Although people often persist when they don’t feel their best, it’s difficult to get by in poor physical health for very long. One might manage to plod along in poor or suboptimal mental health a little longer, but that, too, will eventually make it very difficult to function. And while poor emotional health does catch up, many people live their entire lives in a tiny segment of emotional health that blocks them from experiencing the full spectrum of life’s emotions and even impedes the formation of deep and lasting relationships. Now is a good time to break down the messy habits getting in the way of a full emotional life.

What Are Emotions?

The basic science of emotions has been in flux in recent history. As with mental health, we’re prone to look for specific functional centers within the body — and especially the brain — that are activated by certain experiences. In other words, we want some specific region of the brain to be the place where sadness lives and another to be the location of joy. At least at present, and thanks to the ongoing work led by Lisa Feldman Barrett (especially as described in

The basic science of emotions has been in flux in recent history. As with mental health, we’re prone to look for specific functional centers within the body — and especially the brain — that are activated by certain experiences. In other words, we want some specific region of the brain to be the place where sadness lives and another to be the location of joy. At least at present, and thanks to the ongoing work led by Lisa Feldman Barrett (especially as described in How Emotions Are Made), that’s not quite right. Instead, emotions seem to emerge from a constellation of sensory experiences that create patterns our brains interpret — a process typically called interoception. There may also be fundamental emotion patterns that are hardwired (e.g., fear), but we have less clear evidence about those patterns.

This is useful to understand because: (1) it suggests that the way we function is much less fixed and much more adaptive than most science has historically claimed; and (2) emotions are a sophisticated dance between our more basic functioning (e.g., heart rate and its drivers) and our most advanced functioning (e.g., cognition). If your emotional spectrum is narrow, this could be exciting. (Assuming you experience excitement. And if you don’t, maybe you soon will!)

It is also useful to distinguish among the parts of an emotional arc, because each part can be the basis of dysfunction — but attending to each can also support optimal functioning. I break them down like this:

You have an emotional experience. This is the inner, subjective feeling of an emotion — what happens inside you: the raw, private, often wordless phenomenon of feeling something. It includes physiological sensations (tightness in the chest, warmth, a sinking feeling), the intonations of your inner world, and your conscious or semi-conscious awareness of being in an emotional state. You would recognize it as feeling grief, joy, or dread — from the inside.

The emotional experience is fundamentally personal and often precedes interpretation. You feel it before you necessarily understand or label it. It is the brain’s interpretation of many sensory stimuli, including internal indicators and external context.

We typically name emotional experiences using culturally designated categories: anger, fear, sadness, joy (happiness), disgust, anticipation, and surprise. Each of these attaches to related combinations of emotions, often depicted like a color wheel, such as the one developed by Robert Plutchik.

Something happens. This is where regulation, maturity, and intelligence (more on this in a moment) come into play. Two people can have the identical emotional experience — like feeling deeply hurt — and produce completely different responses. One person might express it vulnerably; another might get angry; another might shut down entirely. One pathway is “automatic,” in that it doesn’t involve any intentional processing or decision-making. The other is “controlled,” in that it is either practiced or consciously chosen. (For the purists: some research shows that automatic reactions can also be conditioned.) I always return to a devastatingly insightful point from Viktor Frankl: this is where two roads diverge, and you get to choose whether your emotions control you, or you control your emotions.

You then have an emotional response. This is the outward or behavioral expression of that emotion — what you do with it. It includes what you say, how your face moves, whether you withdraw or approach, cry or go quiet, lash out or reach for someone. It also includes internal responses like rumination or avoidance — things that aren’t visible but are still reactions to the emotion rather than the emotion itself.

What Is Emotional Health?

I will focus this discussion primarily on the “Something Happens” stage of the emotional arc above. Later, when we dig into the ethics of behavior, I’ll have much more to say about how to cultivate a healthy definition of — and practice related to — your specific emotional responses.

So, what exactly does happen?

Imagine an increasingly complex and challenging set of skills related to emotion management. Each builds upon the last, and the health of each informs the spectrum of emotional experiences and the potential depth of interpersonal connections a person can achieve. Here are some steps on that ladder.

Emotional Regulation refers to the ability to manage and modulate one’s emotional responses — both their intensity and duration. If the “something happens” stage were broken down further, this would be the first thing that occurs. It involves recognizing when the emotions you’re experiencing are leading toward overwhelm, anxiety, or another danger response, and using internal strategies (like deep breathing, reframing, or pausing) to return to a balanced state. Emotion regulation is learned.

