet a higher level. That's gotta be encouraging. 

[00:11:07] Craig Weller: Yeah, I think so. And, and background does matter, you know, if, if you've spent your entire life playing video games on the couch and you decide you want to go be a green Bray, you know, In a year like you've got a you've got much more work to do.

[00:11:21] Craig Weller: But yeah, it's not it's not magic There's a knowable process that more or less anyone can follow if they're willing to do the work And I think while it's encouraging I think that's also the part that some people will have a hard time with knowing that what they have to trade Is a lot of work and that that part in itself The simple but hard thing is right in front of them and that that is tougher to deal with than I think a lot of people recognize like most people that's why you see magic six week training programs and like shortcuts and People trying to find dumbo's magic feather, basically it appeals because I think culturally there's a strong allure for shortcuts for, for like the special thing that will save you from doing the hard thing, but there's really no, easy way to do a hard thing well, you, you either pay the man, you do the work or you don't.

[00:12:18] Craig Weller: And a lot of the people that are failing are failing because they've tried to work around it. Like they've tried to go around the hard part. Um, you know, like there's nothing that there's no shortcut that keeps you from, or that you can substitute for walking with a backpack for three hours. Every couple of times a week, you know, like it's, it's simple, but, but it takes a lot of commitment and it's something you have to do when nobody's watching, nobody cares, and nobody's telling you to do it.

[00:12:45] Craig Weller: And that's, that's what separates people. 

[00:12:47] Travis Bader: One of my mentors once said to me when I was griping and moaning many years ago about how difficult something was and man, everyone else seems to have it easier. I think it was my early twenties and he looks at me and just laughs. This is Travis. One thing I've learned is that nothing worthwhile in my life has ever come easy.

[00:13:08] Travis Bader: And that's always stuck with me. And I know that if I'm doing something difficult, there's something worthwhile that comes out of that. Even if that's just the mental fortitude or the experience of, uh, being able to deal with difficult situation, a difficult situation, um, nothing worthwhile ever comes easy.

[00:13:30] Travis Bader: And the other thing that I, uh, kind of strikes me that you're talking about when I, I started my company and I'm looking at hiring people and I've got a bit of a selection process and criteria that people are going through. I look at their CV. And they've got five pages of, um, door breacher, pistol instructor, uh, night ops, like all, all of these great looking things that would make them well overqualified for a basic firearms instructor of what I'd be looking for over here.

[00:14:04] Travis Bader: And I'm like, holy crow, this person's got it all. This is fantastic. And I'd sign them up and I quickly realized that my selection criteria was way off. Because these skills can be taught. And what I should be looking for is the core values that their mother should have taught them. And I changed how I selected people.

[00:14:26] Travis Bader: If they had those core values that were a good fit, and they also had all those accolades, fantastic, right? But I would start ranking these core values higher in the selection process, even if they didn't have those basic teachable skills, because I'd just spent a bit more time with them from your standpoint.

[00:14:43] Travis Bader: What are some of the core values that you would be looking for in somebody who you would say would make a successful candidate for any one of your selection programs that you're training them for? And what are some of the values that you can start sussing out after a while as maybe being detrimental to an individual?

[00:15:03] Craig Weller: Hmm. Um, it's going to take me a second to walk through that. That's two different things. So that's two questions. The first thing first, I want to have a story about this. Um, there's an old story From the udts the underwater demolition teams, which are the precursor to the seals um where they had an initial screening test to allow people into the program like that's evolved now into what they call the pst where you Run swim and do some pull ups and stuff.

[00:15:30] Craig Weller: But at the time they had them do a thing where they Jump into a pool and carry a bucket of rocks across the pool. So you carry it a little ways, come up, take a breath, go back down, carry it a little ways more and get it across the pool. I think it's a 50 meter pool. And they had a guy do this, who just jumped in and trucked the thing all the way across the bottom of the pool.

[00:15:51] Craig Weller: Set the rocks down where he was supposed to, came up on the side of the pool and, and almost unconscious, gasping for breath, like trying to figure out where he was again. And they yelled at him for not following instructions because he was supposed to, like, walk a ways, swim up to the surface, tread water, breathe, go back down, swim.

[00:16:09] Craig Weller: You know, swim, carry, swim. And like, what are you doing? Like you didn't follow instructions. And he said, I don't know how to swim. But this actually, in retrospect, this story got me, this is what screwed me up and got me into the Navy. And they're like, Oh, well, we can teach you how to swim. Welcome to the program.

[00:16:24] Craig Weller: And that's how it worked. Like they saw someone who was tough enough to do whatever he had to do to accomplish this task, even if he did it somewhat incorrectly. And they knew that he was coachable and trainable, but he had those like fundamental characteristics of basically. Tenacity you're willing to sacrifice his body to keep going.

[00:16:41] Craig Weller: Um, and that's one of the things that we look for You can there's a few different ways to Categorize it. One of the most crucial is an internal locus of control meaning that someone thinks that they Are steering the ship, like they are in charge of their position in the world and that they have the ability to change their circumstances and control their course in life.

[00:17:08] Craig Weller: Um, someone with an externalized locus of control thinks that the world happens to them. And you can hear that, like, we do an application for our one on one clients, uh, and this is one of the things that we look for, like, the application is deliberately onerous, it's, it's a pain, it's very long, the questions are annoying, um, and some of what we're looking for isn't even necessarily, like, the specific answers to the questions.

[00:17:33] Craig Weller: But how they perceive the world when they answer them and also just their willingness to go through the amount of work that this application requires. Um, and we'll, we'll see it in people's language when they say, um, I got a knee injury, which means the injury happened to them. You know, it came from somewhere outside of themselves where someone says, I hurt my knee or I injured my knee that implies that they were in control of that process They could have done something differently.

[00:18:04] Craig Weller: They could have understood a variable They could have trained differently moved differently done something that was within their control, but they didn't and they hurt their knee It means that they're in control and they have an internal locus of control where the person who said, you know, it happened to me I failed this thing because My knee got injured when it's like something that comes from the outside.

[00:18:25] Craig Weller: We'll see that trend. People pretty clearly skew one way or the other towards internal or externally and external locus of control. And if they're heavily externalized, that means that they're not likely to control the things that they can, or they're not likely to work on the things that they can control.

[00:18:43] Craig Weller: Um, and that they're going to feel like a victim of their circumstances. And they're less likely to engage in active coping versus just, you know, Passive coping. So active coping means that you solve or you address problems or you solve problems by making them go away by facing the problem directly.

[00:19:00] Craig Weller: Passive coping means you make a problem go away by avoiding or ignoring it. Um, so somebody kind of turtles up and just hopes it goes away and works itself out. Um, passive coping is immediately in the moment, less stressful, um, because you're avoiding. Direct confrontation with the stressor. Um, you're avoiding a challenge, but the challenge doesn't go away.

[00:19:24] Craig Weller: The problem doesn't go away. You just push it off into the future and it usually compounds and becomes worse. Um, So you can see that in someone's, uh, nervous system and their, in their, the nature of their stress responses. When someone actively copes with a problem, they'll have to engage with a stronger sympathetic response, like a threat response or an engaged challenge response.

[00:19:48] Craig Weller: And in the moment, they'll have a higher stress response, like their heart rate will be higher. That just means, you know, That they're more actively engaged, but as soon as that stressor has passed or the challenge has passed because they've dealt with it, they'll also have a more restful or relaxing baseline.

[00:20:08] Craig Weller: So that person who has been actively coping with their challenges throughout the day now sleeps better. And when it's time to have dinner with their family and shut down and relax, they do that effectively, where the person who's been coping through their day by avoiding and ignoring things. And hoping they work themselves out, um, all of those program, problems are still on their shoulders somehow.

[00:20:32] Craig Weller: They're still lurking in the background and that person is going to have a higher baseline stress response. So they're a little more sympathetic, a little more stressed at baseline when they should be resting, when they should be sleeping. They don't dip as much, their heart rate doesn't come down as much when they sleep, um, because they're.

[00:20:50] Craig Weller: Keeping their problems in their lives, like they're carrying, they're like basically filling a giant trailer behind them of their problems and carrying it around with them. Um, we also look at just fundamental conscientiousness, which is basically doing the right thing when the right thing is hard.

[00:21:08] Craig Weller: Conscientious people tend to be on time. They're prepared. They think through all of the factors that affect the outcome they're going for. Um, so they're not the person who's constantly running out of gas, um, that always has an excuse for something, you know, uh, and they're also a little more prone to.

[00:21:25] Craig Weller: Feeling stressed because they think about and actively deal with all of the little things in their day Like the guy that you know, that seems like he's always a little bit high. He's just never worried about anything I it'll be fine. You know, he shows up 20 minutes later But he just does like screwing up doesn't bother that person.

[00:21:42] Craig Weller: They're they're kind of sloppy That's that's someone who's low in conscientiousness and that's One of the fundamental, uh, behavioral traits in a, it's called a big five profile. So we have openness to experience conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. And for someone looking to do a special operations role, the two that matter primarily are conscientiousness and neuroticism or emotional stability.

[00:22:08] Craig Weller: So someone who is highly neurotic is generally kind of emotionally unstable and prone to a high level of perceived or imaginary threat. Um, they become, they're more, they're a lot more prone to anxiety and they get stressed out easily where someone who's really emotionally stable, uh, tends to stay calm under pressure.

[00:22:30] Craig Weller: They retain control of their frontal cortex. They're able to think through challenges, um, and rationally even when things are Loud and noisy, uh, where someone who's lower in emotional stability or higher in neuroticism, uh, tends to kind of fly off the handle a lot more easily. And the other ones, introversion, extroversion, it matters a little depending on the specific field.

[00:22:56] Craig Weller: Um, so green berets, uh, stereotypically work in teams and they have to go work with foreign units. And Integrate or embed themselves with all kinds of other people. Uh, extroversion is useful there, but if you're going to be say a scout sniper and you have to be okay in your own head for a long time and good at maintaining vigilance when you're bored, uh, introversion is a strength in that setting.

[00:23:22] Craig Weller: So that one is variable. Um, agreeableness or antagonism is the other side of that is basically your. You're, uh, how much you care about making other people mad or how much you care about the feelings of others. Um, so people in the special operations community tend a little toward the low side, but not usually not so much that they're terribly problematic, uh, socially.

