Preparing yourself mentally for the fight is critical. Your success against an multiple aggressors will depend on not just your skill-set but also your mindset. In this section of Combat Mindset will discuss important topics like motivation to survive, fear and negative thoughts, mental programming, how to handle stress, tactical confidence, medical self-aid, and more.

 

Train in All Directions

In Tribe combat training  we talk about the four pillars we continually work on improving in ourselves:

1. Technical
2. Tactical
3. Mental
4. Physical

If one of these pillars is not sufficiently developed, then the whole platform they support will crash down. In each of the four pillars there is vast amount of knowledge and material.

When we are talking about mental training, it is no different. There is a lot for us to learn in order to reach higher levels in our lives. T

The Components

When we talk about developing mental skills, we usually address six training strategies:

1. Visualization
2. Goal setting
3. Positive self-talk (and changing of internal monologue)
4. Combat mindset (courage, determination, perseverance, controlled aggression)
5. Focusing
6. Relaxation

By integrating and utilizing these six main strategies, we aim to develop confidence, control of physical arousal, attention control (focusing and spreading attention), arousal control, imagery use or visualization, commitment, self-talk use, and the commitment to stay in good physical condition.

 

Working on determination and decision-making skills, along with training in different combat systems definitely helps to develop your combat mindset. However, there is so much more to mental training

Meditation techniques  are drills in our curriculum, and the purpose of such  techniques is to quiet the self-talk, the internal monologue going on inside your head, and to help you take control of yourself with a better ability to focus.

Training Combat Mindset

Working on your concentration skills is extremely valuable. You will understand what stress is and get an overview of different stress reactions. It is useful to get to know how your body and mind react to different problems and situations. Having a clear overview of the common mental and physical reactions a person experiences in a self-defense/fighting situation and the normal sequence (process) that people go through as a response to a threatening situation will help you a lot.

Then, of course, you need to learn practical methods and drills for igniting and controlling high levels of aggression, determination and persistence, concentration, focusing, neutralization of destructive emotions, minimizing stress and self-talk, and channeling attention.

It boils down to this: if you are not able to be here and now, and keep your focus on the events at hand, then you will probably experience problems in your later mental training, as well as in your decisions and performances. Once you master being here and now, you can continue with other types of mental training.

Focus and Concentration

Each of us has certain mental resources and capacities. To perform a mission, you need to recruit as much of these resources as possible. When you have to perform serial or parallel missions, the demands are even higher. When you don’t have enough resources, when life’s loads are more than you can easily handle, then stress rises.

Training the mind is no different than training the body. The body changes due to fitness training—muscles grow, bones strengthen, coordination improves, and so on. Focus and concentration exercises for the mind are like  get-ups and chin-ups for the body. Recent studies show that certain parts of the brain can actually grow and thicken with the practice of mental training, and more importantly, your capacities and capabilities become stronger.

Mental training is no different. You practice different drills in order to better yourself for the missions in life, such as:

• Dealing with conflicts, confrontations, and fights
• Overcoming common daily stress
• To better fulfill your missions and work whether you are a manager in a company, a member of a SWAT team.

Relaxation and Defusing of Destructive Emotions

Fear, anxiety, anger, frustration, resentment, and rage are just some of emotions we commonly experience. When dealing with other people, we expect certain kinds of behavior toward us. When our ego is hurt, when someone insults us, or when someone damages or even touches our belongings, our emotions burst out from within. At that point, we turn from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.

 

Many times we can’t control ourselves. We behave outrageously to others, especially to our loved ones, and when we cool down, we regret our actions. In reflecting on our behavior at those moments, we may recognize a kind of animal and not human behavior. Yes, sometimes we need to be aggressive, fight, and maybe even destroy our enemies. We know if we discharge a bullet from our gun, hitting an enemy during war times or while fighting a terrorist, we’ll get a medal. If we discharge the same gun in a local club or school, we’ll find ourselves in front of a bullet or a judge and jury.

