Having learned what we at SheerMind were up to, a friend of ours in the British Army realized how similar some of their training is to the philosophy of Mindfulness. No strangers to stress and pressure, there is much to learn from those on the front-lines, and many parallels can be drawn to the stresses of everyday civilian life. In this great article, our man* outlines what its like to stay in the present moment in the midst of chaos! Enjoy, and comment below!
*Author (name withheld) is in the British Army. He provides close support to Special Forces units and is trained as a combat medic and scout. In his spare time back home in SA, he helps out as a tracker, seeking out poachers.
There is a moment in some peoples’ lives that perhaps only a very small percentage of people will understand: for doctors, it is that moment before a trauma case comes in, for those who do extreme sports, it may be the moment before they jump out a plane, or dive off a cliff. These examples before are hypothetical in my case, however there comes a moment in a soldiers life where everything goes deadly quiet, regardless of the sounds around him (which are loud enough to deafen), time slows down to the extent that you could go insane with the fear of not getting something done fast enough, like finding cover. The world slows down and suddenly the smallest muzzle flash and the quickest puff of dust off the wall make all the difference in the world. This is the split second between being fired at and firing back, this is the initiation of contact which most people will only ever experience during call of duty or paint ball. This is the moment that soldiers actually become addicted to and as a result become known as war junkies. This is not the case.
Companies around the world have always had an affinity for ex service personnel. Words like ‘dependable’ and phrases such as ‘calm under pressure’ are all too often thrown about. While these are true, it is perhaps better to understand why these values are seen in soldiers. We are not born with these values, and those that are, have them honed to a higher level through experience and mind set and it is this mind set, and perhaps a few thought processes that, while I understand these are not the usual things you would talk about, I would like to share.
That moment of clarity when the first round goes past your head is quite simply fear. I will not believe a man that says he has not been shot at without feeling fear. I believe in my training and I carry that out to the letter and that allows me to overcome that fear but it is the repetitiveness of my training, the ‘dry drilling’of carrying out an action over and over and over again. The smallest movement, i.e. Applying the safety catch of your weapon when standing up must become sub conscious so that in a moment of crisis, it doesn’t become one other thing you have to think about. When that moment does come and you are in the shit, the clearer your mind is, the easier your body will move and the more time you will have to think about the things that do actually matter (in a soldiers case, as blunt as it sounds, killing the guy trying to kill you), and so this is the first, basic life skill that we learn, something in particular sportsmen will relate to: practice to the point you are confident in your body’s ability to do something without thought. Go over the process so many times in your head your hands do it without the object being in them. You may be asking how this can relate to you, you may just be a teacher. But this is not about what we do for a living. This is about how we handle stressful situations: are we in an unfamiliar environment, are we going into an interview with a higher up. If we are becoming stressed out because of something we would generally do every day, it is because we do not have the confidence in ourselves to carry the task out, and by extension we are worried we will not have the ability or the time to correct ourselves if we make a mistake. How many of you would fear being in a shootout? How many of you fear driving? What if I told you that more people are killed on the roads in any country in the world than the amount of complete allied forces deaths this century? The fact we drive so often makes it something we do subconsciously, without the fear of failing or crashing. Why? Because we do it so often, we become subconsciously competent at carrying it out. It is when we try to change that, by stressing after a near miss that we think too much about or by trying to drive too fast once we are late that we start to make mistakes.
This brings me onto something my father taught me and something that I have found out time and time again with everyone that gets into some kind of stressful environment. When we are late, we can never seem to get our keys in the door to lock it, traffic lights seem to always be red for us, we may not have put our shirts on backwards in years but today we are late and what do you know…
This is something you should constantly drill into your mind, especially when you are stressed: You have more time than you think. The first time I ever did a magazine change will stick with me forever: this magazine change felt like it took me ten minutes. I was stressed, I was breathing heavily after running the two miles with my kit to get there and I forgot my drills. I fumbled with my webbing pouch, unable to open it, finally I felt the catch slide out. Rounds still firing off all around me. I took the full magazine out and dropped it, my eyes closed with the disappointment. Surely this was a fatal mistake
‘Stop! Apply safety catches and stand up.’ I apply mine, pick my magazine up, which is now covered in mud, more cleaning to do tonight and stand up.
