How to learn more from every challenge with Rich Diviney's Personal After-Action Report

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The after action report of the critical event detail debrief are things that the military does all the time and we certainly did after every single operation or even training evolution, before we did anything else, before we put away our gun, our gear, cleaned ourselves, got everything done, we, we got together and we asked ourselves, okay, three, three basic questions. What went well? What went poorly? And then what would we have done? What could we have done differently? Those three things and those debriefs were usually pretty intense and sometimes brutal, but they were, they were for purpose. When we as individuals go through stress, trauma, challenge or whatever it is, we have to recognize that that has, that has done some, I would, if not damage, but certainly has taxed our system quite a bit and we have to, we have to recover from it. Part of that recovery is simply understanding our physiology so that we can shift into parasympathetic versus sympathetic. Parasympathetic is this rest and digest. You know, if we're, if we're doing things that cause us peace, joy, fulfillment, that's where we're generally in parasympathetic response, which means biochemically, we're creating DHEA versus cortisol. Sympathetic, you're creating cortisol. Parasympathetic, you're creating dhea. DHEA is the rebuilding chemical. I mean, it's the building block for estrogen and testosterone and all this stuff that. So DHEA is great because it rebuilds our systems. So that's part of recovery. And then the other thing we have to do to kind of make sure that we not only recover appropriately, but probably grow and learn from that experience is to effectively and proactively reflect. That's where we start asking ourselves these questions. We can only do that effectively if we've come off of our emotional response. Right? We can't do that highly emotional, because we're not going to get the right answer. So we have to recover enough to people say, hey, how long do I have to recover? Recover enough so that the emotions have dissipated. Enough so that when you ask yourself these reflective questions, you can answer them somewhat objectively. So if you have a fight with your teen or your significant other and it's over and you've got through it and you say, okay, now I have to figure out what happened to make sure that when you ask those questions to yourself, you're still not stewing on the. On the previous event because you're not going to get the right answers. So recover first and then once you recover, do the reflection on those questions. Get those lessons objectively. Certainly part of that is to blame yourself effectively. Blame yourself. Right. And say, okay, what could I have done better? What did I do wrong? Okay. Because it's often ineffective to blame another. Right. So first blame yourself effectively and ask yourself some good questions. And that's part of the recovery and reflect process.

Recovery and reflect prize. I love that it's got to start with grounding our physiology, shifting from sympathetic to parasympathetic such that we can have that. What'd you say? Efficient and objective reflection. Love those three questions. Familiar. Will be familiar to the community of what went well, what went poorly? What am I going to do differently going forward? What do you call it? Personal after action report or.

Yeah, you could call it that because it's in the military. It's called the after action review or the critical event debrief, you know, but yeah, you can call it kind of a personal, personal after action, something like that. Yeah.

And recover enough such you're able to effectively and objectively assess kind of thing. It's like. And it's so fun. I'm thinking of times when I've done this without having recovered and my answers are just like the same kind of snappy, spotty, like, oh, yeah, yeah.

Well, sometimes the worst. And we're all guilty of this too, certainly me included. Sometimes we make the mistake of trying to reflect while we're still in the event. And that's even worse because that's when you start to see downward spirals. You know, you're. You're still in the. In the challenging event. And you're starting to ask yourself, okay, why is this happening? What. What's going on? What. You know, those are not good questions to ask when you're actually in the event. Okay. You have to get through the event and then recover and then ask the questions.

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