Preparing the mind for difficult situations

Lt Col Brian L. Slade started as an enlisted man in the US Army as a diesel mechanic. After he got his commission as an officer he then stated flying Apache helicopters. Shortly after a very long and arduous deployment he decided to transition into the Air Force in an attempt to save his marriage.

His first deployment was for twenty-three months and he had only been married for five months prior to that so for the first two and a half years of the marriage they were separated for two. The problem is often not the separation but when you come back together again and military personnel who are dealing with potential trauma in a very strong comrade type team often find it very difficult to go back to a routine husband, wife and children environment.

Brian’s ex-wife had also had a mental disorder borderline personality disorder so the relationship was really tumultuous. In some ways it was more traumatic than some of the things he was being asked to do in the military because he wasn't as prepared for the dynamics. The military prepares you for certain dynamics that you are going to experience. You are used to a certain regimentation and interaction that didn't work with the relationship.

Brian’s book is about trauma and the reason he wrote it was because when he was deployed as an Apache pilot there were crazy, traumatic, intense experiences that he was exposed to. He started asking why would he experience post-traumatic growth rather than the post-traumatic stress we always hear about. He looked at his peers and although they had the same stimulus they had different results. Brian felt he had grown from his experiences and that they increased his resilience and his ability to see things as opportunities rather than obstacles that would drag him down. Other guys on the alternative end of the spectrum were thinking about taking their own lives - that's a very big spectrum for the same stimulus

Brian’s book outlines seven principles. Things like growing a healthy perspective, how do you do that when you experience things that pull you into a myopic perspective but need to maintain that macro perspective?  How do you build a healthy support system and what does that look like. What are we talking about when we say we need to release hate? That's a big one that we don't really talk about. There are a couple of meanings to it. When you are at war, when you have to kill someone it makes it easier to de-humanise them and make them into something they aren’t. Harboring a hate for them is a coping mechanism but it’s not a healthy one.

As well as releasing the hate for the enemy you have to release the hate for yourself. As we start doing the things that the ugliness of war calls for we start painting ourselves as ugly to, that that's part of who we are. You need to remember that just because you’re there doing things other people wouldn't do it doesn’t make you an ugly person - it makes you a proxy for the people who aren’t suited to doing it or cant do it.

This is similar to a disassociation technique and it plays back to one of the other principals of defining and embracing your honorable mission. Brian’s honorable mission wasn't really to get Osama bin Laden, that was what got him on the plane but realised his honorable mission was to make sure that as many of his brothers and sisters in arms made it back. You are going to do ugly things at times to make sure that your honorable mission is accomplished,

How do we avoid festering, emotional wounds? If you're a banker and go to work and you have a transaction or something happens that's interesting you go home and talk about it. It’s so much harder to do when your job is blowing up twelve people but the fact still remains that your honorable mission is to make sure the ground guys make it home safely. It’s harder to talk about it but that’s how you avoid the festering emotional wound. You just talk about it in a matter of fact way.

Building resilience is never ending. With an honorable mission there’s a beginning and end. There are moments of high adrenaline and then lots of time doing mundane things. The mission allows you to compartmentalise things. There is the focal point that we are looking at and around that are lots of ugly things but when we pull the trigger we have just completed our honorable mission. We know there is lots of auxiliary stuff in there but that stays there because you’re in the ugliness because of your honorable mission. You don't have to take that home with you. Part of that is sharing it. You share it as matter of factly as you possibly can. You use humor because it makes it easier to share. Brian realised humor was his stepping-stone to talking about it seriously. In a way it’s doing the same thing with hate – you’re coping but it’s a positive emotion for coping not a negative one. It's a lily pad to being able to talk about it.

Brian also uses chair flying which is an aviation technique. He added the meditation and role playing pieces to the visualisation aspect. A lot of people will struggle with anxiety if they are visulising a very stressful event so you control the environment through meditation and create a safe space where you plant the things you want to grow and get strong. Breathing exercises help to get in the right headspace and then start to visulise an emergency procedure.

One exercise has a co-pilot and engine getting shot out. In a matter of seconds you need to react to the rotors going down. The co- pilot is screaming in the background and you automatically think that's the first thing to deal with but in fact its number three on the list. The rotor is most important. The flight controls are jammed so that’s the second action then the co-pilot but it all needs to happen in one or two seconds. You don’t get through that by thinking about it. In the leadership world they practice so they get it right, in the military they practice so they don't get it wrong. Things do go wrong but the risk reduction is there. The noisy drama is not always the first thing to do!

You can find out more about Brian at https://www.clearedhot.info/ or find his book Cleared Hot.

 You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
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Speed skiing, engineering and mindset The road to the Olympics

Speed skiing is an extreme sport where skiers reach speeds of up to 200 kms an hour. Each competitor skis in a straight line, in a tuck position as fast as possible to the finish line with the skier with the fastest time winning.