‘Congratulations, soldier,’ my section commander says to me, a normally calm and funny corporal I have nothing but respect and admiration for, something that he currently does not feel for me, ‘you have successfully just completely f-cked up your drills and as a result made yourself ineffective resulting in the entire section being killed.’
The firefight was an exercise, all practiced with blank rounds, however, each step is taken with deadly seriousness: soldiers have a way of treating these situations as very real, this is another minor point to perhaps remember: your mind will not take things in unless it is 100% committed. Exercises are treated as real life because this is where we learn our craft. Do not shirk training your mind, every chance you get.
‘What did you do wrong?’ my corporal asked me. I am still new, but I know the drills and go through it in my head, at this stage, these movements were still conscious movements to me.
‘I took the full magazine out first and then tried to take the empty one off, corporal.’ I respond trying to sound the grey man.
‘Do the drill right, here.’
I do it. Correct this time.
‘Do it again.’ Again, I do it correct.
‘And again.’ I repeat the movement.
‘When you become more experienced, you will learn ways of doing these drills faster and slicker, for now, you did that magazine change, in slow time in under 20 seconds. When we were in contact you were f-cking about for over a minute. In stressful situations, things will always seem to be slow when you want them to hurry up and they will quicken up when you need things to slow down. This happens when you flap [a term the army use for stressing]. Do not flap. Think about your drills and execute them properly.’
The only reason I couldn’t do that mag change was because I tried to do it too fast. The American Forces have a saying: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Let us think about this for a second: a businessman is late for a meeting, he rushes getting changed and in the process has to redo his tie. He then fumbles with his keys locking the door or getting them into his car. He speeds along the roads, dashing from light to light, finally arriving at his destination, still late, flustered and stressed.
If he had just made sure that he got changed, calmed down leaving the house, drove normally in a calm state remembering the lights are probably programmed to change with the speed limit, he would most likely have arrived at the same time, the only difference would be his mindset. Setbacks are inevitable. We will be late, we will meet obstacles; it is only our ability to realise that we cannot get over them by stressing them out the way that we will ultimately overcome them. Calm in a firefight wins the battle: ‘he who shoots needlessly to reassure himself is a coward’. This is a quote from the paratroopers commandments. One shot at a time, carefully placed to either suppress or kill the enemy. That is the purpose of your bullets. The purpose of a jacket is to pull off a look, do not go into something without ironing it at the expense of being late.
Soldiers understand that time must be taken, in everything we do, to ensure it is done right. A pint of sweat today, saves a gallon of blood tomorrow. Go to bed slightly later, miss out on that long weekend you may have had. Make sure your equipment is taken care of because the confidence of having your life sorted out will enable you to go further and push yourself further.
So now we have determined the very basic, physical ways of how a soldier deals with his stresses before and just as a contact is starting, we must understand how they deal with it during the contact. I will delve into the mental and spiritual sides of them later but as the physical is the easiest to maintain it is probably the best to get out the way first.
The simple answer to how a soldier survives the rigours of a battle is to be physically robust and how do we become robust? We train ourselves to do it. There is no easy way to become fit, there is only the way that gives us the satisfaction and that’s to quite simply get out and do it. The hardest part of doing something is the mental strength needed to just start it really, be it asking that girl out or getting out of bed or just putting your head out of cover to see where the fire comes from, that was in order of hardest to easiest for me by the way, but it does show that each man is different. But it is so important that for a healthy mind, a healthy body really is one of the most vital things. Ever seen a fat surgeon? Probably not. ‘Nerds’ tend not to be very sporty but are still generally neither too skinny or obese, and their minds are sharper than most. A healthy body cannot function without a mind, a mind cannot function without a healthy body if we are to fully utilize them.