[00:23:51] Craig Weller: If you're highly agreeable, you're like super into people pleasing, you're kind of a flag in the wind that gets pushed around by whatever social circumstances are around you. You don't hold your ground, even. When you know that you're right about something, but it's going to be painful to hold your ground, like, uh, highly agreeable, people will give up their own opinion or their own beliefs in order to go with the crowd, go with the flow, um, which, you know, being very socially adaptable.

[00:24:18] Craig Weller: At that emotional level can be useful in some settings, but generally not in a special operations role and the people you see who were really good at being sort of that social chameleon in a special operations role usually are doing that cognitively, not emotionally, meaning they don't necessarily have high levels of empathy, uh, like, like emotional empathy, but they have very high levels of understanding cognitively.

[00:24:42] Craig Weller: So they can still read what other people are feeling. And do what they need to do with that information, but they're not always feeling it themselves. They're the gray man. So they're, yeah, yeah. So, um, what was the other, I think that actually covers them all. 

[00:24:57] Travis Bader: Well, that covers a fair bit. So it's interesting when you talk about, um, uh, the internal locus of control, uh, going back to the beginning there and looking at people where things happen to them or whether they feel that they've got that control.

[00:25:14] Travis Bader: I've always kind of, you know, I've looked at it. If somebody is at a certain point in their life and they want to do something else and they want to achieve something higher, and they say, I can do this myself. Well, that's an ambitious individual, right? If they feel that it's within their control, if they figure it's up to other people to get them there, well, the boss has got to recognize me and give me a raise or the government's going to have to ABC.

[00:25:38] Travis Bader: See. Well, that person's entitled, right. And I've always tried to make that distinction between the ambitious or entitled individual, how they want to both want to achieve something, but they have two very different ways they want to go about it. Um, and. The thing about conflict that you said there, and I've heard it said in other places, and there's something that I hold close to my heart.

[00:26:01] Travis Bader: Conflict avoided is conflict amplified, right? If you avoid conflict, I just know in the future, it's going to be harder for me. Whenever I have something of conflict that I see come up, I learned from another mentor of mine, who Just be blunt about it and remove that emotion. And if it's, let's say a verbal conflict or an emotional conflict, just say, Hey, here's what I'm seeing right now.

[00:26:27] Travis Bader: And don't try and dance around the issue and attack it head on. Cause you want to, here's what I'd like to achieve. Here's what I want to get to, but I can see that in both a physical standpoint as well. It's kind of like that. Um, uh, what was that old parable of the, uh, the farmer who, uh, He's looking for somebody to help him out on the farm.

[00:26:47] Travis Bader: And, and he, uh, this guy comes along and. He says, well, do you have any special skills? And the guy's like, well, I can sleep through a storm. He says, well, what do you, what do you mean? Like, that's a special skill. He's like, yeah, yeah, I can sleep through a storm. All right, I'll give you a shot. Right. And come on in.

[00:27:02] Travis Bader: And anyways, he's got the guy working for him for a couple of months and sure enough, a big storm comes in one day and the windows are banging and the farmer and his wife gets up and they run out to check on the livestock, but all the livestock squared away, right. They run to check the batten down all the hatches and.

[00:27:19] Travis Bader: Everything's all battened down. He's like, Oh, I get it. He can sleep through a storm. He's conscious conscientious enough right in the here and now. To look after all of the little things that should things go sideways in the future, he doesn't have to worry about him anymore. And that, that's another one that I've always got it.

[00:27:39] Travis Bader: Everything's taken care of on the farm. The, uh, husband and wife, they go back to bed, everyone has a good night's rest because although. Like you're saying, higher level of consciousness will have maybe, uh, more neuroticism or thinking, if I don't do this, then this could happen. I better make sure this is squared away.

[00:27:59] Travis Bader: And that could lead to, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that could lead to a higher levels of anxiety in the now, but very likely lower levels when it comes time to sleep, lower levels in the future, you know, you have it squared. 

[00:28:15] Craig Weller: Yeah, yeah. So if you have someone who is highly conscientious, but also neurotic, then you have that combination of they're aware of all the problems and all the things that can go wrong.

[00:28:24] Craig Weller: Um, but it, Really, it's really emotionally stressful and they probably aren't engaging in active coping and doing like what that guy did and preemptively taking care of all of these variables that matter. Um, there's a good amount of research on willpower and, and on what we perceive as being willpower.

[00:28:45] Craig Weller: And one of the key findings in it is that the people that we think of as having great willpower because they're really effective in their day to day lives. Uh, aren't actually using willpower. They're, they've already set up the structure around them, and they're using different behavioral systems to take willpower out of the equation, so they don't have to force their way through the day.

[00:29:08] Craig Weller: Like, they don't have to grit their teeth, slam a pre workout every time, and, and like, bare knuckle their way through the day. They have all these systems and structures in place, so that doing the right thing becomes easier. And, and they're just kind of following the path that gravity takes them down where the people that we see as having lower willpower often are exercising a significant amount of willpower, but they're just fighting uphill the whole time because they've created systems and structures around themselves where they're naturally pulled out of the, or away from the direction that they want to go.

[00:29:41] Craig Weller: Um, so it's, it's like you're describing, like, I, I've, I'm going to steal that parable. That's a really good example. 

[00:29:48] Travis Bader: Well, you and I, so a friend of mine, Sean Taylor, XJTF2, you know, Sean as well. And what does he say? He just. Puts his program in and then runs a program. And that sounds like what you're saying, right?

[00:29:59] Travis Bader: Is this willpower? No, it's, it's my program. I just, I set it and I run it. My decision branching tree is narrowed. Does this work with my program or not work with my program? If it doesn't work with it, then I don't even have to think about it anymore. Is that, is that one way of looking at what you're, you're saying there?

[00:30:18] Craig Weller: Yeah, that, that would be that combination of emotionally stable and conscientiousness. Um, so like Sean is okay with, and he's so good at this that it doesn't even enter his thinking most likely, but the things that would detract him from doing what needs to be done don't really factor into his daily life.

[00:30:40] Craig Weller: Like he's just going to do what needs to happen. And, and move forward and, and other people with a different structure, uh, who haven't practiced that kind of discipline of just consistently doing the right thing, um, are more easily pulled away by whatever distraction they have or whatever comfort they need to keep or, you know, um, the normal things that kind of bury us all.

[00:31:02] Craig Weller: And Sean is a really interesting example of that. Basically being a modern Samurai and, and just building his whole life around some kind of pursuit of excellence, whether he's running a coffee shop or writing a textbook or being a special operator, like he's always been very good at focusing on those things and, and making them happen.

[00:31:23] Travis Bader: Do you have a background in statement analysis? Cause when you're talking before about looking at how people answer these questions, the knee injury happened to me or vice versa, do you have a background in that? Um, 

[00:31:35] Craig Weller: Uh, kind of actually, we've never talked about this. Um, I, I've done some work, I have to dance around this a little with the intelligence community in, uh, detecting deception, um, and a few different methods of that.

[00:31:51] Craig Weller: Um, I was part of a, uh, study grant learning methods of, uh, I think I can say this. Um, vetting beliefs was the name of the study, which was, they wanted to know if someone said, I strongly believe this, uh, to know if they were being truthful or not. And we've done some work. Some of it is public. Some of it is not on different methods of detecting deception.

[00:32:14] Craig Weller: And some actually, the Most effective versions of that often involve just basically that statement analysis. Um, computers are actually usually better at it than people and they're using pretty simple methods. Uh, type token ratios are just unique word counts and things like that can be very telling. Um, in a deceptive versus a truthful person.

[00:32:37] Craig Weller: And a big takeaway from all of that work is that we're not good at it. And the people who think they're good at it are usually not. They're usually terrible. Yeah, they're the worst. 

[00:32:45] Travis Bader: Usually they spend so much time pre rehearsing that their tells become just blatantly obvious. 

[00:32:52] Craig Weller: Well, it's, there's that, but also the other side of it, the detecting side, um, people who think that they have a lot of experience.

[00:32:58] Craig Weller: experience. And that makes them good at knowing when someone's lying. Um, that gets into the whole field of research on, uh, developing expertise on how expertise actually works. Um, and expertise requires an accurate, immediate feedback loop. Uh, most people don't have that, especially people who are trying to decide if someone's lying or not for a living.

[00:33:20] Craig Weller: You often don't know if you are correct, but over time people develop these pet theories. And, and they feel like they have instincts, but they've never actually validated their instincts. So it's like someone, if you had someone who's been shooting for 10 years, but the entire time they've never known for sure if they hit the target or not, they just, they've been shooting for 10 years.

[00:33:38] Craig Weller: So they think they're good at it. There's a very good chance that they could have developed terrible habits and, and like weird superstitions and things that don't work for them at all, but they've never had an objective feedback loop. To validate or course correct them and steer them in the right direction.

[00:33:53] Craig Weller: Um, and that's true in a lot of occupations. So like the medical field, for instance, um, a lot of people, depending on the medical specialty will actually get slowly worse at their jobs over time. But the exceptions to that are the people who have immediate clear feedback loops. So surgeons, if you're a surgeon and you screw up, you know it immediately.

[00:34:14] Craig Weller: Because your patient bleeds out or, you know, like you see a tissue damage or something like that. Um, but if you're say an x ray tech and you're diagnosing cancer on an x ray and you miss that diagnosis, like you didn't see something that was there, you have no way of knowing that you're probably not.

[00:34:31] Craig Weller: Following up with that person three years later. Uh, so, so you don't necessarily have a feedback loop that makes you better at your job or, or refines and retains the skill that you have over time. Uh, and that's true in a lot. I mean, that's true in the physical fitness industry. When you see people who are like, I've been training people for this for 10 years.

[00:34:50] Craig Weller: Like. It doesn't necessarily mean you're good at it. It just means you've had one year of experience that you've repeated 10 times and you've developed pet theories. 

[00:34:58] Travis Bader: Yeah. I've said that numerous times that people in the past, Oh, I'm a 10 year, 10 years of experience in whatever it might be. No, you've had, you know, one month of experience, 120 times, right.