This is not the same as emotion suppression. Emotion suppression is a dysfunctional response to emotional experience in which one makes a conscious or unconscious attempt to inhibit, avoid, or push away emotions and their expression, rather than allowing oneself to feel and express them. Children often learn that their automatic emotional responses are unacceptable, so they adapt by suppressing the emotional experience rather than by learning emotional regulation techniques. Those children then become adults. No magical transformation happens when they turn 18. (Sorry.)

Emotional Intelligence (EI/EQ) is a framework popularized by psychologist Daniel Goleman describing a set of competencies for perceiving, understanding, using, and managing emotions — both your own and others’. It is typically broken into five domains: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Emotional intelligence is often treated as something measurable and trainable — and it is always learned, whether intuitively through experience or through intentional practice.

Emotional Maturity is a broader developmental quality that reflects how well a person takes responsibility for their emotions and their impact on others. An emotionally mature person can tolerate discomfort without acting out, handle disappointment without collapsing, repair relationships after conflict, and respond to others’ needs without making everything about themselves. It implies growth over time — it is not a skill so much as a reflection of repeated practice. Someone can have high EQ in a professional context (e.g., reading a room well, managing a team) while still lacking emotional maturity in personal relationships (e.g., struggling to handle conflict, or being evasive and passive-aggressive when it comes to expressing emotions).

Emotional Availability is attached to three elements of interpersonal connection:

• Availability is about access — are you present and reachable, or walled off, distracted, or checked out?

• Openness is about receptivity — are you willing to receive another person’s emotional experience without shutting down or deflecting?

• Capacity is about bandwidth — how much emotional weight can you hold, for yourself and others, before becoming depleted or dysregulated?

A person can be emotionally intelligent yet low in availability (perceptive but guarded). They can be open yet low in capacity (willing but easily overwhelmed). All three together describe someone who is truly present in an emotional relationship.

Why do emotions matter so much in the context of relationships? A lot of reasons, all of which come back to some version of the same insight: our interactions with others shape the way we feel. Here are three examples — though this list is far from exhaustive.

We are hardwired to collaborate. Sure, plenty of people claim they “hate people,” but you can’t come to hate people unless you first have the drive to like (some of) them. Collaboration and competition are basic instincts that drive everyone to find the people with whom they can associate — and those with whom they cannot. Once those people are defined, we work hard to win and maintain relationships through positive feelings. When others persistently fail to reciprocate, we get disappointed and learn to “hate” each other.

Our behavior is co-regulated. When we are not alone, other people’s energy affects our own. Because emotions are constructed partly on the basis of external context, other people influence our bodies’ constant data collection. Their energy, behavior, and even “resting bitch face” can shape our appraisal of safety — and thus everything else we feel.

Emotional safety is at the core of wellbeing. Being connected with others who create space for our emotional expression and remain willing to collaborate is at the heart of thriving, as opposed to merely surviving. Relationships act as force distributors, reducing the burden of living by dividing and sharing it across multiple nodes. Emotional safety creates the space and opportunity to learn and grow.

How Does All of This Translate to a Framework for Emotional Health?

Pay Attention to Your Emotional Experiences

Emotional experiences — the sensations and translation of sensory inputs into a feeling — are not within conscious control, as far as we know. When something is outside our control and we devote energy to trying to control it anyway, that qualifies as delusional thinking. A gentler way to put it: unless your spiritual journey has brought you to a place where you’ve found a pathway to control your autonomic processes, don’t waste your time trying to control your emotions. It won’t work, and it will yield something between frustration and damage. Instead, focus on understanding your emotional experiences.

Now, you might wonder: if emotions are constructed, as I claimed earlier, how can a person “study” them? Plenty of people — like those who construct emotion wheels — have defined nuanced emotions, but how do you know whether you’re having one of those specific emotions or one that is uniquely your own construction? Great news: it doesn’t matter. Understanding your emotional experiences can include becoming better at distinguishing emotions from one another, but the label is just a label. Emotional experiences are signals. When you learn the signals and their differences, you can begin to make choices about what they mean and how to respond to them.