The mind set of a contact: perhaps the part most people always wonder about. How will I react when the time comes? The truth is some freeze up, some get right into it but over time, it all becomes the same: it is how we have drilled ourselves to respond: return fire, take cover, win the fire fight. How do we do that then, further drills required and learned and so on and so forth. In truth, the mindset of a soldier in contact is not really that beneficial to know, unless you are going into the mind of one of the leaders, a section commander or a platoon commander for example. A private soldier will follow orders, he will trust his section commander and do what he asks without hesitation. That is based on a bond so cliché you will all know it and know there’s no point me explaining it to you. That mind set, we will perhaps cover in later times but to be honest, there is very little thoughts as a fire fight starts other than ‘what the f-ck am I doing here?’, or ‘holy shit!’.
During a fire fight, we force ourselves to remain calm, this is not something we have done at that moment though, this is a state we have reached while we were putting on our very carefully maintained equipment and waited in formation in camp before heading out. During a fight, we relay messages calmly, we fire our weapons with the rested precision required and we DO NOT FLAP!! (ok maybe we do but we don’t show it). It is important to combat stress. To take that step back from the situation and breath and just say to yourself the following words: you have more time than you think to do this, you know the drills, you know how to do this.
Don’t think about the consequences, they will come or they won’t and that is the most important thing, if there was one thing I write about today that separates soldiers from civilians, it is our ability to handle consequences. This is the thing we think about before we go out. This is the part we have to master in order to be effective soldiers and this is the reason businesses in civvies street love us. We know how to cope with the fear of consequence.
Before a patrol, a soldier will be carrying up to 100 pounds of kit, his weapon will be heavy in his hand and he will be acutely aware of the limited amount of ammunition he will be carrying and the fact that he will probably pass several IEDS before he finishes this patrol, any of which could kill him (or worse in most soldiers minds: take off a limb). Thing is, and as morbid as this will sound: what’s the worst that could happen? May die. Yeah, its not like I was getting out of this life alive anyway. May get cut, in ten years’ time, it’ll be a pretty ally scar [ally is a term used to describe something different and cool]. It is this relative idea of consequence that makes soldiers able to deal with stress so much more effectively than civilians. Truth be told, I don’t care about traffic, your work day was long, try a 3 day OP in the mud. When you have spent a week in -5 degree temperatures, with rain coming down constantly and the only warmth you had was the weak tea you were able to make only thanks to your careful waterproofing of your kit, you realise there is little in this life that can really affect you. You start to take pleasure in the smaller things: a shower, a toilet, a clean bed. We all fear death, and soldiers have to face that fear on a much closer basis than others but when dealing with the situations that stress civilians out, we are asked how we can be so calm in the situation the real question the person should ask themselves is why are they so stressed about it?
Let us evaluate what is really important in our lives: me personally I guess would be my family and my friends. I have few material possessions, I live off what I need. I do not have a girlfriend but there is someone very special to me back home. Looking at this now, is there any situation I could find myself in where the consequence would cause me to have to live without something I can’t live without? No. If I go to war, my family are still safe, I am in the ideal situation to protect my friends because I’m there in the war with them.
You are late for a meeting because the traffic is busy: will this person kill you because you were late? Will you really lose your job? If there is no way to change your circumstance, then there is no reason to be stressed, start to allow yourself to believe that sometimes things are just out of your control, we are merely there to see it play out. Do all you can to prevent the situations you don’t want to occur: phone ahead and inform you’ll be late, study for that test, dry drill your battle plans and do them to the best of your ability. The rest is out of your control, it takes practice to learn not to stress about that but in as simple a way as it is possible to explain, stress is the thing that disrupts mental harmony and stress comes from believing the outcome will be unsavoury. When in truth, of all the moments that you have felt stress in the past (try think of them now), are you not still here, alive and relatively happy at the least? Soldiers are known for their often sadistic and dark sense of humour and it is because we have realised there is very little in life you cannot turn into something worth smiling about, stress never came with a smile, perhaps it is time you got shot at and maybe then you will realise this world is really just a joyride made scary by people trying to speed along it.
