SEAL Survival Guide (6 page)

MENTAL PREPARATION

Again, the brain is the strongest muscle in the body. You’ve heard stories of how combat soldiers have been shot repeatedly but were
not aware of it until the fight was over. These stories are true, and the power to do such things comes from the mind and can be tapped into by practicing mental preparation. This practice can allow you to far exceed your physical limitations. Just as you train other muscles, you can train the brain with mental-preparedness exercises—and you don’t need to go to the gym to do it! It’s an exercise you can do anywhere. I can’t stress enough how important mental preparedness is for surviving and enduring any life-threatening situation that you could encounter. This is how you practice it.

Emergency Conditioning (EC): Make the Unknown Familiar

Using visualization techniques is a good way to practice what we call
emergency conditioning (EC).
I will highlight this phrase throughout the guide and explain the types of visualizations that are most effective in survival scenarios. It means conditioning the mind in advance of emergencies, thus producing psychological strength in times of crisis. This is also referred to as “battle-proofing” or “battle inoculation” by military personnel. Example: A soldier lying on his cot imagines a nasty firefight with the enemy, including what it will sound like and smell like, the heavy breathing, and the utter exhaustion.

If the brain imagines something in deep and vivid detail, it will become part of a person’s “experience files.” This visualization exercise will actually fool the brain into believing that you have already experienced this event. You can tap into these files at will by hitting the play button that starts the “movie” of what you have already visualized and planned. It will seem more or less familiar if ever you are confronted with a similar experience. This internal battle-proofing gives you an incredible advantage.

Visualization: Make a Movie in Your Mind

No matter if you are going to work or are in a mall, boarding a plane, or anywhere else, look around and take mental notes of the particulars of the place—try to describe the exact details of where you are. This is the setting for your
mental movie.

Now, imagine what you would do in this fixed environment if
something were to go wrong. In this book, I will explain the specifics for each situation, but for now, remember this key step in changing your mindset to one that puts you in
SEAL mode.
In your mental movie, play out various scenarios from start to finish. Begin by imagining the most likely scenario that you may find yourself in, focusing on what to do during a life-or-death situation, such as a home invasion, a fire at work, or being lost in the mountains.

When I was a platoon commander, after receiving a “tasking” (mission request), this is how I would do my entire mission planning: I would visualize every detail, starting with my men, the equipment, the time of day, and the weather, and slowly start
my
movie. I would hit pause or even rewind when I came to a place that I saw as a flaw or obstacle to success. I would play out all the various contingencies in my head until I could visualize any number of versions of events that might take place, working through every possibility. I would often rewind to make a correction, such as add or change equipment or alter an action. I would then continue forward to a point where ultimately my mental movie was a successful mission from start to finish—one from which all my guys would come back safe!

Rehearsal: Act Out Your Plan

To take this a step further, you can actually practice and rehearse what you have visualized. This is essentially what fire drills accomplish in schools and why airline personnel try to show passengers emergency procedures at the beginning of every flight. In your home, you should rehearse and teach your children what to do in the event of a house
fire. Most kids respond better when given explicit rules to follow, and doing so will not only give your kids specific things to do during such an event, it will also reduce their fear; they will be more confident in an emergency and their usefulness to the general safety of the family will be increased. For example, to prepare for a power failure, you could turn off the lights in your home to practice how to navigate in darkness or how to get to designated evacuation exits. Rehearse with your family how to respond to a variety of dangerous situations, such as a home invasion. Make sure everyone knows the plan for each scenario from start to finish. The more you practice, the easier it will be.

Obviously, there are limitations to how far you can take this rehearsal. Please do not light a fire in your kitchen to practice escaping your house, or run down the street yelling “Rape!”

This pre-emergency technique will not only enable you to implement your visualization but will also begin to train your muscles, allowing you to physically perform without forethought in a controlled environment. If in your “movie” you have yourself doing a backward somersault, the rehearsal nixes that idea as something unrealistic. Throughout the book, each scenario I discuss requires various rehearsal drills that can be practiced and used to improve muscle memory and response time.

Muscle Memory

By repeatedly practicing your emergency procedures, you are also creating
muscle memory.
Of course, the muscles do not literally have the ability to store memories, but your brain does. It knows (via a complex system of neurological circuitry) what you want the muscles to do the more you practice the same action time and again. After you
learned to ride a bike as a kid, you never forgot how to do it. It’s the same if you learned how to swing a tennis racket or hit a baseball over the fence. The more you practiced those activities, the better you got, as if your muscles remembered on their own how to respond. Rehearsing various skills needed to survive helps improve muscle memory. If you really want to bring it up a notch, you need to repeat the same action 2,500 times before it becomes so ingrained that you can do it without even thinking about it. Athletes know this, as do those who practice fighting and forms of martial arts. The thousands of punches, kicks, and combinations they execute when in a fight happen automatically.