You must make the correct decision under stressful conditions. How do you reach this level? The only magic components are: gain the knowledge and practice the drills by yourself or with the best partner you can find.

One of the drills we can do is changing the internal monologues—the self-talk. Usually people are inclined to destructive sentences and descriptions of future failures like, “I will die,” “I will get hurt,” “I can’t do it,” “The boss is going to fire me,” and so on. That self-talk is distressing you and commonly leads to defeat and setbacks. Our simple drill is first to change this internal monologue and then minimize it entirely. Initially, you need to substitute the negative self-talk by speaking to yourself with encouraging sentences, compliments, and inspirational phrases. Then, using the focusing and breathing drills, you are able to totally minimize the self-talk.

Here is a drill for calming the mind integrated with relaxation of the body. You should focus on each part of the body, usually starting from the feet and working toward the head. Contract and then relax each area—an area can be the foot, the face, palm and forearm, the whole leg, or even the whole upper body and neck. Inhale, stop breathing, contract the muscles of that area for couple of seconds and the relax that area and exhale. Progress from the feet toward the head, initially by small parts, then by larger parts as you gain experience. Eventually, with training, you will be able to quickly contract and relax only your fists and palms to reach a fully relaxed state of mind.

We must be able to:

• Develop an appropriate mental state such as courage and determination, combat mindset and fighting spirit, controlling aggression, and channeled anger.
• Use techniques and training methods to control destructive emotions and defuse stress.
• Focus, relax, and overcome fear and anxiety, frustration, and anger.
• Create mental conditioning to better the intuitive fighting response.
• Improve self-control and decision-making processes under stressful conditions.
• Conduct relevant mental preparation sessions with hard physical training alongside still sessions to focus the mind, body, and internal monologue (self-talk).
• Progress yourself or improve others, including your fitness clients, martial art trainees, active governmental officers, or corporate employees with the utmost advantageous abilities.

Understanding Mindsets

If you are looking for a good all-in-one reference on the topic, I suggest reading “Warrior Mindset,” cowritten by Dr. Michael J. Asken.

Experience shows that up to 90% of successful performance is attributed to psychological skills. Rarely is that number reported to be less than 40%. This comes from talking to military personnel, police officers, including SWAT tactical team members, and other emergency responders who engage in life and death situations.”

That’s huge when you consider how little training we receive in the psychological aspects of performing our jobs. Think about your own training; how much time does your agency spend on molding mindset?

In my opinion, of all the tools someone has at his or her disposal, the mind is the most important, and yet it’s the least understood. 

Warrior Mindset

In the book “Warrior Mindset,” Lt. Col. Dave Grossman says, “In the end, it’s not about the ‘hardware,’ it’s about the software. Amateurs talk about hardware or equipment, professionals talk about software or training and mental readiness.” In other words, another way of looking at warrior mindset is with mental readiness.

Everyone knows what it feels like doing something for the first time. You are unsure of yourself and you overthink it. You sometimes second guess yourself to the point of inaction. A big part of your success depends on your mental readiness to see it through. You have to be prepared for the difficulties that lie ahead and drive on.

Former Navy Seal and author of “Unleash the Warrior Within” Richard Machowicz says it clearly: “Being a warrior is not about the act of fighting. It’s about being so prepared to face a challenge and believing so strongly in the cause you are fighting for that you refuse to quit.” In those few words lie not only a great definition for being a warrior, but also what I feel are the keys to having a successful warrior mindset: preparation and believe

In his book, Asken goes on to say that “Because the brain (and the mind) exists in the environment of the body, the quality of that environment is an essential factor in the quality of psychological function.” In other words, you can maximize the use of your mind all you want, but if you’re a couch potato, you’re probably not going to do well in a stressful situation.

Working out, eating right, and getting enough sleep are critical factors toward developing your peak performance. Not that this is anything new, but it’s advice we continue to ignore and pay the ultimate price for doing so. You can’t afford to break the mind-body connection and expect your peak performance to be there when you need it the most.