Take time out to enjoy your shower, see the colours in the clothes of the people around you. Start to realise your actually not in a war and you’re in a life that you decide how you see things. Because as a soldier knows, there’s no point getting stressed out until the rounds come back and even then, it’s just another bar story.
*Author (name withheld) is in the British Army. He provides close support to Special Forces units and is trained as a combat medic and scout. In his spare time back home in SA, he helps out as a tracker, seeking out poachers.
There is a moment in some peoples’ lives that perhaps only a very small percentage of people will understand: for doctors, it is that moment before a trauma case comes in, for those who do extreme sports, it may be the moment before they jump out a plane, or dive off a cliff. These examples before are hypothetical in my case, however there comes a moment in a soldiers life where everything goes deadly quiet, regardless of the sounds around him (which are loud enough to deafen), time slows down to the extent that you could go insane with the fear of not getting something done fast enough, like finding cover. The world slows down and suddenly the smallest muzzle flash and the quickest puff of dust off the wall make all the difference in the world. This is the split second between being fired at and firing back, this is the initiation of contact which most people will only ever experience during call of duty or paint ball. This is the moment that soldiers actually become addicted to and as a result become known as war junkies. This is not the case.
Companies around the world have always had an affinity for ex service personnel. Words like ‘dependable’ and phrases such as ‘calm under pressure’ are all too often thrown about. While these are true, it is perhaps better to understand why these values are seen in soldiers. We are not born with these values, and those that are, have them honed to a higher level through experience and mind set and it is this mind set, and perhaps a few thought processes that, while I understand these are not the usual things you would talk about, I would like to share.
That moment of clarity when the first round goes past your head is quite simply fear. I will not believe a man that says he has not been shot at without feeling fear. I believe in my training and I carry that out to the letter and that allows me to overcome that fear but it is the repetitiveness of my training, the ‘dry drilling’of carrying out an action over and over and over again. The smallest movement, i.e. Applying the safety catch of your weapon when standing up must become sub conscious so that in a moment of crisis, it doesn’t become one other thing you have to think about. When that moment does come and you are in the shit, the clearer your mind is, the easier your body will move and the more time you will have to think about the things that do actually matter (in a soldiers case, as blunt as it sounds, killing the guy trying to kill you), and so this is the first, basic life skill that we learn, something in particular sportsmen will relate to: practice to the point you are confident in your body’s ability to do something without thought. Go over the process so many times in your head your hands do it without the object being in them. You may be asking how this can relate to you, you may just be a teacher. But this is not about what we do for a living. This is about how we handle stressful situations: are we in an unfamiliar environment, are we going into an interview with a higher up. If we are becoming stressed out because of something we would generally do every day, it is because we do not have the confidence in ourselves to carry the task out, and by extension we are worried we will not have the ability or the time to correct ourselves if we make a mistake. How many of you would fear being in a shootout? How many of you fear driving? What if I told you that more people are killed on the roads in any country in the world than the amount of complete allied forces deaths this century? The fact we drive so often makes it something we do subconsciously, without the fear of failing or crashing. Why? Because we do it so often, we become subconsciously competent at carrying it out. It is when we try to change that, by stressing after a near miss that we think too much about or by trying to drive too fast once we are late that we start to make mistakes.
This brings me onto something my father taught me and something that I have found out time and time again with everyone that gets into some kind of stressful environment. When we are late, we can never seem to get our keys in the door to lock it, traffic lights seem to always be red for us, we may not have put our shirts on backwards in years but today we are late and what do you know…
This is something you should constantly drill into your mind, especially when you are stressed: You have more time than you think. The first time I ever did a magazine change will stick with me forever: this magazine change felt like it took me ten minutes. I was stressed, I was breathing heavily after running the two miles with my kit to get there and I forgot my drills. I fumbled with my webbing pouch, unable to open it, finally I felt the catch slide out. Rounds still firing off all around me. I took the full magazine out and dropped it, my eyes closed with the disappointment. Surely this was a fatal mistake
‘Stop! Apply safety catches and stand up.’ I apply mine, pick my magazine up, which is now covered in mud, more cleaning to do tonight and stand up.