An estimated 10% of the population experiences alexithymia — a disordered pathway between sensory experience and interpretation. If you genuinely cannot distinguish among more than three or four emotions, or have persistent difficulty identifying different emotions, you could benefit from professional support. Otherwise, you grow wiser about things you study. So study your emotions, and do so with curiosity rather than an intent to control. Just as with the attention-control strategies from our mental health framework, emotional health benefits from intentional awareness as a starting place.

Emotional Intelligence Is Not Just for Work

Emotional intelligence has become a popular “X factor” in the workplace, with those who have it allegedly sailing through organizational hierarchies and succeeding in business. Based on my experience working with leadership teams in dozens of workplaces, I can tell you that emotional intelligence is not reliably correlated with success. That’s a bummer, because the result is wildly toxic workplaces that promote cultures leading to high levels of interpersonal conflict — or too many employees simply giving up. If I had to diagnose the reason so many workplaces are a mess, it is some combination of underdeveloped emotional intelligence and lacking emotional maturity. It’s not that people aren’t smart, or are lazy or irresponsible.

I frequently see people damage relationships at work and elsewhere because they assume that if no one is openly complaining, things are fine. That’s probably a losing assumption about 95% of the time. Some people learn to be hyperattentive to cues from others because they were raised in environments where inattentiveness came with undesirable consequences. Others seem to have a natural proclivity toward paying close attention in interpersonal dynamics. Still others are good at seeing potential problems but not at cultivating positive emotional experiences.

The standard dimensions of emotional intelligence include self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. The Unbeatable Mind emotional framework highlights four key qualities of emotional health: self-esteem, self-awareness, optimism, and a focus on others. Putting these together, one useful way to think about how emotional intelligence is cultivated is as a mirror — reflecting the emotional skills one has for oneself against those one has for others.

Self-esteem pairs with esteem for others (basic care and empathy). Self-awareness pairs with reading others’ cues, which are often implicit and perhaps not fully expressible in words. Just as you come to understand yourself in ways you cannot always explain, you can build the same understanding of others — sometimes by getting to know them, and sometimes by recognizing patterns in their behavior. Empathy for oneself (approaching emotional experiences nonjudgmentally) pairs with empathy for others. Optimism, as it relates to managing your own emotions, pairs with perceiving others’ emotions not as threatening but as cues that should guide an interaction. Note that when someone expresses anger, the appropriate cue is sometimes to de-escalate or disengage — but that is different from experiencing the emotion itself as a threat.

If I had to identify one skill that most powerfully transforms emotional intelligence, it’s this: start by examining how healthy your inward-facing “intelligence” is, and work to improve that as a training ground for better emotional engagement with others.

Emotional Maturity = Taking Responsibility

Most people learn that punching someone who has made them angry isn’t socially acceptable. Far fewer learn that using words and actions to make someone feel small or inferior is just as childish — perhaps even more so. This might be the most obvious interpretation of emotional maturity. But I also see it play out in workplace cultures and interpersonal relationships in subtler, more pernicious ways — through passive-aggressive behavior and through the belief that one has to “blow up” in order to get people to change their behavior.

Emotional maturity isn’t about swinging the pendulum to any extreme. It’s not about having unmitigated emotional blow-ups, but it’s also not about foregoing emotional experiences, failing to express them, or pretending not to have them. It is about being disciplined in expressing emotions authentically and accurately. If you are feeling angry, holding that in is no healthier than expressing it poorly. Good recognition gets paired with understanding how and when to express emotions productively.

Sometimes the most productive thing to do is simply manage the stress that comes with challenging emotions — you may need to complete the stress cycle without ever involving another person, even when that person is responsible for the stressor. The practice here is evaluating what is effective when it comes to holding boundaries, expressing emotions to help others understand your experience, and using your internal cues to maintain the self-esteem and optimism that enable you to be present and supportive of others.

Emotional Availability Requires Energy

We are designed to pick up on cues from others — ranging from explicit verbal communication to nearly imperceptible body language. Whether we have learned to pay attention and tune into those cues is one thing. Whether we have learned to intentionally devote energy and attention to acting on them is another. The primary practice I associate with availability, openness, and capacity is intentional effort. Can you manage your own emotional experience while someone else is sharing theirs? Or do you let your emotions take over and redirect attention to yourself at exactly the moment when someone else most needs your support? People express emotions in a broad variety of ways, and holding space for them to do so requires intentional effort — especially when their modes of expression don’t match yours. Being emotionally available doesn’t require superpowers. It requires the ability to intentionally focus on someone else, even when the content of the interaction is uncomfortable.