[00:35:09] Travis Bader: Or one year of experience, 10 times over, right. It's, uh, there's a difference between those two things. 

[00:35:15] Craig Weller: Yeah, you think of everyone driving on the highway next to you, like, uh, most of them stopped getting better at driving maybe a year after they got their license. Like there, there was initially a learning curve, but then we all do this thing.

[00:35:27] Craig Weller: It's called the hypothesis of par hypothesis of tolerance, where we decide that it's good enough and we go from conscious development of a skill into automated execution of that skill. And at that point we no longer improve it. And the point at which we do that is very arbitrary. Like, so there are people who are really, really good drivers.

[00:35:45] Craig Weller: You know, like you've seen drift car, race car drivers, people like that. And then most people who have been driving a car for 30 years, haven't gotten better at it in 29 of those years. And, and that's entirely up to them. Uh, but, but if without an effective training model or a process to make them better, it's never going to happen.

[00:36:04] Travis Bader: Do you, so with that background and basic statement analysis, like I remember as a kid, my father was a detective and he'd bring home different files. And one of them I was reading through and They was at a hospital and there was a theft that had happened and they gave the same form to everybody to fill out.

[00:36:22] Travis Bader: And, you know, to try and spot the person who's lying by reading just one form was difficult, but when you read them all together and their, uh, entirety and compare them against, there's one that really, really stood out from the rest. That was a person, you know, what would you do if we found the person who stole, right?

[00:36:41] Travis Bader: What kind of punishment would you have? And people are like, people are like, Well, they should be fired right away. They should do this. And one of them says, well, you should find out why they did it. And, and maybe they had a good reason. And if they pay it back, then maybe they can that beside all of the other people are like, nope, it's wrong.

[00:36:59] Travis Bader: Fire them really helped it stand out. So I got interested in statement analysis at a younger age. I've done both. Basic interview and interrogation and advanced interview and interrogation course through different police agencies and companies out of the States. And you're right. Um, detecting deception is a, uh, uh, is a difficult, a very, very difficult thing.

[00:37:21] Travis Bader: And even the pros get it wrong a fair bit. Um, But as well, I apply that to just interactions with people, just looking at, uh, at how we work together. And I try and apply that same sort of principle and just getting, getting reads, I guess, on people, uh, it, does that form part of your process? Process aside from your questionnaires and going through, or are you looking at both statement analysis and, uh, physiological responses to stressors and what you're doing with them?

[00:37:54] Travis Bader: Is that a part of it? Cause this is going to lead into another question, but I'll let you answer this. 

[00:37:59] Craig Weller: Like, is there a alongside something that we could kind of hard code? You know, like we could rate statements for internal versus external locus of control or whatever. Are we integrating just a felt sense, like a kind of an instinct toward, um, to some extent, yes, I think we do.

[00:38:21] Craig Weller: Um, generally we're able to, uh, justify that using those criteria. Um, we have that discussion every time we have a new applicant for coaching and there's four of us. Who kind of pick and choose who, through who we're going to take, who we're not. And each person basically makes their case for this is what I've seen.

[00:38:44] Craig Weller: You know, this is where I think he's a good candidate. This is where I think they're not going to be a good candidate. Basically, this is this person's probability of success with good coaching. And, and we do, there's kind of an instinctive thing. Um, I can think of, there was one recently where. Me and Jonathan, both were just kind of immediately annoyed by this person.

[00:39:08] Craig Weller: And it was even, it was somewhat hard to even articulate why. Um, and, and three out of four of us were like, ah, no, I'm good. I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to work with this guy. And then one guy was like, he seems coachable. I think it's going to be a challenge, you know, like I, it'll be a challenge to get him to, to think better, to, to kind of like turn his life around.

[00:39:29] Craig Weller: And I'm going to take this challenge on. And it was. It's a complete waste of time. Um, the guy wouldn't follow his program, didn't engage with it, quit within a week. Um, you know, he had to chase him down. It wasted everyone's time. And in that case, I think we had a few hard criteria on things like conscientiousness or even just a person's ability to like express themselves intelligently as a factor, like how well they can communicate in written language, assuming that they're a native English speaker.

[00:40:00] Craig Weller: That's, uh, that can be a big tell because you're also looking at conscientiousness and baseline intelligence there when you see that, um, but, but something about that guy was just a felt sense. Um, and I, I think we all kind of generally, for all those reasons I just described, try not to go too far into that, um, relying solely on like a gut feeling.

[00:40:21] Craig Weller: gut instinct kind of thing, because that can be easy, that can easily be wrong if you can't also like hard code a reason for that sense, you know, um, but we've been doing it for so long that generally our felt sense, like our initial instinct is matches up with what the hard criteria would be anyway.

[00:40:44] Craig Weller: Because you've 

[00:40:45] Travis Bader: received that immediate feedback feedback or somewhat immediate feedback from repeated trials. 

[00:40:52] Craig Weller: Yeah. Yeah. So we've had the feedback loops to like, uh, calibrate that felt sense. Um, like we've been doing this for a long, long time and we've had a lot of repetitions on it. And we do have pretty good feedback on it.

[00:41:07] Craig Weller: Like in this guy's case where he was like, I think he might be coachable. I'm going to see this as a challenge to, you know, help this guy get his life together. And basically the feedback loop that that guy got was we just turned down other people because we didn't have coaching slots who probably would have been more willing and able to do the work.

[00:41:24] Craig Weller: We shouldn't have taken that guy, um, because he wasted all of our time. 

[00:41:29] Travis Bader: You can always take the Tony Robbins approach. He's got a, uh, somebody wants personal coaching from Tony Robbins. He's going to charge you an arm and a leg. He's going to make it hurt because if someone's willing to pay that amount of money, They'll be willing to put the work in required afterwards.

[00:41:44] Travis Bader: It's just theory. Anyways, maybe, maybe not. Maybe they just have a bucket of money and they can throw it around. 

[00:41:50] Craig Weller: Possible. Yeah, that is possible, but it is a good filter. Um, which is kind of tragic, you know, because we, we deliberately work with a market that is comprised of people who generally don't have a lot of money and we adjust our pricing in to account for that, uh, knowing that.

[00:42:10] Craig Weller: You know, like if you're a 20 year old kid trying to get into special operations, like you're not throwing around a ton of cash Um, so like the coaching that we do if we were working with like executives or something like that would cost three or four times as much um, but There is that thing where you've where anyone regardless of like their financial status Values more what they pay for or values what they pay for to a greater degree So if you give something away Even if it is someone, you know They just lost their job or whatever, and they can't pay for it.

[00:42:42] Craig Weller: And you, you start comping them a couple of months of training or something like we've seen over the years, it is often true that, um, if you don't charge people something enough, that it hurts at least a little, they're not going to value it, which is just a tragedy kind of, because there are people where like, I'd honestly prefer to not charge them knowing how much it hurts them to pay us when they're like in a tough financial place.

[00:43:04] Craig Weller: Um, And we do that sometimes, but it often doesn't work out because people stop valuing what they're, what they don't pay for. I give, 

[00:43:12] Travis Bader: I had a, uh, it's, it's still something I struggle with is value valuing myself appropriately. Uh, I tend to give a lot of things away for free because, uh, the other side of that is if I charge 'em what I think I'm, should be valued at.

[00:43:29] Travis Bader: I mean, like you say, that could be, that could be a, a difficult situation. Um. I I look at, uh, in, in the same way, if you, someone does something really nice for you, let's say they go out and they buy you a coffee and you turn around and you buy them, give them $10 or five bucks or whatever the coffee is worth, you can diminish their sense of giving and they can diminish their, uh, gift that they give to you.

[00:43:53] Travis Bader: But if you turn around and give them a gift, you know, uh, in return flowers or something else, right? They can say, Hey, I feel appreciated. So that's one thing that I've always struggled with because I, you know, not wanting to be the receiver of gifts, but on the value side, there's one story that I can tell that has always cemented it in my head.

[00:44:13] Travis Bader: I had a fellow come in Swiss guy, older fellow. Came in back in the days before it was silvercore training and it was silvercore gun works. And I was doing gunsmithing for barber car companies across Canada and fix and to work for police. And then every Joe Blow who had a gun would bring something in.

[00:44:30] Travis Bader: And anyways, this guy comes in. He's got a barrel, he's got an action. He says, I want this barrel cut, crowned, threaded. Uh, I want a muzzle brake put on it. I want the other side threaded to fit into the, into the action. And I want it chambered. And he had some tight specifications and I want the whole thing Parkerized.

[00:44:51] Travis Bader: And he's got this whole laundry list of things that he wants done on it. So I go through and I started doing this work and I'm like, Oh, this old guy, he's made a point of telling me that he's an old pensioner. And so I, what am I going to charge him? And I go Brownells in the States has got a high, low of what gunsmiths charge.

[00:45:08] Travis Bader: And I just went on the low side of everything. And some, I just crossed off and I gave him a smoking deal. Anyways, he gets his rifle. He looks at it. Hey, thanks very much. See you later. Oh, okay. Fair enough. Comes back a week later, another same type of action, another barrel. He says, I want another one done up, but I wanted the exact same thing done, but in a different, uh, chambering, a different caliber.

[00:45:32] Travis Bader: I'm like, now the guys has taken advantage of me. I'm thinking, right. So I, I go through and I go to the Brownells list and I go on the high side and I charge her everything. He came, he looked at the work and he turned around and left, he went back to his truck. And I'm like, oh man, he's mad. Cause he looked at the bill.

[00:45:46] Travis Bader: He looked at the work and it's a lot more than the last one. And I warned him ahead of time. I'm not going to be able to give him the same price. Anyways, he came back and he put these white gloves on and he picked it up and he holds it up to the light. And he says, no, that that's quality work. I did the exact same thing that I did for him the week prior on this other gun.

[00:46:05] Travis Bader: I just charged him more and that paid off. Perception of the value for getting charged more is always stuck in the back of my head. 

[00:46:14] Craig Weller: That's a good, that's a really good example. That's like having run a bunch of gyms and stuff that is a really common thing to struggle with is like when you're running your own business.

[00:46:24] Craig Weller: Um, But yeah, it's, uh, it's a good example of how that psychology works. Uh, crucially you are really good at what you do, so you can back that price up with the quality of your, your craft. Um, you know, there, there are certainly people where that's a mismatch, but. But yeah, it is, it is a good illustration of that concept.