‘Congratulations, soldier,’ my section commander says to me, a normally calm and funny corporal I have nothing but respect and admiration for, something that he currently does not feel for me, ‘you have successfully just completely f-cked up your drills and as a result made yourself ineffective resulting in the entire section being killed.’
The firefight was an exercise, all practiced with blank rounds, however, each step is taken with deadly seriousness: soldiers have a way of treating these situations as very real, this is another minor point to perhaps remember: your mind will not take things in unless it is 100% committed. Exercises are treated as real life because this is where we learn our craft. Do not shirk training your mind, every chance you get.
‘What did you do wrong?’ my corporal asked me. I am still new, but I know the drills and go through it in my head, at this stage, these movements were still conscious movements to me.
‘I took the full magazine out first and then tried to take the empty one off, corporal.’ I respond trying to sound the grey man.
‘Do the drill right, here.’
I do it. Correct this time.
‘Do it again.’ Again, I do it correct.
‘And again.’ I repeat the movement.
‘When you become more experienced, you will learn ways of doing these drills faster and slicker, for now, you did that magazine change, in slow time in under 20 seconds. When we were in contact you were f-cking about for over a minute. In stressful situations, things will always seem to be slow when you want them to hurry up and they will quicken up when you need things to slow down. This happens when you flap [a term the army use for stressing]. Do not flap. Think about your drills and execute them properly.’
The only reason I couldn’t do that mag change was because I tried to do it too fast. The American Forces have a saying: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Let us think about this for a second: a businessman is late for a meeting, he rushes getting changed and in the process has to redo his tie. He then fumbles with his keys locking the door or getting them into his car. He speeds along the roads, dashing from light to light, finally arriving at his destination, still late, flustered and stressed.
If he had just made sure that he got changed, calmed down leaving the house, drove normally in a calm state remembering the lights are probably programmed to change with the speed limit, he would most likely have arrived at the same time, the only difference would be his mindset. Setbacks are inevitable. We will be late, we will meet obstacles; it is only our ability to realise that we cannot get over them by stressing them out the way that we will ultimately overcome them. Calm in a firefight wins the battle: ‘he who shoots needlessly to reassure himself is a coward’. This is a quote from the paratroopers commandments. One shot at a time, carefully placed to either suppress or kill the enemy. That is the purpose of your bullets. The purpose of a jacket is to pull off a look, do not go into something without ironing it at the expense of being late.
Soldiers understand that time must be taken, in everything we do, to ensure it is done right. A pint of sweat today, saves a gallon of blood tomorrow. Go to bed slightly later, miss out on that long weekend you may have had. Make sure your equipment is taken care of because the confidence of having your life sorted out will enable you to go further and push yourself further.
So now we have determined the very basic, physical ways of how a soldier deals with his stresses before and just as a contact is starting, we must understand how they deal with it during the contact. I will delve into the mental and spiritual sides of them later but as the physical is the easiest to maintain it is probably the best to get out the way first.
The simple answer to how a soldier survives the rigours of a battle is to be physically robust and how do we become robust? We train ourselves to do it. There is no easy way to become fit, there is only the way that gives us the satisfaction and that’s to quite simply get out and do it. The hardest part of doing something is the mental strength needed to just start it really, be it asking that girl out or getting out of bed or just putting your head out of cover to see where the fire comes from, that was in order of hardest to easiest for me by the way, but it does show that each man is different. But it is so important that for a healthy mind, a healthy body really is one of the most vital things. Ever seen a fat surgeon? Probably not. ‘Nerds’ tend not to be very sporty but are still generally neither too skinny or obese, and their minds are sharper than most. A healthy body cannot function without a mind, a mind cannot function without a healthy body if we are to fully utilize them.
