When stress hits, you default to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. But you can pause instead. David Goggins used a "take a knee" technique during SEAL training to imagine two futures and choose the harder one. A breath creates space to pick your next step deliberately, not automatically.
Awareness is actually the key to allow us to escape the situations that arise for us that we feel we have no control over. So when I say that, I'm looking at the fact that when we're in a situation and we're in that stress, we're in that one of the 4 Fs, we're in that fight, we're in the flight, we're in the freeze, or we're in the fawn situation. When one of those situations come up, we really have a choice. And the choice is that we can go into our old patterns, our old beliefs, our old egoic sense of ourselves that is bred about from, you know, a limited perception and experience that we've had and the conditions that we have taken on in the past that say that we can only do certain things within the framework of the Matrix. Or we have a choice that says, wait a second, let's take a moment and let's have a look at this and activate that, that prefrontal cortex that says there's something going on here. I need to take, take some time and consider what the next step is. So what normally happens in these situations, and we're in the flight, we're in the fight, we're in the freeze, we're in the fawn, is that we revert to what's comfortable, what's addictive, what is the way we've always performed. And if you can think about a situation in your life where you have faced some type of tension where resilience may have gotten you through, and you think of how you worked through that difficult situation, and maybe it was in your childhood, just think of the situation and think of what happened at that point. Was there a choice for you, or were there circumstances that arose that you felt there was nothing that you could do? And as a child, we did have limited power to be able to do things. But if you move into being a young adult and think of a circumstance that comes up for you where as a young adult you had this situation that arose, there was an awareness that you were not in control, that things were happening to you, and you possibly didn't like the result. Or conversely, think of a situation where where something happened and there was a situation, there was a circumstance, and you made a conscious choice. You took a moment and you made a conscious choice to do the unthinkable, the unnatural, the not expected, and you actually had a way to actually navigate your way through that circumstance. And then think of yourself as a young adult, maybe in relationships Maybe in career, maybe in a health choice that you have or a health situation. Did that thing happen to you? How did you react to it? So James Campbell has, um, this saying, and I think it's really relevant for us here, and that really comes to the fact that when we think about the situation of pain, pain is inherent as a human going through life. Pain will happen. Pain is inherent, but suffering is optional. And what that means is how we turn up, how we actually navigate the situation and the circumstances that arise for us. So as we kind of go through this masterclass today, I just want you to consider that when are these circumstances that have come up in your past? And maybe there's something that's recently come up for you, and maybe it's something simple, like maybe there's a family disagreement or a car crash. There's— there could be something that you have a fight with the government, or you have unexpected ill turn in your company, and maybe a business partner has left, or a major contract, or the guy who's doing your website. And this tension and this worry and this concern comes up. What's been your default modus operandi? What have you done? And if you look at that Often what we see is the patterns that we've actually played out in the past as well. Now, I'd like to think that we're, we're all conscious beings and we, we can pick this up very quickly and we make a choice to do things differently. But the reality is often in those, those times of stress, what happens is that we actually go back into our default patterns, our default beliefs, our default ways of dealing with the situation. So I was reading this book called Never Finished by David Goggins, and he is an ex-Navy SEAL. He tried 3 times to get into SEAL training, and for whatever reason, he rang out each time. And he's an amazing person and he has this incredible fortitude about him, and he runs 100-mile runs in deserts and he does these ultra marathons, etc. And he really is an incredible person. And just reading his book, he has this exercise that he does and he calls it the mental lab. So he goes into his mental lab and when there's a situation of stress or worry, and he talks about this situation where his kind of kryptonite as a trainee in the Navy SEALs was the Pacific Ocean, which if you think about it, if you're a Navy SEAL, you probably have to have a good relationship with water. It just terrified him. The waves terrified him. Some of the biggest challenges were around these situations. And he talks about this moment where the team members have to hold arms and the waves come and batter you and you get slammed into the sand. You have to, you have this choice. It's like, do I really wanna be here? And he talks about this choice that he had and he could just imagine he could ring out quite quickly. He could go to the hottest, warmest shower that he's ever experienced. Eat well, rest and relax. And then he looks back and he looks at those other people, and he then connects with what his goal is. And he thinks, well, if I do this, what's going to be the next logical thing that happens if I ring out? Well, I can go back to my hometown. I've got the competence to be a security guard or a lifesaver. That's about it. Or I can actually front up and I can make the decision to go back into the line and see the next 6, 8, 10 weeks out and become a Navy SEAL. And he talks about that second, and it's just the one second that allowed him to disconnect to the pain, the hardship, the, the water, the cold, everything that he was feeling. And it allowed him to actually go what's the alternatives? If I take this path or I take that path, what happens? And I think— and he talks about that throughout his book, and he talks about— he calls it taking a knee. So in times of doubt, take a knee for a second and just think about the two paths and what those outcomes are and what's the next obvious step. And so I was thinking about that and thinking, geez, having that time to actually take a step back and breathe and have that breath to give you oxygen so you're not hyperventilating, which often happens when we're in stressful situations, but gives us an opportunity to, to really think about what that next step is.