[00:46:47] Travis Bader: So people who listen to this podcast, if they go back a few, they're going to see what I did with Sean Taylor. He was one of the plank holders. He started up GTF too. They probably also listened to the collective of which both you and I have been on on a number of times in the past. And of course, Sean and Chance are on there all the time.

[00:47:06] Travis Bader: For those people who know who we're talking about, and even for those who don't, who want to go and check out the collective or listen to the past episodes, Sean Taylor, how would you look at him? If you're looking at statement analysis, you're looking at gut feeling, how would you kind of break him down from an analytical standpoint for why he's been able to be successful in the areas that he has been?

[00:47:30] Travis Bader: And if you were to provide advice to him, what would those areas be to put you on the spot? I 

[00:47:36] Craig Weller: don't know if I'd have any, I don't know if I could have any advice for Sean that, that he's not already doing. Um, He, if he fits that exact profile of highly conscientious, like, like he's the guy who can sleep through storms for sure.

[00:47:52] Craig Weller: Um, emotionally stable. And in his case, I don't know all of the details on this. I've talked to him a bit of like the books and the ideas that have influenced him over time. Um, I know he got into Bruce Lee's stuff a long, long time ago, like his philosophy writing and that kind of stuff. Um, but he's made a conscious.

[00:48:13] Craig Weller: Practice of learning and internalizing concepts through experience. Um, so, you know, like any concept that we talk about, like toughness or discipline or whatever, um, the words themselves don't really mean anything unless they're informed by an experience that you've had, that you've navigated with those things in mind.

[00:48:39] Craig Weller: Um, like until you've lived it, you, you don't really know what it is. You just know the words that describe it. And Sean has done a very good job of living all of those things so that they are who he is. They're not just things that he knows or words he can say. They're who he is. And I think that's one of the things that distinguishes Sean from most other people.

[00:49:04] Craig Weller: Is everything that he would, any value that he would express, um, is basically matched one to one by what's on the inside and what he's done or what he does on a consistent basis. Like there's no mismatch between his externally expressed values and the way that he lives his life. Um, and that's a pretty rare thing.

[00:49:29] Craig Weller: And he fits that whole profile. You know, he's fairly agreeable to the extent that he needs to be, because I think he's a sociable guy. He's pretty extroverted. His cognitive style is fairly externally oriented and broad. He, so he's, he sees like a big spider web of interconnected ideas around him. And he's, he's kind of thinking outside of himself a lot.

[00:49:55] Craig Weller: Um, but he can shift internally as well. And he's very introspective. Um, so he's just kind of agile mentally. He's a really interesting guy in that sense. Um, I don't know what advice I would give him. I don't think I have any, honestly. The dude is like, how old is he? Like he's in his sixties. He's more ripped than most 20 something crossfitters.

[00:50:18] Craig Weller: Like he's, and he's, he's just like a good dude. It's yeah. I don't, I don't know if I'd have any advice for him. We, so you got those meals, right? We sent you the base camp kitchen. He got them too. And his tasting notes were like. He like a sommelier , he sent them to, to jen, the chef. And he, I think he mismatched a label.

[00:50:40] Craig Weller: He read something, he read the wrong one, but his tasting notes, he was noting the mismatches. He's like, there's something spicy in here. There's nutmeg. I know there's nutmeg, but I don't see nutmeg on the recipes. And when you hit the low, the base notes in this. And the, it was like, it was incredible. Like the guy is basically a professional food taster somehow.

[00:51:02] Craig Weller: And I'm guessing that comes from having run a coffee shop and like being, you know, like really into the nuance and, and tasting quality there is probably where that at least was refined. Who knows what else he's been up to. I think it comes from 

[00:51:17] Travis Bader: wanting to do a job well. And if he's going to do it to provide the best bang for the best job that he can possibly do in, in that process.

[00:51:26] Travis Bader: I think that's what it comes from. I know. 

[00:51:29] Craig Weller: Yeah. Yeah. Cause I told him like, you're hired, you're the new executive vice president of tasting things. And his response was just like, just excellence in what I do, like excellence in everything I do. And I think that's it. Like, like he understood the assignment, like we're sending you these meals and we want better feedback than it was good.

[00:51:48] Craig Weller: You know, you know, I ate it and I was full, like it, it was exactly what we needed. And yeah. 

[00:51:56] Travis Bader: Well, we, uh, had the. First one today. So I'll, you'll be getting some notes on that one. And, uh, um, my, uh, my wife's a chef and so, uh, going to be getting, getting some notes from, from that perspective as well. It just, uh, that's 

[00:52:11] Craig Weller: helpful.

[00:52:12] Craig Weller: Yes. That's what we need. So 

[00:52:13] Travis Bader: she's a red seal chef for, um, previously in a previous life now she's doing, um, a lot of work with Silvercorp since we got to a point where we needed her help. Um, uh, cool. So. You know, you talk about mental toughness. A lot of people say, well, that, that, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

[00:52:33] Travis Bader: And I used to, uh, Subscribe to that school of thought way back in the day, when I was a kid, Oh, sure. The tougher it is, it doesn't kill me, makes me stronger. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it just keeps compounding on top of you, and if you don't have ways to deal with it, you get beaten down further and further.

[00:52:50] Travis Bader: And so at some point I had to figure out some ways to be able to, uh, you know, Build processes for myself to, like, you talk about that trailer that you drag behind you to put things in the trailer, drag it to where they need to be, let them off and keep on going. And so I can, uh, uh, get further. Um, what, what would you suggest for a person who wants to be mentally stronger?

[00:53:18] Travis Bader: Are there some steps that you would point a person towards to, uh, increase their mental strength? 

[00:53:25] Craig Weller: Hmm, um, Yes. Some of it will depend on a personal profile, because the recipe isn't the same for everyone, so you'd have to, oops, you'd have to understand where you struggle, what specifically you struggle with, and, and then work to address those things, because that can be different for everyone.

[00:53:45] Craig Weller: Um, one thing that's, commonly misunderstood is that, uh, like, first of all, the concept of toughness is a lot more limited than some people make it out to be. Toughness is essentially goal fixedness, which means you're just going to keep badgering away at something until you accomplish it or it kills you, but that's The problem is that it can go both ways.

[00:54:08] Craig Weller: Um, so toughness should be paired with adaptability and an intelligent approach to what you're doing. Um, like there's that saying, if you're going to be dumb, you better be tough, but it, it would be better said that if you're going to be tough, you should be smart as well, uh, otherwise. Toughness is just going to kill you, like you're just going to keep doing something wrong over and over, doing it the unnecessarily hard way over and over until you figure out a better way to do it.

[00:54:36] Craig Weller: Like you could think of me swimming, like I was mentally tough, trying harder and harder to swim really badly. When all I needed to do was do it better and, and more toughness or more fitness wasn't going to help me out of that situation. Didn't you almost drown? Oh, I, yeah, repeatedly. Drowning was like a, like a weekly event, almost like I lost consciousness.

[00:55:01] Craig Weller: In the water several times. Um, I would get these terrible migraines cause like the long swims might take 90 minutes and I'd be hypoxic the entire time. Um, so I'd have like these terrible headaches from 90 minutes of hypoxia, which is probably really bad for your brain. Um, it's not showing on you 

[00:55:18] Travis Bader: yet.

[00:55:19] Travis Bader: We'll see how you age. So far, 

[00:55:21] Craig Weller: we'll give it time. Yeah. Um, but one, another, another piece of that, like the, you know, like how do I become mentally stronger thing? Um, I think you actually touched on this, the idea that, what was it? Problems suppressed, a problem suppressed is a problem. Amplified. Amplified.

[00:55:39] Craig Weller: Yeah, it's a really good expression. Emotions or emotional health are an integral part of being more resilient or tough or whatever you would say because if you're getting through life by numbing and ignoring emotions, they're going to come back and they're going to be stronger and you're not going to have the skills.

[00:56:07] Craig Weller: To handle that. Um, and even, even reasoning or like decision making happens with the aid of emotions. Um, if you look at someone who's trying to make a decision without any input from emotions, you're looking at a person who's pretty significantly on the autism spectrum. And that's what that does. That's, that's where that decision making comes from, where they're overwhelmed by everything because they don't have an emotion that helps point them in the right direction and shortcut that process.

[00:56:36] Craig Weller: And even when we're detecting danger, um, we're recognizing patterns, most of that happens subcognitively or emotionally before we're consciously aware of it. Um, so being able to integrate emotions into our reasoning, um, whether we're, you know, Solving a problem at work, learning how to write code, or, you know, like we're navigating social situations or trying to decide whether we should quit the selection course or not.

[00:57:04] Craig Weller: Um, being tuned into your emotional state and able to monitor it objectively and recognize what you're feeling, categorize it accurately and respond to it appropriately is an important skill. And it's one of the things that we're currently working on more with our The clients that we have, um, because we're in a place where we can physically get pretty much anyone where they need to be given a long enough timeline.

[00:57:33] Craig Weller: And we can give them cognitive skills that help them navigate situations, which are a key piece of, of, you know, resilience or toughness or whatever. Um, things like segmenting, uh, are really important, which is where you break a task down into the smallest manageable pieces you need to. So in a really tough day in selection, you might only think about doing the next five pushups or running the next hundred meters or whatever's in front of you.

[00:57:54] Craig Weller: Make it to breakfast, make it to lunch, make it to dinner, break your day down in that sense. And there's a paradox in there as well where compartmentalization can be a useful skill when you're using it to acknowledge and recognize a negative feeling, a negative emotion or something that sucks that either you can't do anything about at the moment or it's unproductive to address it at that time because you have other things to do.

[00:58:19] Craig Weller: So you're terribly hypothermic because you've been sitting in cold water all day or all night. It's terrible. You recognize that it's terrible that you're really cold. You also recognize that it doesn't matter There's nothing you can do about it. It's not going to kill you and you have other things to do So you just set that aside you just like set aside that hypothermia and you put it out of your mind You may put away Negative emotions at that time, you know, like you feel some self doubt or something You can just put that in a box set it aside for now because you have push ups to do you have something else to do the problem with that is if Compartmentalization or numbing becomes your go to method all of the time, constantly.