Emotional health sits atop a foundation of physical and mental health. None of these practices is easy, but all of them become harder when physical and mental health are not strong. Each deserves independent effort, but they are interdependent. As you evaluate your health in each domain, consider where the three are interacting — positively or negatively.

One day I walked into our local Target store–something I had done numerous times before–and was overcome with disorientation. I felt like I was in a wind tunnel with all of the sensory inputs around me flying directly into my body. It was terrifying. I returned to my car, but then wondered whether it was safe to drive. And then I imagined what would have happened if my children were with me. I got nauseated, I think, from the ensuing anxiety. Other times I found that when I approached a high stakes meeting I would have the same creeping sense of worry about what would happen if I suddenly experienced another moment of vertigo, or worse. That anxiety could trigger the sensory overload symptoms.

It turns out that my vestibular system was at the center of my injury and all of these symptoms could be tied back to a specific injury in a physical location in my body. That’s not always true of psychological symptoms, and unfortunately that means there are precious few ways to evaluate and address the underlying causes of poor mental health. It also means there is a hierarchy of mental health issues in which brain injuries (where people are “injured” or “ill”) seem different from systemic malfunctions (where people are “crazy”). People who have brain injuries can be repaired and therefore recover. People with malfunctioning neurotransmitters or other less clear mental illness origins are marked for life. The fear of being mentally ill is attached to the nonsensical but almost pervasive belief that it is forever.

So one must possess the courage to confront the fear associated with being mentally unwell, and all of its real or perceived ramifications. That is especially true for our named pathologies. While depression, anxiety, and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder are becoming more visible and accepted today, most other defined mental illnesses remain hidden and stigmatized. Intense forms of all three of the above are also still extraordinarily difficult to confront, acknowledge and address. I studied psychology in undergraduate and graduate school in the early 2000s, but the reality of these issues has never been more apparent to me than it is right now. Six months ago, a fellow firefighter committed suicide on World Suicide Prevention Day. It wasn’t the first time someone I know has taken their own life.

The marked increase in suicide rates in the United States, especially among youth, has been well documented. The CDC also gathers data on suicidal ideation and attempted suicide, which demonstrated that over 12.8 million people per year consider ending their lives, 1.5 million try, and about 47,000 are successful. That means about 4% of the population is considering suicide at any given time. This might simply be a feature of humanity in the modern era, but it’s hard to reach that conclusion considering that during the same 25-year period, the European Union saw suicide rates decline. They are on average ⅔ of the U.S. rate as of 2024.

How Did We Get Here?

Of course, it’s a long way from mental illness to suicide. It’s also a long way from mental health to mental illness, and this is one domain where it is extremely obvious that we tend to define health as “the absence of disease.” So let’s imagine a continuum that incorporates all three. It might look something like this:

(Note: I’m definitely not the first person to envision a continuum and I encourage you to take a look at far more scholarly evaluations of the specifics of what constitutes mental health, such as Corey Keyes’ research.)

One one end, a person is able to cope with life’s normal torments and appreciate its profound beauty. On the other, those capacities are crowded out by an overload that is either coming from external stimuli or internal malfunction or both. If we imagined our mental health systems like an assembly line with different parts coming down the line, a healthy operating system would be able to move at the pace of the line and assemble what is available or figure out how to discard the contents coming its way. An unhealthy system would allow these things to pile up until eventually it becomes impossible to sort through them or the line breaks. (This is obviously a very crude analogy for a system that I have several times described as “exquisitely designed with incredible elegance.” I still think it’s helpful.)

The contents on the assembly line are all the things that we allow to have our attention.

Using this analogy, it becomes clear that one way our mental health can be managed is by controlling what is allowed onto the assembly line. What are we allowing into our consciousness (or into our working memory) by devoting our attention to it?

Another is by attending to what we do with what comes down that assembly line. Are we able to manage the pace and make sense of the content?

Yet another is by maintaining the functioning of the line. Are we keeping the mechanisms free of debris from previous issues and providing the right power and lubrication?

By now, you are beginning to see that cultivating mental health is a lot like cultivating physical health. It requires fuel, exercise, and recovery. When we don’t get these things, or we get toxic versions of these things, our mental health declines, and we eventually get a suboptimal line (illness) or the line breaks (severe illness).