It’s not about training for the Olympics either. There are knuckle draggers that would have you believe if you’re not throwing up, you’re not working out. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. Though there are exceptions, you can’t expect a 55-year-old to train the same way a 25-year-old does.

To maintain a positive mind-body connection, your goal is to maximize your own conditioning, maintain a high number of abilities, and increase your tolerance for stress. True peak performance has never been about how much weight you can lift or how far you can run; it’s been about operating optimally under long periods of intense stress. That’s the secret to surviving and winning.

The point it brings home to me is that the people with the best attitudes and strongest survival mindsets are the ones that make it all the way through. It’s not always the biggest and strongest who make it, but those with the most heart; those who keep on going no matter what is thrown at them. It’s a lesson you need to remember if you want to become a true warrior.

Believe

You’ve heard people say that if you can see it you can achieve it. Well, there’s a reason for that. Mental imagery, or visualization, is one of the most powerful skills you can use to enhance mental toughness and performance. It’s not used as a substitute for hands on training, but to supplement it. Research has shown that if you prepare mentally and believe you can accomplish a task, you will increase your chances of success. If you allow negative thoughts and doubts to enter in, they will decrease your chances of success.

A simple form of imagery training goes something like this. You first think about the action you are about to practice. You go over it in your mind and imagine yourself doing the task while sitting or standing quietly. Next, you think about it again but you go through the motions almost in a pantomime fashion. You might have seen someone with his eyes closed talking to himself, moving around and pretending to perform a task. Although he may look like he’s in a trance, he’s not crazy; it’s just a form of cognitive rehearsal. The last part of this of course is actually practicing the task.

This type of training helps create a bridge between the psychological and physical aspects of what you are trying to accomplish. If you incorporate this into your training, new skills won’t seem so new when you try them for the first time. Mere repetition will not do the trick; you have to go beyond just going through the numbers. You have to want to be successful and you have to see yourself being successful as you perform each task. You need to have a single-minded focus.

Overcome and Win

Some of us are already warriors in one form or another. Being a warrior means throwing your heart and soul into something you believe in and never looking back. Having a warrior mindset means you won’t quit. It encompasses the Spartan philosophy of bringing back your shield or being carried back on it.

Having a warrior mindset means doing whatever it takes to be prepared because warriors don’t just survive, they overcome and win. At the end of the day, life is nothing but a mind game; it’s important that you play to win. Your life depends on it.

Think Like a Warrior

1. A warrior is one who is engaged aggressively or energetically in an activity, cause, or conflict.
2. An attitude is how a person views something or tends to behave toward it.
3. Mindset comes from employing a fixed mental attitude that predetermines your response to a given situation.
4. The keys to a warrior mindset are preparing and believing.
5. It’s all a mind game; how you play is totally up to you.

 

Jeff Cooper’s Color Codes of Awareness

about Lt. Colonel Cooper

Born John Dean Cooper, but known to his friends as “Jeff”, Cooper was a Marine Lieutenant Colonel who served in both World War II and the Korean War resigning his commission in 1956. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Stanford University and, in the mid-1960s, a master’s degree in history from the University of California, Riverside.

In 1976, Cooper founded the American Pistol Institute (API) in Paulden, Arizona (later the Gunsite Training Center). Cooper also began teaching shotgun and rifle classes to law enforcement and military personnel as well as civilians and did on-site training for individuals and groups around the Free World. He sold the firm in 1992 but continued living on the Paulden ranch. He was known for his advocacy of large caliber handguns, especially the Colt 1911 and the .45 ACP cartridge.

The most important means of surviving a lethal confrontation, according to Cooper, is neither the weapon nor the martial skills. The primary tool is the combat mindset, set forth in his book, Principles of Personal Defense. In the chapter on awareness, Cooper presents an adaptation of the Marine Corps system to differentiate states of readiness:

The color code, as originally introduced by Jeff Cooper, had nothing to do with tactical situations or alertness levels, but rather with one’s state of mind. As taught by Cooper, it relates to the degree of peril you are willing to do something about and which allows you to move from one level of mindset to another to enable you to properly handle a given situation. Cooper didn’t claim to have invented anything in particular with the color code, but he was apparently the first to use it as an indication of mental state.