It was a demonstration sport at the Albertville Winter Olympics in 1992 but has not been part of the Games since then however there is a likelihood of it returning in the 2026 or 2030 Games and Jacob is on a mission to see that happen. 

Like all high level sport speed skiing is about failure, rectification, incremental gains and constant evolution. It’s an extremely tough sport mentally and physically – you know you will have crashes but you have to have a long-term vision and know where you’re tying to go. You have to put goals in place that are incremental – you’re not going to get to your end goal of skiing at 200 kms an hour on your first run but you can set goals to get towards it and look at it with a long term perspective.

It needs a lot of confidence to go that fast. The starts can be extremely difficult because the tracks are very steep – sometimes it can be like looking out the window of a plane! Starting points can be between 400 and 800 metres or 2000 feet tall and even getting to the start can be problematical. Often you have to use ropes or climbing gear to get in position and it’s even more of a challenge with super long skis of 240cms. Once you get in position and set up for the run you then just jump off a platform or push off the side of the track.

At the start you run though your check-list – the position, what you’re going to do on this run, is all your equipment correct. You focus on things systematically because it then makes you feel as if you have a game plan which in turn gives you a lot of confidence when you’re about to start. Then you put on your aerodynamic helmet (which has an inner helmet which stays on in a crash and an outer helmet that breaks off) and you’re ready for the run. The last thing you should be thinking about at that point are the potential consequences, the ‘what if’ or the ‘what will happen if I crash’. 

With the helmet on the field of vision is very small. You can only see a couple of feet in front of you especially when you are at high speed in a tuck but once they say go you’re totally focused. The run is over in 20 seconds so sometimes the hype before the run is more of a rush than the run itself. You focus intensely for 20 seconds or so. You’re travelling at 100mph and can see the undulations in the snow, you can feel the speed and the wind and then its over. Before you know it you’re at the bottom.

Jacob is also a Manufacturing Engineering team lead for Amatrol Inc., a global leader in technical education and training for industry, community colleges, and technical colleges. He finds it a very rewarding job transforming the global workforce and feels there is renewed interest in trade schools and in developing skills for various aspects of industry. He also finds that the engineering principals he uses and has learned can be applied to the speed skiing side of his life. Speed skiing is heavily involved in equipment so having a background in design engineering and manufacturing engineering allows him to provide product input on the different components of equipment and also to design various pieces of equipment set up.

Jacob found his way to speed skiing by chance. He competed in alpine ski racing, particularly slalom and giant slalom, as a junior and had some success but at the same time he was playing tennis in high school. He wound up playing Division 1 tennis for Wright State University and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and competed on ITF and UTR Pro Tennis circuit.

Whilst he was focused on tennis he took a break from skiing competitively. The career span in alpine ski racing is not very long with most racers retiring around 30. By time Jacob came out of college he was 25 years old so it didn't leave a lot of time to complete. He started looking for ways to get involved in competitive skiing again but in a way that would provide a longer opportunity to build, compete and develop. He looked at different disciplines such as cross country and ski jumping but then came across the speed skiing which he thought looked really cool.

Jacob started reaching out to people in the US and in different organisations in Europe and found out more about the sport. The speed skiing community is there to help everybody. You are competing but somehow are on the same team and everyone wants to get more people interested in the sport. People were helping him to understand the equipment needs and how to get into competitions and at that point he realised this was what he wanted to do. The first year he didn't have any sponsors so was using used equipment in the feeder category for World Cup Competitions which is called S2. He did really well and last year was his first year on the World Cup category itself and he hopes to continue from there.

Managing anxiety is important. When he started out Jacob didn't have much anxiety but last year he had a crash at over a 100 mph. He walked away from it with just bruising but it wasn't the physically side that took a long time to get over. Ever since then when he’s training or even just working on equipment he relives the crash or gets anxiety about it. The biggest thing for him to deal with it was to understand why he crashed and then understand how to prevent it. Once he had figured this out then he could finally let go of that experience. He feels that if you can’t put a reason to why you are doing it or what the causes are then that's what creates anxiety – its the unknown.

Many engineers are very rational thinkers who are not prone to massive flights of imagination and Jacob thinks this can sometimes help because you can logically think through problems but sometimes it works against you because you start to overthink problems - you start to ask too many questions when in reality you should simplify the problem but you make more out of it than it is.

Jacob feels that his engineering and skiing careers overlap. There are always challenges and problems in manufacturing, meeting goals, using resources efficiently, increasing production and improving quality. These things go hand in hand with speed skiing, not just from a technical side but from a mental side as well.

You can find out more about Jacob at https://www.jacobperkins.org/ or to find out more about speed skiing visit speedski.com or fis-ski.com

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.