The Fuel of Mental Health

More consumable information is being created every day than ever before in history. I say “consumable” because even when raw data becomes available, it can now be interpreted and provided to people almost instantaneously no matter how big the data set. It would be a mistake to say that we will “soon” be unable to determine the true source of our information. That time is already here. You don’t even know if I have really authored this piece or some AI has drafted it for me (I promise I wrote this one from scratch–and I am even drinking coffee and fretting about whether anyone will even read this just to make sure that my work on mental health is infused the the proper amount of human anxiety!).

Entire disciplines are being upended and redefined by the pace of information generation and the tools that can translate that information into something that is novel, interesting, and exactly what you want to hear (or see, or read). Yesterday I asked ChatGPT to draft a short bio for me based upon the ostensibly true information in my LinkedIn profile, my website at HighImpactHumans.co and my coaching credentials (all real). It created an incredibly compelling one-page summary about me that I would love to share with you except … it was almost completely false. I used another AI tool to pull information from the internet about two training systems that I use and respect, translate them into a client-facing survey, and then build the code that would allow Google Scripts to turn the survey into a Google Form. In 11 minutes, I had a 50-question survey tool that was extremely accurate and ready to use. These two examples from one day demonstrate how easy it is to produce anything–and how random the accuracy might be.

The use of AI tools might seem like the frontier of information exploration, but in some ways my interactions with AI are the least biased and most trustworthy interactions I have all day. AI does not have any personalized bias toward me (although these tools are set up by me to know what I want and am looking for, and to try to deliver that). By contrast, people are essentially manipulation machines and news outlets are increasingly viewed as politically polarized. Interestingly, research has struggled to show that news is in fact increasingly biased and instead demonstrated that a “hostile media effect” is more measurable–wherein people perceive news stories to be more biased based upon the content of the stories and their own ideology rather than the stories themselves. We like to wring our hands about how there are no reliable media outlets anymore, but the driving force behind that is probably not actually biased news coverage. Rather, it is increasingly sophisticated technology that is designed to track our behavior, profile us, and then predict and deliver what we want. That’s not just our social media algorithm. That is essentially every technology and application that we interact with every single day–usually many times a day.

We could further unpack all of this over several essays, but really I only want to make one fundamental and critical point about the “fuel” for our mental health: we have control over our attention, and where we put our attention defines our lives. Everything in our environments has always been competing for that attention. Now, that competition is fierce, sophisticated, and largely imperceptible to us. So think very hard about what you allow yourself to attend to. Most things do not merit your attention, either because they are not useful to you or because they are toxic to you.

Some of these are obvious: Irrelevant but entertaining information. False or incomplete information masquerading as news. Especially talk radio, talk-radio style podcasts, and debate-style TV news where the people behind “news desks” are shouting at each other. Curated social media feeds. Some of them are less obvious: the toxic ideas repeated by the people you spend time with. Anger. Self pity. Self doubt. Self recrimination.

Do not allow them on your assembly line unless you know what they are and what you want to do with them!

The Exercise of Mental Health

In the assembly line analogy, the exercise of mental health is what we choose to do with the things we devote our attention to. This isn’t just about translating thoughts into action. This is about cultivating mental functionality that leads to thriving.

Many authors have taken up the question of why, at a time in history when we face the fewest barriers to our basic needs, we seem to be unhappier than ever. Plenty have attributed this to the rise of digital media.

Digital media is easily consumable and it quickly–almost imperceptibly–eats up our attention. It also often fills our attention with false realities and opportunities for consumption. But even so, I argue that it’s less the media and more the atrophy of our attention control that is driving this problem.

Attention control is a skill. If you practice, you can improve. If you do not practice, you can lose it entirely. This is the foundation of mindfulness, which can demonstrate that if you fail to train your attention, it will be trained for you. If you don’t pause and assess the thoughts you experience, you may come to identify with them. You may begin to believe that everything on your assembly line is real and true. This is called cognitive fusion, a process by which your thoughts become your captors. If that sounds terrifying to you: congratulations! You’re seeing (and perhaps even feeling) the cognitive roots of anxiety and depression. Why let your thoughts control you when you can control them?

I’m writing this at a specific moment in history when there is a seismic shift in progress. Those close to the epicenter already feel it and those further away have only observed small disturbances. But the unbelievable pace of advancement in artificial intelligence is going to change not just how we do things–it’s going to change how we think. I predict that the single most critical skill associated with this transition is going to be cognitive flexibility: the capacity to change thinking patterns when context changes. First you will have to recognize contextual shifts, then you will need to identify and develop the ways thinking must change to respond effectively.