[00:58:58] Craig Weller: And you're doing it with things that don't go away, that aren't transient. You know, like it's, it's useful when you're hypothermic at midnight and you're gonna be warm the next morning. And then it's fine, but it's not useful when it's something that isn't going to go away and you're going to have to continue dealing with it without the ability to do so because you've never directly faced it.

[00:59:18] Craig Weller: Um, so one of the, one of the things that we have people do is just work on, on that, the ability to recognize and understand their emotions and to be able to sit with them without suppression or avoidance. And in order to give themselves, um, like a better view of the landscape, so to speak, so that they're able to navigate those things more effectively.

[00:59:41] Craig Weller: Because once someone has the fitness, once they're not just failing the screen test to get into a selection course, or they're missing the run cutoffs or whatever, um, the reasons people quit in these really difficult courses usually come down to either I don't feel like I belong here or other people don't feel like I belong here and I believe them and then they quit and they go away and that perception is very fluid and it has very little to do with their objective performance in the course.

[01:00:12] Craig Weller: Um, we've seen people quit who were out of like right at the end of the selection course. This was, uh, one outside of the U. S. Um, It's maybe a three week course they had two days to go And they quit because they felt like they just weren't good enough like they didn't belong there They shouldn't have been there and then they learned afterward that out of the 20 some guys left They were number two like physically in every performance metric.

[01:00:33] Craig Weller: They were the second like top performer they were definitely going to make it if they just Um, and, and that perception of, I don't belong here, other people don't think I belong here is it's, it's in your head, it's on you and people have to be able to deal with that and the factors that are going to impose that because these courses are designed to make you believe that because that's one of the main things they're testing is your ability to retain your own self belief.

[01:01:05] Craig Weller: Or your own intrinsic drive in circumstances that are entirely discouraging and entirely designed to take that away from you. And if you have someone who still believes that they're capable of moving forward and that they deserve to earn their place, when that entire system is trying to break them down and take that belief away from them, then you have someone who's very strong.

[01:01:27] Craig Weller: Um, but that comes down to a lot more than being good at exercise. It comes down to knowing yourself and knowing your motivations and knowing what matters to you and who you are and basically that you are, that you are allowed or you're entitled to earn your place. Not that you have a place that you're just owed one, but that you deserve to earn it, like that, that you can work for it.

[01:01:52] Craig Weller: And it's yours if you fight for it. And that's where, The fit people who are otherwise qualified tend to break. Um, it's just, they become emotionally discouraged. 

[01:02:01] Travis Bader: So those would be emotionally based decisions that they're making. And yeah, like so many people, like, how do you differentiate between running away from something or running towards something that's more desirable, being able to differentiate I'm quitting because I, I can't handle it.

[01:02:19] Travis Bader: I'm just not good enough. People don't like me too. I'm quitting because. There's actually a better path for me to go forward. And that's one of those things that people rationalize in their head, right? Oh no, it's not because I wasn't good enough. It's because I can do better work over here. Like that, that's a tough piece of the puzzle.

[01:02:38] Travis Bader: I got to imagine for not only for the individual, but for you to be able to be working with, with people. 

[01:02:45] Craig Weller: Well, and, and it can be true. I mean, that's, that's true. Part of what these courses are doing. Like if you're in the middle of all that chaos and pain and like, people are yelling and you're doing pushups and, and you just realize like, like, that's kind of what your job's going to be like anyway, like that's something that a lot of our people who have graduated and moved on, we talked to them after about what their job is like and what they wish they had known.

[01:03:08] Craig Weller: They're like, the hard part isn't over. Like these selections are designed this way. Because this is what the job is like, like, you're still going to be cold, wet and miserable as a professional, like with that pin on your chest, it's not going away. And so if you're in that environment and not just because of the physical discomfort or the emotional discomfort, but you're just like, this lifestyle is not for me and I would much rather do something else.

[01:03:35] Craig Weller: Like I have skills or capacities or interests, things that I'm good at that fit in a different box than this. Then then leaving that course is the right decision and you should go do that. Um, but like you said We're really good at rationalizing our excuses and you can see people doing it over time because usually quitting People build up to it.

[01:04:00] Craig Weller: They they kind of they test out their story, their narrative, their excuses, and, and, and make it okay in their head. They'll test it with their friends a little bit. Um, and, and they build that rationalization. Uh, and if, if it's just that, if it's just like giving yourself a comfortable reason to give up on yourself on something that you actually wanted, but you're not quite willing to pay for, then, then, I mean, it's still a good thing that you're not in the course because that's not the kind of person they want in those courses, but, um, I'm kind of, I'm kind of losing the thread here, but it is a useful, it is, it is a useful thing to know those things about yourself.

[01:04:41] Travis Bader: Well, it's one of the pieces of the puzzle, which when you brought up, you know, modern day samurai, I remember, uh, I think you know him as well. Speaking with him, one of the early podcasts I did with him. And I, he's talking about the whole emotional aspect to training in jujitsu training as a, um, he was head of BC emergency response team.

[01:05:03] Travis Bader: And, and I look back to, um, like, uh, my father, when he was training, he was in charge of the, uh, Vancouver's emergency response team for a number of years. And I didn't see. From my perspective, any emphasis put on the emotional side and listening to Seb talk about this, they can, uh, the older eras, it seemed to be all about physicality and all about, uh, uh, mental grit and toughness and perseverance and it sucks, but we're pushing it through anyways, but the emotional side was just completely ignored.

[01:05:39] Travis Bader: And I said, well, this is kind of cool that it's being addressed. And so I was like, well, when was it forgotten? Right. I mean, this is always a piece of the puzzle going back hundreds and thousands of years was the emotional side to the warrior. Um, are you finding a resurgence in the desire for emotional balance in special operator training?

[01:06:02] Travis Bader: Uh, or is that, uh, something that's always just kind of been there that other people like myself just haven't seen. 

[01:06:11] Craig Weller: Uh, there's always been a threat of it. Um, it, it depends on the community a bit. I, I think it's always been there within certain people. Um, but we're seeing a resurgence in it. I think now because we're post GWAT would be the U.

[01:06:25] Craig Weller: S. term for it. Like we're post all these 9 11 forever wars and we just. Destroyed our special operators for 20 years, throwing them into endless combat deployments over and over and over. And we're seeing the guys that are coming out without physical injuries are often still not okay. And there's a growing awareness.

[01:06:50] Craig Weller: That if you want to have a functioning home life, if you want to have functioning relationships, if you just want to feel okay with yourself, um, that you have to take care of those pieces as you go. Uh, and I, I think that awareness is, is important. It's been driven by multiple decades of failing to do so effectively, and us seeing the negative results of that, of people who either burn out within their community, or they leave their community and they can't really function that well anymore.

[01:07:23] Craig Weller: And it's because they stayed good at exercising, but they let everything else die off. And We've, we've realized that we could do better at that, that we can have people who are not just physically fit and good at exercising, but that are also still emotionally fit and capable of being good family members and good friends and socially okay and okay with themselves.

[01:07:48] Craig Weller: And, and, and there is a shift toward that, I think. The selection courses are also changing a bit in most cases where they're looking a little more at the complete person. Um, a lot of times I think if, I think even Sean's early days, some of his courses were largely based on just surviving short term physical brutality.

[01:08:11] Craig Weller: Um, and you can get people through with a particular personality type who can do that. Um, but now they're starting to look a little bit more at the whole person and how they're going to interact with the team, whether it's going to become a criminal later on, you know, like these kinds of things and the selection criteria are different.

[01:08:29] Craig Weller: So there are courses now where a lot of people. can make it through physically, but they're still not going to be chosen. They're not going to be selected. And that's going to be based on some kind of social dynamic thing. Um, how they do in an interview, how they do in a contrived social setting, um, places where their sociability and emotional health, even just interviews with a psychiatrist, um, are going to factor into whether they get the job or not.

[01:08:51] Craig Weller: So even for people who don't particularly care about it. Uh, they're recognizing that it might be necessary for them to get what they want. Yeah. So they're working on it just for that reason. Well, 

[01:09:01] Travis Bader: wouldn't a higher level of psychopathy predispose an individual to maybe be a little bit, uh, uh, further along the, uh, the, wouldn't that allow somebody to be able to approach these challenges a little bit more easily?

[01:09:18] Craig Weller: Yes, depending on the challenge. Yes. Um, the really, the courses that really rely on physical brutality, I think do skew a little more toward sociopathy or psychopathy possibly. The, I'm not well versed enough in some of the diagnostic criteria for that. I think psychopathy, uh, isn't really its own DSM category.

[01:09:41] Craig Weller: I think you'd mostly put. Those characteristics under sociopathy. But the, the courses, Bud's in particular, um, SWCC is somewhat similar. It's modeled after Bud's, um, relies pretty heavily on just. Physical brutality and and physical perseverance and those can skew more towards sociopathic types or or people that are very very good at compartmentalizing for a short amount of time relatively short amount of time and it does not Emphasize social dynamics for the most part, and often not in a very positive way when there are social dynamics.

[01:10:25] Craig Weller: Like there are things in say buds where there's a lot of shuffling, um, people trying to game the system and get into the right boat crews and put the perceived weaker people into these boat crews or put the stronger people into their boat crews. Like there's a lot of like social shuffling in kind of a Lord of the flies way, um, but not in the way that say SF special forces selection.

[01:10:47] Craig Weller: Emphasizes like sociability and group dynamics and your ability to communicate as a leader and and they put a lot more emphasis on peer reviews And things like that where they tend to get people through who are a little more emotionally balanced where some of the programs that rely more exclusively on brutality as a Selection criteria.

[01:11:07] Craig Weller: Um, some, some level of sociopathy is helpful in those, and that doesn't even necessarily mean that it's a bad thing. Like you can, like you can have that personality type, which is basically the ability to withdraw your emotions from a situation until it's over. Um, and, and. Do pretty well. Like you also see that in surgeons, uh, in trauma medics in executives.

[01:11:32] Craig Weller: Yeah. Yeah. Where like some level of psychopathy or sociopathy can be an adaptive or beneficial personality type in those settings. Like if you're a trauma surgeon and you're taking, like, you're working on like a gunshot wound and you're covered in blood, like if you allow the emotional stress or the emotional implications of that situation, like you just saw this Like wounded person's loved one hand them off to an ambulance or like, you know, if you're a trauma medic, that might be what you're seeing.

