Random Thoughts on Mindset, Pt 4

I’ve always found it useful to define terms. “Mindset” is a fuzzy term. What does it mean? Poll any number of combat practitioners — military, law enforcement, combat athletes — and you’ll get as many different answers as you have people.

I don’t think there’s one generic descriptor that applies to “mindset” — though I’ve been lazy in discussing it as though there were.

Here’s a couple of random chunks that I think *may* add up to a consensus definition:

There’s those aspects of mental training that relate specifically to enhancing performance. These might include visualization, mental rehearsal and techniques drawn from kinesthetic learning.

There are those aspects of mental training that install attributes: willingness to kill, willingness to engage in personal violence in general, ability to recognize and manage stress, situational awareness.

And then there’s that training that enhances control of the physiology in the mind/body matrix: autogenics breathing and psycho-physiological state management (or access).

For a long time, the approach for training mental attributes in combat focused on “toughening” — the mind, the body, through harsh and rigorous training. I wonder if that in fact actually trained that attribute, or uncovered it in those who already had it. (See previous post that touches on selection processes).

Something I focused on early on was identifying those individuals who had “it” — that amalgam of attributes and abilities listed above — and modeling them on the basis that recreating the physiology they displayed would help coach an novice learner *faster* into the desired end-state. Lots of previous work on this, especially in sports psychology and the “modeling” process as developed by Bandler and Grinder in the evolution of NLP.

So my approach was focused on detailed study of high performers and then parsing out what they were actually doing (as opposed to what they reported they were doing, a nuance lost on some) and figuring out ways to install that in training. I had the benefit of some excellent training in analyzing and evaluating body language and physiological response, as well as utilizing elicitation technique to evoke certain physiological states.

I once coached a member of the South African Olympic rifle team, an extremely experienced military sniper. He started to tell me about his problem, and I had him stop, and just go through his shooting sequence while I observed. When I identified his “hitch” I stopped him, corrected it, and he fired the perfect shot that had eluded him. Took 3 minutes start to finish.

He got up, and backed away from me with a very strange look. “That’s bloody witchcraft, oke…” he said.

I don’t think so, but it certainly can appear like that to people without training or experience.

The basis of this approach is that a high performance individual in a certain skill-set has what we need; we just need to study how he or she does it and then parse it out so it can be trained (see my previous post here on how to train the attribute of situational awareness: https://marcuswynne.wordpress.com/2012/06/02/neural-based-training-for-situational-awareness-first-printed-in-swat-magazine/ or else this post here on how to train rapid target discrimination in the peripheral vision field for shooters: https://marcuswynne.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/neural-based-training-training-peripheral-target-discrimination-for-shooters/

So the question that drove my approach was: How do you transfer the cognitive map/strategy/neurological process that comprises that elusive “mindset” into a novice learner? I took the approach of eliciting, modeling and then installing into training those pieces that added up to expert performance. I remember, a long time ago, wishing that the technology would catch up and we could just be like Neo and Morpheus in THE MATRIX and just VR our way into combat skill mastery.

Well, now we can. Kinda. Check out this very recent patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US20110105859 and the work done by http://www.advancedbrainmonitoring.com.

The technology now exists, available to the public (for the first time), to model the neurology of an expert in real-time, capture it, and then coach (via haptic, auditory and visual clues) a novice learner into the desired psycho-physiological state — the theory being that once in that state, the novice learner will become expert very quickly.

We’ll come back to that part later, but it certainly is interesting, isn’t it?

Have a Happy New Year!

The Evolution of Mindset Training, Pt 3: Random Points

In response to some offline questions/comments (don’t be bashful about posting comments; I don’t require you to agree with me, LOL)

1. What I’ve been doing is *not* NLP or neuro-linguistic programming. I studied NLP and found it useful, but the training protocols involve merging accelerated learning principles with stress-inoculation, experiential learning and psycho-physiological state management. I use certain NLP-derived techniques as an instructor (as do most good modern instructors, whether they call it NLP or not).

2. Accelerated learning — more on that later. My friend and long-time colleague Dennis Martin started an interesting parallel discussion here (you may have to register, I don’t know): http://combatives.forumotion.com/t2633-accelerating-the-training that talks about the acceleration of handgun training going back to COL Cooper’s compression of 3-weeks worth of material into the original one week Gunsite program, and covers some of our experiments in Africa.

3. I’m not a firearms instructor nor do I play one. I started experimenting in improving firearms performance because I used to be a firearms instructor and because results were easy to quantify. I later tested the concepts and protocols in other high stress training which included professional race car driving, corporate crisis management and other interesting venues.

I’m going to be taking some time off to tend to other things and will be back in awhile. Enjoy your holidays, the Winter Solstice, the Mayan End of Days, and especially Christmas!

