Search Result: Mental Training

Panic has little place in the modern world, and for a crime fighter it can be a killer; action is our mantra, and preparation is our antidote.

I have discovered that a trainer has an incredibly powerful role to play in imbuing the trainee with either positive or negative expectations. And our profession demands that we hone skills essential for victory in confrontations.

Any time you react you are processing information and making decisions using the OODA loop. The OODA loop consists of four parts: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.

Everyone is well aware that humans are visual creatures. It is far and away our most dominant sense and that is one of the reasons I get so frustrated that we have so many distracters in our modern patrol vehicles.

While in fiction Sherlock Holmes' magnificent intuitive leaps lead to remarkable arrests, we would make a huge number of mental errors if we tried the same tricks. Worse, we might make assumptions that would get us or someone else hurt.

Even though we now have these marvelous tools, the key to winning confrontations is still what is happening behind our eyes, not in our hands. Yes, great weapons help us win, but we have to have our minds right, before and during a life-and-death confrontation.

A mindset is developed when you employ a fixed mental attitude that predetermines your response to a given situation. For example, your attitudes toward something help develop your response or approach. Your mindset becomes your approach.

The problem we have as humans is we aren't real good at evaluating risk, and if we don't evaluate it properly we can't compensate for it.

As a student of human performance I am always amazed at the way we pay lip service to the winning mindset. It seems we think that if we just say this or that to ourselves, or visualize ourselves doing this or that, we will become winners. Simple, right? Wrong.