[01:12:01] Craig Weller: Um, if you allow that to cloud your decision making or stress you out so much that you can't think well and do your job and keep your hands steady while you're doing a surgery, like you're not going to do your job well, or you're going to burn out. Um, a lot of those jobs. are very prone to vicarious trauma, where you start to absorb the weight of the trauma that you're processing and dealing with.

[01:12:23] Craig Weller: And if you can't just shut that off and turn it away, same with, you know, trauma work or if you're some kind of social worker dealing with that kind of thing, if you're in law enforcement dealing with the worst parts of society, if you can't. Set that aside, like if you're an overly empathic, like warm empathy type person, like you're gonna start carrying that weight and it's gonna break you down.

[01:12:45] Craig Weller: So, so some level of what you could term sociopathy or psychopathy can be an adaptive thing in those cases where people are able to go emotionally cold and just do the things they have to do to manage the situation effectively until it's over. Problems arise when that personality You know, and then that person doesn't have a good home life, isn't good with friends, you know, like they're just not a happy person or not enough, not a functioning person in society.

[01:13:11] Craig Weller: But the ones who are good at it can basically turn that switch off and on and do what they need to do when they have to, and then they can be, you know. You know, a warm person outside of that. 

[01:13:21] Travis Bader: So when you say turn off, would that be where, when you mentioned before having somebody sit with their emotions without suppression or avoidance, would that be part of the turn off process?

[01:13:33] Craig Weller: Yeah, afterward. Okay. So if you think of the active coping thing, like maybe in the middle of a trauma incident, you know, there's blood spurting out of an artery. People are screaming, you just have to go cold and follow the checklist. Like trauma is basically following a checklist of, Stop the bleeding, start the breathing, plug the holes, package for transport, you just, you just do that cold, but then afterward, you should be able to emotionally process that and sit with it and be okay with it, or, you know, make yourself as okay with it as you can be, um, because if you cope with that after the fact, in what should be like the, the restful or restorative moments where you're recovering from, um, The stresses that you just went through.

[01:14:13] Craig Weller: Like if you still have to rely predominantly on suppression and avoidance as your coping mechanism in those non threatening, non time pressured restful moments, um, then you're going to end up carrying a lot of baggage and you're going to be incapable of dealing with the, the fallout of that over time.

[01:14:35] Travis Bader: How would somebody, or how would you coach people to be able to sit. With those emotions without suppression or avoidance. And is that where these somatic experiences that people talk about are allowed to process. 

[01:14:50] Craig Weller: Yeah, actually, something like the trauma releasing exercises, uh, can be really useful for that, um, where there is a physical component to processing and releasing trauma.

[01:15:02] Craig Weller: Um, some people will use exercise for that if they can also maintain some sort of like internal awareness of what they're doing. Um, there's a psych that we work with, a Canadian named Dr. Krista Scott Dixon, who, she works with a lot of our clients and she has them go through some of those. Kinds of things like trauma releasing exercises, which generally just involve like shaking or moving um allowing yourself to kind of like physically Um, I guess trauma would be the way to phrase it.

[01:15:33] Craig Weller: It's something you'll see animals do as well. Um, you can find YouTube videos of, say, like a gazelle getting taken down by a cheetah. There's several of these where, for whatever reason, the animal still lives. They go completely, like, deeply parasympathetic. Still, like, that full trauma response where they're barely conscious, um, and then the threat goes away.

[01:15:53] Craig Weller: I think in one of the videos like another predator chases off the cheetah and the gazelle lays there for a minute and then you see him start doing like this really deep breathing, like, like pumping their ribcage and then they start like this full body tremor shaking, like kind of looks like a seizure.

[01:16:08] Craig Weller: And then they, they slowly get up and they shake while they're standing and then they're good and they run away. Um, but that's like a physiological means of processing trauma and humans do that as well. Like mammals generally do it. So there's that component. Um, and then I think the other component, which is some of this gets outside of my depth.

[01:16:28] Craig Weller: This is where we often refer to an actual site. Um, but the other side of it is, I think. Uh, being able to just articulate name and allow or accept your emotional state as it passes or as it works through you. Um, one of the things that we've found with, with people that can be really helpful is, uh, the ability to identify a broad range of emotional experiences.

[01:16:56] Craig Weller: Um, a lot of people, the people Need this the most are often really limited in the types of emotions that they're able to feel and describe They basically have angry or hurt or sad. 

[01:17:08] Travis Bader: Yes, 

[01:17:08] Craig Weller: and and that's it. But you can google like there's an emotion wheel There's a bunch of versions of them where maybe you're frustrated annoyed irritated There's all these different gradations of emotions that we can experience and and one of the things that we'll have people work on is just uh to be able to more accurately identify The emotion that you're feeling to not even do anything about it.

[01:17:33] Craig Weller: Just sit with it recognize it and understand it and try to uh connect it to the physical sensations in your body because most emotions have a physical physical component of some sort. You might feel like a warm burning sensation in your stomach, or you might feel flushing in your face or whatever. Um, and if you can learn to link those physical sensations to the felt emotions, um, then you'll usually have a better vocabulary of emotions at your disposal.

[01:18:01] Craig Weller: And you're able to kind of calmly sit with them and just allow them to be until they go away, until they work their way through. And in a lot of cases, you, if you're someone who's dealing with, you know, like your job involves trauma or something like that, um, or you're just dealing with like a highly stressful work environment or one of those things, working with a pro, like working with an actual psych is a useful thing to do to help you navigate that process.

[01:18:28] Craig Weller: It's, you can think of it as just having another coach. Um, but, but we've been integrating that a lot more into the work we do with our clients. We're working with. Like an actual PhD psych is part of their, um, like training process to just sort out whatever it is they need to sort out. And then we try to have that kind of person available for the active or operational guys.

[01:18:51] Craig Weller: A lot of the commands have them on staff now anyway. Um, but for the ones that don't, uh, we can make referrals to the people. You know, to people who can help them and work with them. And they're people that, that, that get them, you know, that makes a big difference. Like I have a friend who's yeah, I have a friend who's a psych who works with a lot of soft guys.

[01:19:11] Craig Weller: Um, and he's like, most of these people won't do a therapy session, but they will go shooting. So I'll go shooting with them. And then we'll, we're like loading rounds into a magazine or something. Like we're just sitting there in the idle moments. He'll start chitchatting with them and he'll draw them out and, you know, Get them to talk about the things they need to talk about, um, but he does it in a way that is not, like, he, he approaches them from where they are, like, you know, like, as kind of one of them, and, uh, he understands them, like, he gets, you know, Who they are, where they're coming from.

[01:19:41] Craig Weller: And he's not annoying about it. And it works really well. I've 

[01:19:44] Travis Bader: been asked to speak with a, uh, a group of, um, aspiring psychologists, uh, at a university in, in the States of California. Actually, I'll be doing a web chat with them next Monday and, uh, uh, yeah. The, the teacher reached out to me and we're talking about a few different things.

[01:20:03] Travis Bader: And I said, well, I don't know, one of the areas that I might be able to bring value in having seen different strengths from an early age, being diagnosed with high level ADHD and all the fun stuff that goes with that. Is the compatibility of the individual who's going to be dealing with the, both the compatibility of the, the talk doc in the, uh, in the patient, because I took it from a very oppositional standpoint.

[01:20:30] Travis Bader: I didn't want to tell anything. And I was, I looked at each interaction as a game and it wasn't until I found one person or one person found me who was somewhat compatible that I actually learned something. And I spent so many years actively trying to fight learning anything or bettering myself because I viewed it as a, um, uh, as something to be oppositional about, I don't need this help.

[01:20:53] Travis Bader: So when you say finding that compatibility scale, I think that's massive. And that's one of the things I'm going to be talking about with them next week too. 

[01:21:03] Craig Weller: Yeah, it's, it's big. I think for anyone who's, you know, We actually have messages from people who are going to go be attached to a soft unit, like as a psych, as a, like a human performance person, as a nutritionist, you know, and one of the key messages.

[01:21:19] Craig Weller: Keith pieces of advice that we give them based on, you know, like how we've experienced it and how our clients experience it is to live the lives that these people have, to some extent, like try to understand their experiences and their, um, perspective. So like we did an interview with a guy who works with a special forces unit, uh, currently stationed in Germany and he would go and do, he's like their performance guy, strength coach, and he would go and do their land nav training with them and.

[01:21:47] Craig Weller: You know, do the rocks, do the heavy work, like walking around, sleeping in the rain, sleeping on the ground for multiple days, not eating hot food for a while. Like just to, just to understand how much their job sucks. Um, and to kind of show them that. He's willing to be there alongside them or experience the same, at least some of the same things that they experienced.

[01:22:12] Craig Weller: And I think that's one of the reasons he does well as a coach. Um, if you look at like the engagement rates that he has and the number of guys that choose to work with him, it's much higher than it is at a lot of other commands where they're kind of in their own box and they're like, you go do your silly thing, being cold and wet and, uh, we'll see you later.

[01:22:32] Craig Weller: And, uh, a lot of those. Those people, those consultants or whatever you'd call them, professionals don't have nearly as much engagement because in any, any of these units, it's all voluntary, whether they work with the trainer, the psych, the nutritionist, and if they don't feel like that person gets them and understands them, they're not going to work with them.

[01:22:51] Craig Weller: And in a lot of cases they don't. 

[01:22:54] Travis Bader: Um, you talked about the gazelle there and it seems like it kind of brought us full circle to, excuse me, you talked about the gazelle there and it feels like it brought us full circle to something that. We were talking about at the beginning, which was buck fever and how to deal with something like this, the anxiety and the physiological response to, uh, the excitement or the stress.

[01:23:17] Travis Bader: Uh, and even if people don't hunt, I'm sure that same sort of thing can be applied to tests or performance anxiety, or I should imagine there's going to be some form of a similarity between these things. Um, how, how would you suggest that somebody approach?