See you on the Other Side!

cheers, m

The Evolution of Mindset Training, Part 2: More Random History

(part of an occasional series on neural-based training)

A couple of my beliefs about mindset training for combatives:

1. You don’t train it by reading about it.
2. You don’t train it by listening to somebody else talk about it.
3. You don’t train it by watching DVDs or playing video games.

So how do you train it? Based on experience, research and observation, I think there’s a lot of ways to approach that.

Knowing in advance, for instance, about the impact immediate-onset-threat-to-life stress has on one’s physiology *can* help mitigate the symptoms when an educated person experiences those symptoms. No guarantee, but it can certainly help. That’s part of the basis behind stress inoculation and pre-exposure training, which can be embedded (most of the time without much thought or attention to the way the brain learns best) into training.

One method is education. Notable in the area of law enforcement, military and “tactical” training is the work of Grossman et alia, including my friend Loren Christensen, in their books and presentations describing the various symptoms of “immediate-onset-threat-to-life-stress” and offering some solutions, like “combat breathing” drawn from autogenics, to mitigate the effects of stress. Also the Force Science Institute and other law-enforcement oriented research/education organizations have done some good work in this area. Sports psychology has a long established practice, which is for the most part focused on education about and training in specific techniques to improve the mental platform.

An interesting area is selection. When I was invited to observe and comment on NASA’s Astronaut Selection process while consulting with the Psychological Services Branch, I had the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with the psychologists who designed the various evaluation means for a wide variety of military units.

I’d had the benefit of discussing the embedded stressors and evaluation that went into military selection before I went down to NASA; Lofty Wiseman ran selection for the SAS for a long time and was (and is) a walking compendium of insight into the factors that go into evaluating “mindset.” I worked in the early 80s for CSM Forrest K. Foreman in Korea, immediately after he had left SFOD-D, where he was involved in training and planning. He was also informative about “how-to” stress and evaluate and recognize the mindset piece.

The problem as I saw it was that military selection programs focused more on weeding out people that didn’t have the mindset instead of training it in. That’s great for elite tip of the spear units, but for other purposes, like law enforcement and general military application, it’s expensive and wasteful of good talent. Selection was good at finding people who already had mindset, but it didn’t train it in. You either had it or you didn’t.

The area I remain most interested in is training. I’ve come to believe, based on experience and research, that mindset had three components:

Genetics: certain people are born with an inherent ability to manage stress and to seek out high risk situations. Research done with Naval Special Warfare and other high-risk personnel identified a specific gene sequence that predicts that kind of human attribute. It may be part of a selection process now. You can’t do much about your genetics.

Experience: “You can’t learn experience in a classroom.” Lofty Wiseman. Experience is not just the tactical or combat related, i.e. being shot at or shooting at a live human, though that’s a significant factor. Experience also encompasses *everything* that has happened and continues to happen in all aspects of an individual’s life. A child who went through the Siege of Sarajevo grows into a human who has an experience that shapes how they will handle stress and violence. So modifying current and future experience and mining past experience may help shape the mental attributes for combative applications.

Training: Of the triad, this is the piece we can directly influence. Training in combative arts or mental attributes *can* influence mindset. Problem is determining if that is in fact true or not, and if so, how to design the training so as to maximize that particular aspect and to measure or quantify it. Since the “mindset lecture” is set aside as a block of instruction, it’s often taken out of context for *application.* More on that later.

So in my opinion: Genetics + Experience (past, current, future) + Training = Combative Mindset.

Based on that thesis, the areas I focused on were Experience and Training.

I certainly wasn’t the only person exploring how to design training to make combative skills work better under stress. The WW 2 work of Fairbairn and Sykes and Applegate for the OSS based on the Shanghai experience was really the first. Massad Ayoob designed the Stressfire system back in the 80s; he was the first major firearms trainer to develop a methodology based on what happens to the body under combative stress. I experimented with and adopted for my personal use his methods for handgun, because it worked. And there seems to be a great many more trainers doing that now. More on that later.

The time I spent working with NASA was informative. I remember the first meeting I had with the working group that included every top staff psychologist and psychiatrist from the US military. While most of them had worked together before, some of us had not, and so the obligatory around the table introductions kicked off. One after another of the scientists introduced themselves, their unit affiliations, where they got their Ph.D or M.D, relevant areas of published research, etc. When they got around to me (I was about as skittish as a private in a Sergeant Majors meeting) I said, “Hi, I’m Marcus. I have a BA in English Literature, a Ph.D from the School of Hard Knocks and post-doc work in The Gutters of Application.”

A long moment of silence, and then one earnest question, “Hard Knox…is that in New Jersey?”

My sponsor rescued me from the general laughter and said, “We’ve brought Marcus here because he’s *not* a scientist. His training experiments are very interesting, and he’s done the best job we’ve found in embedding certain principles in training. He’s a trainer, and we want him to give us a reality check.”

