Focus is everything Let me start with a simple question.  What does a monk, a ballerina, a special forces soldier and an elite athlete have in common? The answer is equally simple.  All of them, the monk, the ballerina, the soldier and the athlete have mastered something psychologists call flow.  Remember that saying “go with the flow”?   Remember that time when everything fell into place and you seemed to be almost on

Backstabbing I am absolutely sure that at some stage in your life you have been affected by gossip which is also known as backstabbing.  You may have even been guilty of backstabbing yourself. Any form of backstabbing is like introducing toxins into your team’s drinking water.  Ultimately, everyone loses, so it is in your best interests to know how to filter out gossip from your interactions with others.  If there

The Key Take Away Having good situational awareness is a necessity to being a high performer. Possessing physical, emotional and social situational awareness allows the individual to better predict outcomes. If the average person develops this skill to a high standard it can be a force multiplier, increasing their achievements exponentially. What is Personal Situational Awareness? A person is situationally aware when they are in tune with the environment around

Humans are easy to kill. We are soft tissue and muscle covering a fragile bone skeleton. Given the right circumstances, our deaths can happen in an instant, but what if the event happened and you weren’t dead yet? How prepared are you to survive? What if you had to fight for your god damn life – what if you found yourself fighting for the life of your loved ones, or fighting

Some of the finest men I know carried a gun all their career. Some of the finest men I know had to put down that gun and pick up their friends and put them back together. After 26 years in the Regular Army, half of which was spent within the SF group as a Commando qualified medic, I know what it is to see true trauma, smell fear and experience

Fly in – Fly out lifestyle The Fly in Fly out lifestyle is not conducive to physical or indeed mental optimisation. This is due in part to the schedule itself, but also the nature of the work and the hours spent out on site. Let’s consider, as a simple example, a roster of two weeks on and two weeks off. It is generally safe to say that the day prior

The truth is, most people are not able to operate effectively in a crisis, at least not without some significant prior experiential training. The secret to reacting well in a crisis – you’ve done it before and know what to expect. Having experienced a similar situation before allows you to speed up the mental imaging of what comes next. It allows you to have access to a preconceived solution. It gives