Quotes from Michael J. Asken

Rudyard Kipling, in his famous poetic description of what makes for mature and effective adulthood, wrote in part: If you can keep your head When all about you Are losing theirs And blaming it on you... If you can trust yourself When all men doubt you... This famous 1909 poem "If" was inspired in Kipling after observing one military leader's actions during the Boer Wars (Lt. Colonel Eduardo Jany, personal communication, October, 2007).

Being a warrior is not about the act of fighting. It's about being so prepared to face a challenge and believing so strongly in the cause you are fighting for that you refuse to quit.

115 BPM Fine motor skills deteriorate 145+ BPM Complex motor skills deteriorate 175+ BPM "A warrior can expect to experience auditory exclusion or loss of peripheral vision and depth perception. This initiates a catastrophic failure of cognitive processing capabilities, leading to fatal increases in reaction time or hypervigilance (freezing in place or irrational acts)." p.7-8

There is no darkness but ignorance. – Shakespeare

From On Combat (2004) Do not expect the combat fairy to come bonk you with the combat wand and suddenly make you capable of doing things that you never rehearsed before. It will not happen.

A core attribute of the effective leader is the act of inspiring and developing others. Leaders model by their actions.

Beckett (2008) citing the work of Marcus Wynne gives advice to: Train with the understanding that firearms practice is 75% physical and 25% mental; however a gunfight is 25% physical and 75% mental. On a closer look, perhaps these estimations are not so surprising.

Barnardand his colleagues (1973) demonstrated that without a physical warm-up period, 60 percent of the healthy males in his sample (including some firefighters) showed ischemia or restricted blood flow when engaged in sudden strenuous exertion. This occurred under conditions (sudden intense treadmill) that simulated the kind of bursts of energy that might be needed in an emergency.

Mental toughness is possessing, understanding, and being able to utilize a set of psychological skills that allow the effective, and even maximal execution or adaptation, and persistence of decision-making and physical and tactical skills learned in training and by experience.

Complexity of the task is another important factor as to how levels of arousal affect the quality of performance. Simple tasks use and tolerate more arousal than complex ones.

Skills that have been well-practiced allow higher levels of arousal without becoming impaired than do newly learned skills.

Proper experience and training engrains a skill so that it's much harder to disrupt under any condition, including one of stress and arousal.

Solid preparation can reduce the stress of any situation. Therefore, the integration of a mental toughness psychological skills component with military and police skills training in all areas can enhance missions and reduce response stress. With this comes the possibility of reducing post-traumatic stress. Evidence for this has been found in parallel critical incident stress reactions among police officers.

Positive self-talk, and visualization or mental rehearsal, trained to a level of confidence and competence, may be critical to both improved performance under stress and increased resilience after a traumatic incident.

The Department of the Army's Field Manual 3-05.70 states about survival: A key ingredient in any survival situation is the mental attitude of the individual involved.

High Velocity Human Factors is defined through its mission statement as "a focus on those instances when the human agent has to perform in an environment where the stakes are high, physical danger is imminent, and the future is unpredictable and the information is incomplete.

I quickly learned that success in any area of life, be it in the boardroom or on the battlefield, is overwhelmingly dependant upon a person's mastery of their own mind. General Patton once said: "If you are going to win any battle, you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do...

High-level, professional athletes receive training on how to deal with pressure, get it under control, and focus on doing what they need to do to win. It's now time we start doing the same thing for our men and women in law enforcement and the military.

The mental and physical — psyche and soma — are two faces of the same coin and cannot be separated. To train the world's greatest military and law enforcement warriors, we must realign our focus and esteem their minds every bit as much as we esteem their physical capabilities and skill sets. No longer can we simply train the way we fight and fight the way we train. We need to rethink the way we train and retrain the way we fight.

While, perhaps somewhat surprising, experience shows that up to 90 percent of successful performance is attributed to psychological skills. Rarely is that number reported to be less than 40 percent. This comes from talking with military personnel, police officers, including SWAT Tactical Team members, and other emergency responders who engage in life and death situations.