[01:23:39] Craig Weller: So if you compare the shooting skills of a special operator to a conventional person who has a good deal, less training, um, one of the main variables, or one of the main things that makes a special operator, Good at shooting isn't the peak of their performance. Like obviously they're accurate and they're good at shooting.

[01:24:03] Craig Weller: Um, but it's how little they degrade under stress. Um, like in a combat situation or shooting in general, uh, It's like problems happen or skill is expressed under stress and the people who are the best at it just don't degrade because in those scenarios, people usually like their shot groups go from the size of a soda can to the size of a Frisbee.

[01:24:26] Craig Weller: Uh, it expands outward. You get shaky, you make small mistakes, you do dumb things repeatedly. Um, basically stress turns your brain off and. To a lesser extent than in a combat setting, hopefully you're, you're seeing that in like a buck fever scenario where a lot of the fundamental motor skills that a person has are suddenly less available or less reliable.

[01:24:51] Craig Weller: And they're losing their cognitive function. Like they're losing their executive function or their ability to process what's happening and kind of have a, like a meta perspective, like their, their ability to see what's happening and do something about it. They get more lost in the moment and on repeatedly looping a behavior or something like that.

[01:25:09] Craig Weller: Um, so there are two aspects to that. Um, one of them is just improving all of these fundamental skills, uh, uh, to a high enough level of skill that they can be automated and relied upon. So we talked earlier about how we all kind of arbitrarily relegate a skill to good enough at some point. And at that point, we no longer really become better at it.

[01:25:31] Craig Weller: So one of the first steps here is to just become a really good shooter and all of the other skills that are involved in hunting, which you probably know better than I do, um, I'm assuming camouflage stillness, not making noise, that kind of stuff. Um, is knowing these things well enough that you can automate them and they're good enough to get the job done.

[01:25:54] Craig Weller: Like they're, they're. They're where they need to be. And they can also degrade a little and they're still reliable. So that's also like fundamental trigger control, all your safety kind of stuff as well. Like that's where a lot of problems happen too, is you haven't practiced those kinds of things. And now people are accidentally shooting themselves in the head underwater.

[01:26:12] Craig Weller: Um, so the other side of that, once you have developed a skill well enough that it can be automated at a high level, um, is, you To go through a process called stress inoculation or stress inoculation training, where you're not really improving the peak of the skill, but you're improving your ability to retain and recall or execute that skill under stress.

[01:26:38] Craig Weller: So you're becoming a little more like that special operator who's shot group doesn't really open up even when their heart rate is pounding, even when they're stressed out and there's a whole bunch of things to process. Um, there are. A lot of other components to that as well, it kind of supporting things like just your aerobic fitness is a supporting factor in that because it helps you affect your cognitive function.

[01:26:59] Craig Weller: Um, but primarily you want to start integrating stress inoculation into your training by understanding and managing your stress response. Well, executing a skill. So you go from say, shooting on a static range to introducing physical, or to the extent you can a little bit of emotional stress and your, your goals as you do that are to recognize and understand your own stress responses.

[01:27:31] Craig Weller: So we go back to the stuff we talked about with like. The emotions wheel and understanding like the physical symptoms of a given emotion. In this case, you're experiencing, you could just tag it as buck fever, but you're also feeling some kind of pressure. Like you, you try to, um, identify the physical sensations of what it is that you're experiencing.

[01:27:48] Craig Weller: So you recognize that your heart rate is racing. You can hear your pulse pounding in your ears. You feel your blood pressure go up. You feel your chest rising. You feel sweaty palms. You feel all these things like. And the better you get at that, the more rapidly you'll be able to recognize those, or the earlier in the process, you'll be able to recognize them, which means the earlier you'll be able to start to mitigate them or do something about them.

[01:28:12] Craig Weller: So once you can recognize the patterns of your own stress response, um, you want, and you learn to control them or learn to like, Kind of get ahead of them a little bit. Um, you want to start integrating strategies to help mitigate them, which usually come down to some kind of, uh, verbal mantra, a physical ritual.

[01:28:34] Craig Weller: Like maybe you go through the same thing in checking your safety, checking your magazine, checking your whatever, doing, uh, maybe you're checking distance on your scope. Um, I haven't been hunting since I was a kid, so I don't know all these things that well, um, but you want to, you want to learn like the little physical rituals you're going to follow.

[01:28:51] Craig Weller: Um, and then the things that you're going to do to specifically mitigate or regulate your stress response, which often comes down to breathing and your thoughts. So, thoughts make feelings and whatever happens in our minds is going to happen in our bloodstream. So, identify Again, it's going to be pretty individual, but identify whatever thoughts are present in your mind when you're in that stressful moment, when you're about to make this high pressure shot.

[01:29:16] Craig Weller: Um, are you worried about missing? Are you worried about you just wasted this entire trip? Are you worried about wounding the animal, having to chase it down? Which I remember having to do once when I was a kid, and I swore to never do that again. Um, all of those things, learn to identify those things and then.

[01:29:34] Craig Weller: And then do something about them. So depending on what the specific thought is, learn how to redirect that or recalibrate that. So if you're looping negative thoughts, like in yourself, talk about, I'm going to miss, I'm going to screw this up. I'm going to waste this trip. I'm going to embarrass myself. Um, learn how to replace those thoughts because we can't really attend to more than one stream of conscious thought at a time.

[01:29:57] Craig Weller: So if you can have something else where you recognize that. Um, that stream of thoughts or that stream of self talk is probably preceded by some kind of physical symptom. Um, you know, like the sweaty palms, erasing heart rate, whatever your thing is, you can get ahead of it a little bit and you can start to replace those thoughts that negative self talk spiral with something else.

[01:30:19] Craig Weller: Um, in my case, like in selection, I would often just use song lyrics or a short little mantra. Um, you can come up with whatever. Small ritual or set of self talk helps you to stay focused and avoid that negative like doom loop of, I'm going to screw this up. I'm nervous. What am I doing? You know, kind of thing.

[01:30:40] Craig Weller: Um, or it may be the stress response is so strong that you're not even sure what's happening in your head. Like you've kind of, you've moved fully through the spectrum into more of a parasympathetic shutdown state. In which case you need to kind of bring yourself back out of that and get a little more like active and functional.

[01:30:57] Craig Weller: Um, those are the people who have a freezing response. So, you know, like you see somebody who's about to take that shot and suddenly they're just deer in headlights and, and nothing's really happening. Um, that's the full on, on freezing response. And you have to bring those people back, which is often going to start with breathing because, uh, thinking isn't working out.

[01:31:18] Craig Weller: So at that moment, you want to lock them into something that's more physiological, which is going to be like retaining a deep conscious breathing, and like good exhales, and, and managing something physically that will hopefully then carry over into, um, Better regulating your autonomic nervous system and your thoughts.

[01:31:36] Craig Weller: Um, there's breathing is, is one of the most common things that is helpful for that alongside like the motor skill rituals of, you know, checking safety, checking magazine, checking all the basic stuff. Uh, if you, if you've ritualized doing all of that, doing all of the steps that lead you toward making an effective shot, knowing, you know, like knowing what's behind your target, knowing what's in front of your target, knowing who's behind you, all of those things.

[01:32:00] Craig Weller: Um, like if you ritualize all of those, you can also more or less let them go and know that those are happening and that even though you're kind of stressed out and on autopilot, they're happening in a way that they're supposed to happen. So that comes down to your training. Um, so basically you're learning to recognize your stress responses.

[01:32:19] Craig Weller: You're learning to do something about your stress responses. And then once you're doing that, you're going to gradually increase the difficulty of that or the magnitude of the stressor. So. With, with, say you have a given person where just having them run a few hundred meters of sprints up and down the range before they go and shoot is enough that they're going to completely throw the shot.

[01:32:40] Craig Weller: Um, in that case, you'll, you'll grade the magnitude of the stressor to a shorter run. Maybe they run 50 meters or a hundred meters. It's just enough that it makes it hard for them to make that shot, but it's still generally manageable. And that's one of the key things. To bring into this is, um, you want to earn success.

[01:33:02] Craig Weller: You want to struggle, but succeed. So the magnitude of the stressor that you're adding in your training needs to be adjusted to the level of your skill and your ability to manage that stressor and still be generally successful. So if you just blow somebody up. And you have them go sprint a mile and you slap them five times in the face.

[01:33:23] Craig Weller: And like you completely mess them up and they just can't function. They can't do this thing. Then they're not improving. They're not training. They're not like developing a useful skill set. So you need to adjust the magnitude of the stressor that you're imposing just to the level of earned success or desirable difficulty.

[01:33:39] Craig Weller: Um, so like in a traditional weapons range, just physical stress is the easiest thing to add where you're just going to blow them up a little bit with sprints. You have them run 50 meters, 100 meters, whatever, to where the shot that they normally could make without a problem. Say it's a 200 meter shot with a scoped rifle.

[01:33:58] Craig Weller: Um, now they've just. Finished sprinting. They just did some burpees. They've dropped down into position and now they're going to shoot and they're shaking. They're breathing hard They're their thoughts are a little more jumbled because they're stressed out and when your heart rate's really high sometimes cognitive function falls And now they still make that shot, but it was harder their shot group opened up just a little bit You practice that a few times.

[01:34:22] Craig Weller: Maybe you're doing this over days and weeks as well But you just keep moving You The magnitude of the stressor, the things you add to make that stressor increasingly realistic. Like at some point you add their friends, mocking them from behind while they're doing it, you do whatever weird social pressure thing might be a factor.

[01:34:42] Craig Weller: You teach them the specific strategies to mitigate that. Um, and then you just keep ramping it up, but you keep, you're continuously doing it to where. Each time you step up the stressor, their skill or their ability to mitigate that stressor has increased concurrently. So it's always getting just a little bit harder while they're getting just a little bit better at managing that hardness.

[01:35:04] Craig Weller: And eventually you can physically wreck them. You can cause social stress by maybe they bet a hundred dollars on the shot. Uh, their friends are making fun of them. They're someone's squirting them with a. Water gun from, you know, like you're, you're adding all kinds of distractors. You put a dummy round in the rifle so that they, their first shot misfires, like you mess with them as much as you need to.

[01:35:28] Craig Weller: And they still perform those motor skills effectively. Um, they're able to identify, recognize and manage their self talk so that, you know, if they get into that downward spiral of I'm going to screw this up, I'm gonna embarrass myself in front of my friends. I'm, I'm wasting my time. Like they're able to recognize that before it takes over and shut it down.