So we’ll come back to training and training design later on.

In addition to education, selection, and training, technical enhancement was just starting to emerge in the 90s. By that I mean the use of biofeedback devices (I was issued one while a student at FLETC) to train autogenics in conjunction with instruction in breath control and stress management.

Technical enhancement certainly seems to be the hot area right now in terms of dollars spent on research and development, per the links I posted before. Advances in neuro-imaging, remote biomedical sensing, nano-technology, and mobile computing have, for the first time, brought ways to actively engage the human neurology to coach a novice brain into expert performance.

One of the reasons I initially sought to develop protocols around firearms training was because that makes progress quantifiable. You can measure accuracy and speed. You can create baselines for performance. The latest generation of technological enhancement has some very cool gadgetry designed to take advantage of that.

What I’m most interested in, right now, is how to integrate the new generation of technology into training design so as to maximize the benefit to the student of “mindset.” That seems to me to call for a synthesis of training and experiential learning with appropriate use of the technology. So we’ll come back to that.

The Evolution of Mindset Training, Part 1 — Some Random History

(part of an occasional series on neural-based training)

It’s interesting for me to watch the evolution in mental aspects training in combative applications. When I started researching and developing ways to inculcate mental training into combative training in the 80s, the only people (officially) involved in that were the folks parodied in the movie THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS. Ronson’s book of the same name, in my opinion, was one of the best pieces of disinformation ever put out about a sensitive training program, but it does make for amusing reading.

For better historical information, check out http://www.amazon.com/Search-Warrior-Spirit-Fourth-Disciplines/dp/1583942025. Heckler-Strozzi does an excellent job of documenting the early evolution of the training. One of the students he trained in this particular project (again, parodied in THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS) won a Medal of Honor. Jim Channon, immortalized by Jeff Bridges in the movie, was a LTC tasked with developing mental aspects training in the 70s. A good overview of what he did is here: http://ejmas.com/jnc/jncart_channon_0200.htm.

As you may imagine, the “New Age” flavor of the mental techniques examined (which included bio feedback, meditation, active visualization, etc — remember this, we’ll come back to it) put off a lot of people. The level of distaste, dislike and distrust for the “touchy-feely” approach was reflected officially in a generally sweeping condemnation of the 70s and 80s era programs, captured specifically by a dismissive overview conducted by the National Research Council report drafted in the 80s and published in 1990 here: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=1580

As a counter-point to the criticisms leveled by the NRC in the Enhancing Human Performance report, COL John Alexander, Major Richard Groller and Janet Morris wrote and published a book titled THE WARRIOR’S EDGE (not to be confused with a book by a trainer who adopted part of the title for his book after I pointed out this particular reference to him). THE WARRIOR’S EDGE is out of print but still available here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Warriors-Edge-Front-Line-Battlefield/dp/0380716747/ref=dp_ob_title_bk.

MAJ Groller also published an article in the handgun press (JPEG below) which was the first detailed examination, naming names and giving statistics, of the JEDI PROJECT focused on enhancing combat marksmanship.

I was at the time involved in developing training for Air Marshals and other people at the former FLETC facility at Marana, AZ, which also hosted, at the time, a number of other government organizations involved in counter-terrorism.

I was part of an informal working group that included people like Bob Taubert http://www.amazon.com/Rattenkrieg-Science-Quarters-Battle-Pistol/dp/0977265943 who was at the time with the FBI SOAR Unit, Ed Lovette http://www.amazon.com/Defensive-Living-Preserving-Personal-Awareness/dp/1932777091/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355681350&sr=1-1&keywords=defensive+living who was, at that time, conducting training for a government agency involved in counter-terrorism, Dave Spaulding http://www.amazon.com/Handgun-Combatives-second-Text-Only/dp/B004RTMXY6/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355681403&sr=1-2&keywords=handgun+combatives+2nd+edition and a number of other notables in training. I was fortunate to have an extensive roster of cutting edge mentors and contacts, derived from my employment as a protection specialist and trainer with Lofty Wiseman and Dennis Martin’s CQB Services operation:

While at FLETC, I had access to a facility and a cadre of role players, and I was fortunate enough to be given a free hand in designing certain aspects of training. I had the opportunity to experiment with and then implement some of the early concepts that evolved into “neural-based training” — incorporating elements of accelerated learning, cognitive strategy mapping, expert skill set transfer to novice learners, etc. — on multiple groups of students. And I didn’t have to have an approved Human Use Protocol.

