[JGarcia]

1. Develop the Self-awareness of selective perceptions and effective thinking skills.

Soldiers and leaders need to understand how their perceptions and thus their thoughts affect their performance on a day to day basis. Soldiers must realize the relationship between internal thoughts about tough and demanding training and immediate changes in their physiology which either physically frees them up to perform aggressively or slows them down to a level of mediocrity. It involves telling soldiers that free will plays an important role in how they choose to view their environment. SLA Marshall stated it clearly when he said “It profits an Army nothing to build the body of a soldier to a gladiatorial physique if he continues to think with a brain of a malingerer.”

Moreover, soldiers must be made aware of the usefulness of their thought patterns. Self-awareness involves asking the question, “Am I performing better while worrying (thinking) about making mistakes, worrying to much (thinking) about letting others down, or acting because (thinking) I legally have to? Surely, these underlying motivations are acceptable but not necessarily in keeping with an aggressive warrior attitude. Great soldiers and leaders on the other hand think like champions because they perceptively view tough, realistic and demanding training with eagerness and trust, rather than with doubt and apprehension both of which stem from a certain thought process. At the end of the day, it is a choice individuals can consciously focus their mind on.

Not only do the thoughts of war fighters cause changes within their internal physiology, which effect performance, but they also engage an on-going self-fulfilling process which occurs within in each of the thought processes of the individual. The self-fulfilling prophecy is a documented phenomenon, based upon quantitative and qualitative research that reveals that people tend to become what they think about. The statement “Rangers lead the way” is a case in point. The cultivated attitude of a warrior can be harnessed if soldiers are trained to become aware of what they say to themselves. Hence they will choose a useful and productive thought process which will, in turn give them the best chance to fulfill a desired vision of what they want to do.

Therefore, a warrior ethos initially develops from the seeds of optimistic perceptions which in turn become our internal effective thought process which eventually galvanizes our belief system. It is not necessarily the tough, realistic, and demanding training that builds the warrior ethos; it is the perceptions and thoughts that we internalize before, during and after tough, training events or combat that produce a hardened warrior mindset.

2. Achieving balance between the training and trusting mindset

Generally, leaders wisely view training as the key to building confidence. It is the idea that the more I train my unit the more confident my unit will become. This is an absolute necessity in order to develop the necessary skills for success (i.e. operate weapon’s systems). However, constant over-training brings its own set of challenges. First, managing optempo is always an issue, as “burnout” and “finger drilling” become likely. Second, the typical training mindset involves training hard, conducting an AAR, finding what went well, and not so well, and then retraining the weak or broken area till the unit gets it right. This sounds logical but may cause individuals, leaders, and the unit to become unknowingly analytical, judgmental, and preoccupied with shortcomings. This training mindset may unknowingly produce hesitation and doubt spurred by a focus of purposely looking for errors in training. This training mindset must therefore be balanced with a trusting mindset by first focusing 60% of the AAR process on what went right. Furthermore, areas that did not meet the standard should be generally viewed as temporary and fixable versus “permanently broken.” Shortcomings should also be viewed as a thankful lesson learned versus failure and attaching personal blame to the shortcoming. Again this comes down to a “deliberate and selective perception” about the training experience that has occurred. Bottom line: leaders must carefully measure what goes into the brain-housing group of themselves and others.


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