[01:35:47] Craig Weller: Um, you just. Basically find all of these things that can go wrong. You identify how specifically they're going to go wrong with this individual. Like if it's in their self talk, if it's in their fundamental motor skills, if it's in whatever you give them strategies to mitigate that, and then you increase the magnitude of the stressor as their skill steps up concurrently.

[01:36:07] Craig Weller: Um, that's basically how it happens in the military. We, we impose stressors in a different way. Like there's a lot more leeway in the military to torture people. But, uh, that's basically it. A lot of the reasons that people like special operators are really good at shooting is just because they've done basic things over and over and over under increasing levels of stress.

[01:36:27] Craig Weller: And they've learned to manage their stress response while they were doing them. And eventually you get someone who's just kind of unflappable. No matter what's going on around them, like it's dark out, it's cold out, the wind is blowing, it's raining, your boots are full of sand, whatever it, none of it sways you.

[01:36:43] Craig Weller: Um, but you have to do it in stages and you have to do it, um, where you're earning success each time. You can't just overwhelm someone. I really, 

[01:36:51] Travis Bader: really appreciate that systematic approach in your answer, which matches the systematic approach that you take through your book, building the elite. Yeah. Uh, it just, it's a blueprint it's essentially from E to Z of what a person needs to do in order to be able to be the complete guide to building resilient, special operators.

[01:37:11] Travis Bader: And I, it, it really is that. So we've, we've talked about a fair bit. Is there anything that we've missed? Is there anything that we should be talking about that we haven't talked about? 

[01:37:23] Craig Weller: Hmm. We talked about stress inoculation. I think, uh, did we cover stages of motor learning kind of stuff? We didn't. No.

[01:37:31] Craig Weller: Okay. So, so that ties in really It meshes with the stress inoculation concepts. Um, so we learn in a sequence. Um, if you remember, say, learning to type, um, any basic skills, like typing is a common one. That's where a lot of the research is at. When you first started typing, uh, you had a very high error rate.

[01:37:53] Craig Weller: You made a lot of mistakes. It took up, All of your mental focus to just type a word out and you were probably very slow and deliberate like hunt and peck one letter at a time. You thought about the letter A, then you thought about the letter B, and you worked it out. Um, that's called the cognitive phase of learning.

[01:38:11] Craig Weller: So you're, you're learning kind of the basic rules of how the thing works. And then you're learning the smallest possible pieces of how to put it together. So you can think of how that would happen in like learning to shoot as well. Like this is where the magazine goes. This is when it's, this is how you know that it's facing the right direction.

[01:38:29] Craig Weller: This is a safety. These are the basic safety things, you know, like finger off trigger, all the kind of stuff that you have to know with a weapon. Um, and at first, when you give someone that it's very slow. Okay. Like they're all of their attention is on it. You are making the training environment. It's where, uh, you're setting it up so that a mistake is acceptable and safe.

[01:38:52] Craig Weller: So at first someone's learning to handle a safe, like a clear and safe weapon when they're, when they're putting their hands on it, they're figuring out what the buttons do. They're learning not to put their finger on the trigger when they're not supposed to, so that if they make a mistake, because it's likely that they will, they're not going to Push around through something like they're not going to accidentally shoot someone.

[01:39:09] Craig Weller: Um, as you go, as you start learning, you start to automate those things. They just become part of the process for you. And they're no longer as fully conscious. And you move into what's called the associative phase, which is where you start to see things in bigger chunks or patterns. So that's where the amount of cognitive focus comes down because some of those skills are automated.

[01:39:34] Craig Weller: So when you're typing, you're maybe no longer. Um, And so, um, in the past, we were no longer going letter by letter, now you can type out an entire word or even entire sentence without really thinking about it. It just happens. And you can be distracted or you can think a little more. You can talk to someone for a second while you're typing without losing your spot.

[01:39:51] Craig Weller: Um, you're putting together the bigger patterns and you're integrating things that you were previously doing one by one are now a bigger chunk of behaviors. So, the way a person You know, on holsters, their weapon puts a mag in all of that has their finger in the right place, weapons oriented in a safe direction.

[01:40:10] Craig Weller: All of that just happens because they've drilled each single step of that a whole bunch of times. And now it's just one automated chunk. Um, and that's where you can also start adding more complexity. So now they're on holstering, loading, checking clearance, say if they're doing the things that they need to do, and it just happens in there.

[01:40:27] Craig Weller: Now they're adding other steps. They're moving towards an obstacle or they're, they have multiple weapons, maybe. Um, they're, they're making it more complicated. That's the learning stage for the most part. That's where you're, you have a conscious feedback loop and you're trying to increase the number of things that you can automate at a high level of skill.

[01:40:47] Craig Weller: So maybe you're simultaneously, you maybe have multiple targets, maybe you have dummy rounds or like deliberate failures. You're practicing failure drills. Like that's another big part of, I don't know how much it comes up in hunting, probably not as much, but like with military weapons training, you're You know, you're dealing with failures, you're dealing with misfires or stove pipes or whatever goes wrong so that you can very quickly handle it and just keep shooting.

[01:41:10] Craig Weller: And the people who are really good at it, a misfire doesn't matter. It doesn't slow them down at all. Uh, where with novice, you know, like suddenly they push the magic button and nothing goes bang and they don't know what to do. And they're stuck. Um, but as you get better and better, you can handle more of those deviations.

[01:41:28] Craig Weller: You can handle more disruptions and you're consciously working on all of those things. Like maybe you're working on specifics of your shot. So you're working on not anticipating recoil or milking the trigger or doing whatever thing you might mess up. And you're doing that with a feedback loop. So, you know, you're doing some kind of drill to know if you anticipated the recoil or if you milked the trigger or if you did whatever, um, and you're, you're getting repetitions of that.

[01:41:54] Craig Weller: Like I did in the pool, like I was trying to bend my arm a certain way with each stroke. And if I did it wrong, some guy in a blue shirt would tap me on the top of the head and tell me I screwed it up and to do it better. And you do that in loops. Um, eventually you hit that phase, the hypothesis of par, the hypothesis of tolerance phase, where all of those things that you were working on and consciously improving are automated and they're just part of what you do.

[01:42:21] Craig Weller: Um, if you're watching a really good shooter, most of what they're doing is now just fully automated. The, the thing that's in their head is basically shoot this course, respond to the dynamic targets like do the thing and everything else that's happening, their trigger control, their, their failure drills, all of that stuff is well below what they're used to.

[01:42:43] Craig Weller: It just happens. Um, that's the autonomous phase. That's the third stage of motor learning and the that's, that's where you want to be for performance. So you're out on the hunt. You're, you know, like you're shooting this animal that you've been, you spent years training to, to do this thing. You've done all this weapons training, or you're in the military, you're on a deployment, you're doing a mission.

[01:43:05] Craig Weller: Like that is where. All of that skill development, like learning how to manage your emotional, your stress responses while you're executing these motor skills, like all of that has been developed in the cognitive and associative stages, and now it's all automated, and you're Um, that's where you want to be for performance, but once you're in that stage, you're no longer proving because you're not conscious of how you're executing that skill, you're not breaking it down into smaller pieces.

[01:43:34] Craig Weller: You may not be paying as much attention to the feedback loops. Um, you may have internalized those feedback loops well enough that like if you're in a performance setting and you suddenly realize you anticipated recoil or your breathing got off or something happened, like you might be able to also automatically correct those things.

[01:43:50] Craig Weller: Um, but typically our performance environments are not learning environments. We don't. Display a skill and develop it at the same time We practice something and then we perform or we develop something and then we display it And and those two things are distinct. You can't really do both at once so being in that Or that slow, clunky cognitive phase, which even as a good shooter might come up if you're on a new weapon system, using a new optic, shooting a new course with a different style, something like that.

[01:44:24] Craig Weller: Like you might still be in that slow, step by step, kind of the crawl phase. Like you'll see, In the military shoot house, people like doing CQB go through this stage, even as really experienced professionals where they're literally walking and very slowly doing each one of the things they're going to do is they're in the room.

[01:44:42] Craig Weller: Um, you have to go back into that stage in order to pick up a new skill and then refine it and distinguishing between those stages. Determines how much you're going to learn and how many new things you're able to learn because if you automate skills and you stop thinking about the components of them and how to make those components better, if you go from the associative phase to the autonomous phase too quickly, and then you just go and you're just shooting to shoot, you're shooting to see what you hit.

[01:45:10] Craig Weller: You look at your score, you're happy or sad, you move on with your day. You're not getting any better if you're just going through the motions and doing the thing. So if getting better at it is part of your goal, then you need to bring yourself out of that automated stage, the autonomous stage of motor learning to where you're again, consciously thinking about the individual components of that skill, where your limiting factors are in that skill.

[01:45:34] Craig Weller: And how you can improve them with a lot of repetitions with an immediate feedback loop. So you're working with a shooting coach, they're giving you a specific thing to focus on that is a limiting factor for you if you're anticipating recoil, if your failure drills aren't very good, or whatever it is you're working on.

[01:45:51] Craig Weller: You have a very specific thing that you're trying to do better and you're doing it with feedback. So you know what you're trying to do and you know whether you did it right or wrong. And you run that feedback loop as many times as you have to until you can't get it wrong anymore. And then you can go back to the autonomous stage and go shoot for funsies and just see what kind of score you get.

[01:46:12] Craig Weller: But if you're trying to become better at it, you have to bump yourself up and down through those stages. And the people who get stuck, who've been shooting for 10 years and haven't got better for eight of them. I have automated those skills and they've just been shooting, um, without going back into those associative, like learning based stages where you have a conscious practice, a mental model, and a feedback loop.

[01:46:33] Travis Bader: Craig, that's absolutely amazing. I really like, honestly, I could talk to you for hours. You have so much information and I know you're going to be back on the podcast again, I'm going to be putting links where people can find your book in the, uh, in the bio. Um, Thank you so much for being on the Silvercore podcast.

[01:46:50] Travis Bader: I really enjoyed this chat. 

[01:46:53] Craig Weller: Thanks. I had a good time. Thanks for having me.