The mind set of a contact: perhaps the part most people always wonder about. How will I react when the time comes? The truth is some freeze up, some get right into it but over time, it all becomes the same: it is how we have drilled ourselves to respond: return fire, take cover, win the fire fight. How do we do that then, further drills required and learned and so on and so forth. In truth, the mindset of a soldier in contact is not really that beneficial to know, unless you are going into the mind of one of the leaders, a section commander or a platoon commander for example. A private soldier will follow orders, he will trust his section commander and do what he asks without hesitation. That is based on a bond so cliché you will all know it and know there’s no point me explaining it to you. That mind set, we will perhaps cover in later times but to be honest, there is very little thoughts as a fire fight starts other than ‘what the f-ck am I doing here?’, or ‘holy shit!’.
During a fire fight, we force ourselves to remain calm, this is not something we have done at that moment though, this is a state we have reached while we were putting on our very carefully maintained equipment and waited in formation in camp before heading out. During a fight, we relay messages calmly, we fire our weapons with the rested precision required and we DO NOT FLAP!! (ok maybe we do but we don’t show it). It is important to combat stress. To take that step back from the situation and breath and just say to yourself the following words: you have more time than you think to do this, you know the drills, you know how to do this.
Don’t think about the consequences, they will come or they won’t and that is the most important thing, if there was one thing I write about today that separates soldiers from civilians, it is our ability to handle consequences. This is the thing we think about before we go out. This is the part we have to master in order to be effective soldiers and this is the reason businesses in civvies street love us. We know how to cope with the fear of consequence.
Before a patrol, a soldier will be carrying up to 100 pounds of kit, his weapon will be heavy in his hand and he will be acutely aware of the limited amount of ammunition he will be carrying and the fact that he will probably pass several IEDS before he finishes this patrol, any of which could kill him (or worse in most soldiers minds: take off a limb). Thing is, and as morbid as this will sound: what’s the worst that could happen? May die. Yeah, its not like I was getting out of this life alive anyway. May get cut, in ten years’ time, it’ll be a pretty ally scar [ally is a term used to describe something different and cool]. It is this relative idea of consequence that makes soldiers able to deal with stress so much more effectively than civilians. Truth be told, I don’t care about traffic, your work day was long, try a 3 day OP in the mud. When you have spent a week in -5 degree temperatures, with rain coming down constantly and the only warmth you had was the weak tea you were able to make only thanks to your careful waterproofing of your kit, you realise there is little in this life that can really affect you. You start to take pleasure in the smaller things: a shower, a toilet, a clean bed. We all fear death, and soldiers have to face that fear on a much closer basis than others but when dealing with the situations that stress civilians out, we are asked how we can be so calm in the situation the real question the person should ask themselves is why are they so stressed about it?
Let us evaluate what is really important in our lives: me personally I guess would be my family and my friends. I have few material possessions, I live off what I need. I do not have a girlfriend but there is someone very special to me back home. Looking at this now, is there any situation I could find myself in where the consequence would cause me to have to live without something I can’t live without? No. If I go to war, my family are still safe, I am in the ideal situation to protect my friends because I’m there in the war with them.
You are late for a meeting because the traffic is busy: will this person kill you because you were late? Will you really lose your job? If there is no way to change your circumstance, then there is no reason to be stressed, start to allow yourself to believe that sometimes things are just out of your control, we are merely there to see it play out. Do all you can to prevent the situations you don’t want to occur: phone ahead and inform you’ll be late, study for that test, dry drill your battle plans and do them to the best of your ability. The rest is out of your control, it takes practice to learn not to stress about that but in as simple a way as it is possible to explain, stress is the thing that disrupts mental harmony and stress comes from believing the outcome will be unsavoury. When in truth, of all the moments that you have felt stress in the past (try think of them now), are you not still here, alive and relatively happy at the least? Soldiers are known for their often sadistic and dark sense of humour and it is because we have realised there is very little in life you cannot turn into something worth smiling about, stress never came with a smile, perhaps it is time you got shot at and maybe then you will realise this world is really just a joyride made scary by people trying to speed along it.
Take time out to enjoy your shower, see the colours in the clothes of the people around you. Start to realise your actually not in a war and you’re in a life that you decide how you see things. Because as a soldier knows, there’s no point getting stressed out until the rounds come back and even then, it’s just another bar story.
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