* White– Unaware and unprepared. If attacked in Condition White, the only thing that may save you is the inadequacy or ineptitude of your attacker. When confronted by something nasty, your reaction will probably be “Oh my God! This can’t be happening to me.”

* Yellow – Relaxed alert. No specific threat situation. Your mindset is that “today could be the day I may have to defend myself.” You are simply aware that the world is a potentially unfriendly place and that you are prepared to defend yourself, if necessary. You use your eyes and ears, and realize that “I may have to SHOOT today.” You don’t have to be armed in this state, but if you are armed you should be in Condition Yellow. You should always be in Yellow whenever you are in unfamiliar surroundings or among people you don’t know. You can remain in Yellow for long periods, as long as you are able to “Watch your six.” (In aviation 12 o’clock refers to the direction in front of the aircraft’s nose. Six o’clock is the blind spot behind the pilot.) In Yellow, you are “taking in” surrounding information in a relaxed but alert manner, like a continuous 360 degree radar sweep. As Cooper put it, “I might have to shoot.”

* Orange– Specific alert. Something is not quite right and has gotten your attention. Your radar has picked up a specific alert. You shift your primary focus to determine if there is a threat (but you do not drop your six). Your mindset shifts to “I may have to shoot HIM today,” focusing on the specific target which has caused the escalation in alert status. In Condition Orange, you set a mental trigger: “If that goblin does ‘x’, I will need to stop him.” Your pistol usually remains holstered in this state. Staying in Orange can be a bit of a mental strain, but you can stay in it for as long as you need to. If the threat proves to be nothing, you shift back to Condition Yellow.

* Red– Condition Red is fight. Your mental trigger (established back in Condition Orange) has been tripped. If “X” happens I will shoot that person.

The USMC also uses “Condition Black” as actively engaged in combat, as do some of Cooper’s successors, but Cooper always felt this was an unnecessary step and not in keeping with the mindset definition of the color code since it is a state of action.

In short, the Color Code helps you “think” in a fight. As the level of danger increases, your willingness to take certain actions increases. If you ever do go to Condition Red, the decision to use lethal force has already been made (your “mental trigger” has been tripped).

The following are some of Cooper’s additional comments on the subject.

“Considering the principles of personal defense, we have long since come up with the Color Code. This has met with surprising success in debriefings throughout the world. The Color Code, as we preach it, runs white, yellow, orange, and red, and is a means of setting one’s mind into the proper condition when exercising lethal violence, and is not as easy as I had thought at first.

There is a problem in that some students insist upon confusing the appropriate color with the amount of danger evident in the situation. As I have long taught, you are not in any color state because of the specific amount of danger you may be in, but rather in a mental state which enables you to take a difficult psychological step.”Now, however, the government has gone into this and is handing out color codes nationwide based upon the apparent nature of a peril. It has always been difficult to teach the Gunsite Color Code, and now it is more so.

We cannot say that the government’s ideas about colors are wrong, but that they are different from what we have long taught here.”The problem is this: your combat mind-set is not dictated by the amount of danger to which you are exposed at the time. Your combat mind-set is properly dictated by the state of mind you think appropriate to the situation. You may be in deadly danger at all times, regardless of what the Defense Department tells you. The color code which influences you does depend upon the willingness you have to jump a psychological barrier against taking irrevocable action. That decision is less hard to make since the jihadis have already made it.”

“In White you are unprepared and unready to take lethal action. If you are attacked in White you will probably die unless your adversary is totally inept.

In Yellow you bring yourself to the understanding that your life may be in danger and that you may have to do something about it.

In Orange you have determined upon a specific adversary and are prepared to take action which may result in his death, but you are not in a lethal mode.

In Red you are in a lethal mode and will shoot if circumstances warrant.”