I shared my results freely with the other members of our “working group” and got plenty of feedback from the guys who were out doing the deed in the late 80s and early 90s. After I left federal service in 1993, I continued the work and shared the information as I found it. I found excellent testbeds for the concepts (relative to unarmed combat) in the martial arts and “front door security” world of the United Kingdom, where security professionals regularly engage in full on unarmed combat against armed or unarmed (and skilled) opponents; my testbed for armed combat was in South Africa, where I was invited by the South African Police Service to present material to their frontline operators in what was, at the time, the most violent urban area in the world. The SAPS incorporated it into a module titled MENTAL CONDITIONING FOR CLOSE COMBAT, required for all National Police officers in the mid 90’s.

Meanwhile, back in CONUS, “mental training” was relegated to lectures on mindset, many of them growing from COL Cooper’s original Gunsite lecture on mindset http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Personal-Defense-Jeff-Cooper/dp/1581604955 which influenced and continues to influence multiple generations of combative instructors. As it should. But talking about mindset is not the same thing as training it.

I started publishing in 94-95 a series of articles, primarily in COMBAT HANDGUNS, SWAT, GUNS AND WEAPONS FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT (some of them archived on this blog) focusing on sharing with a larger audience some of my findings. These included introductions to the OODA Loop, situational awareness as an attribute, and training that focused on installing and enhancing the mental platform for combat. There’s some good overviews archived here: http://www.kalijkd-u.com/dev/kjkdu_articles.php?aid=1&title=Marcus+Wynne:+The+Way+of+the+Jedi However, writing about mindset is not the same thing as training it.

I was laughed at quite a bit and denounced for “New Age” bullshit. One notable, at the time, trainer made a point of denouncing “so-called accelerated learning” in his popular book; I notice that in subsequent editions he’s deleted that. Perhaps after these folks started focusing major effort on that “so-called accelerated learning: http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/DSO/Programs/Accelerated_Learning.aspx

I just plowed ahead and continued to do my thing. I measure my success by the number of lives saved by people I’ve trained all over the world.

Lives saved, dudes and dudettes. That’s what it’s all about.

So fast forward to the second decade of the 21st century and what do I see? I’m so far outside the tactical community I may as well be Obi Wan out in the desert, but I do see a return by cutting edge trainers to the essential foundation of the warrior’s skill set — mindset and mental attributes. I also see that technology and research is catching up with the work that was done back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Here’s where the cutting edge research is today:

http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/DSO/Programs/Accelerated_Learning.aspx
http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/DSO/Programs/Enabling_Stress_Resistance.aspx
http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/DSO/Programs/Strategic_Social_Interaction_Modules_%28SSIM%29.aspx
http://advancedbrainmonitoring.com/advwp/publications/

And here’s *some* of the really cutting edge technology that’s becoming available:
http://advancedbrainmonitoring.com/advwp/publications/
http://www.npstwo.com/default.aspx

Everything Old Is New Again.

The Article That Started It All —

The Jack of All Trades

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

I’ve recently spent time with someone I’ll call “Mr. C.” Mr. C is a tradesman by vocation, and “one of those guys” i.e. someone who can do everything, like the skilled human Robert Heinlein refers to.

I’ve seen Mr. C repair broken water pipes, build a charger for 12V batteries, repair a rifle, load ammunition, patch a roof, tend a child, cook a tasty meal, replace brakes on a 4×4, maintain a Harley and a dirt bike, navigate without a GPS, repair a washing machine, rig up a wireless network and repair a Nintendo.

The washing machine incident was insightful. He noticed the washer no longer agitated during the cycle. He took the components apart, noted the parts number, went online and ordered the parts, which were delivered via Fedex the next day. It took him about fifteen minutes to install the new parts (about $8 dollars) and get the machine running again. Total down time for the washer: about 18 hours, most of it overnight.

My observation was that today most people who own washers (probably the vast majority) wouldn’t know how to diagnose a mechanical problem in their washer, let alone dare to take it apart, figure out what was wrong, find out where to get parts, order the parts, and then put it back together again.

A generation or two ago, the skill set of “being handy” or “mechanically inclined” was taken for granted; shop classes were standard in high school and there was something wrong with the kid who couldn’t fix a flat on his own bike.

Recently, I’ve personally witnessed people who don’t understand how to make a fire with tinder, kindling and small bits of wood; people who cannot walk more than a block from their home without Google Maps on their smartphone, drivers who cannot change a tire and householders who would spend $150 an hour to have someone come and look at their washer instead of trying to fix it themselves. All told, Mr. C’s time in the problem was about 2 1/2 hours, or $375 in repair time.

Somewhere along the line the vast majority of us lost the interest in tinkering and problem solving for ourselves; it’s easier (albeit more expensive) to ask or hire someone else to do it. It would have cost at least $375 – $450 to have the repair done unless it were under warranty, in which case it would have cost a significantly greater amount of time.

Here’s my thought for the day: if you couldn’t afford to hire someone to fix things for you, do you know someone that would be willing to fix whatever for you? And if not, could you work the problem yourself? It’s a good thought for the resilience-minded, or so I think.