What is exercise if not the regular practice and improvement of skills? And what is an effective exercise routine if not something that is aligned with current capacity with a degree of challenge that increases as capacity grows? For all of my friends who studiously read Lev Vygostsky in graduate school: how do you find your zone of proximal development for attention control?

First of all, let me start now with what I think is the headline for our brave new AI world, but honestly for the world as it has always been–even in the prehistoric times of dumb computers that could only read disks and display green font: only the aware survive, and only the curious thrive. It is now impossible to be too old, too tired, too advanced, too specialized, too smart, too secure, too anything to engage with the technologies that are now emerging. But don’t forget that you have always had access to the most sophisticated computer system we know of: your mind. No matter who you are, you simply do not fully understand your mind.

Second, the application of curiosity begins with noticing. Almost everyone gets tripped up by adding judgment to noticing. I notice that I have lost focus on my task and my judgment is that I am ______ (lazy, unfocused, unmotivated, worthless, etc.). Successfully controlling your attention begins with separating noticing from judging. Curiosity is easy when applied outside of yourself. It is hard when applied internally because the stakes feel high: I did something and I did not like it. Then I focus on the feelings I have about it rather than the thing itself.

Air Force Colonel John Boyd developed a now common application of this idea in the “OODA loop”: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. First, observe. Then make sense of that observation. This is as opposed to experience → react. Mark Divine developed a related strategy outlined in the Unbeatable Mind method that also focuses on differentiating each step in a process of mental control: Witness, Interdict, Redirect, Maintain (WIRM). The “witness” step is about applying the lens of an outside observer. If you fail to notice (recognize) a thought, you find yourself interacting with it even if it is unhelpful, untrue, or irrelevant. You must practice the art of observation and exercise curiosity with what you notice.

The balance of the OODA loop and WIRM protocols are designed to direct thoughts and actions. They are deeply relevant to attention control in the sense that most of what distracts us is not external stimuli per se, but our internal chatter. Our focus now is on attention control, so I’ll save the application of these tools for later.

The third key in attention control is tuning into your capacity to let go of incoming information without interacting with it. Most people who have explored mindfulness will have struggled with an exercise in which they attempt to watch their thoughts like a bystander. Usually the analogy is that thoughts become like clouds floating by or cars zipping past. We don’t try to catch them; we are simply aware of them. However you practice this, keep in mind that it takes practice. It’s training. Like any exercise: it takes time to develop the skill.

Lastly, attention control requires balancing between the vigilance of a sentry who is always on the lookout for threats (incoming information) and devoting attention to an intended target. For those who struggle with focus, who feel that their attention is somehow deficient, this part of training should begin by setting intentional attention targets (e.g., specific task) and:

1. Removing obvious distractions

2. Establishing habit cues

3. Using progressive overload

Remove Obvious Distractions

Not everyone is distracted by the same things, but there are some common culprits. If we’re talking about a place where you will sit and focus and get work done, they might include: a messy desk or workspace; easy access to junk media, failure to make a choice about which task you’re devoted to right now (i.e., multitasking); notifications enabled on your phone or workstation; noise, etc. Take a minute to identify all the things that tend to distract you and get rid of them. (I do have four kids under 7; I know you can’t always eliminate noise or interruptions–but you can get headphones and a lock for your door. Sometimes creative solutions are required. Just do it.)

There are other distractions that often weight on peoples’ psyches as well: unresolved conflict; unmet goals or obligations; past or ongoing poor performance; ambivalence about something important (work, relationships, etc.); general malaise or chronic fatigue; a nagging inner voice saying that you’re on the wrong path, etc. Some of these are obviously easier to resolve than others, but you can see that a person might struggle with all of them at the same time. As such, resolving what is resolvable as effectively as possible is critical to achieving focus and making progress. Don’t let conflicts linger. If you don’t achieve detente, learn to let it go. Identify sources of ambivalence. Make a plan to address each one. Remember: this is training. You don’t make all the progress in one day or one hundred days. You keep chipping away.

Establish Habit Cues

People frequently ask me how I sustain habits that most people don’t. The answer is pretty simple: I eliminate as many conscious choices as possible. I do not wake up in the morning and decide to go to the gym. I wake up, and a series of cues that nearly always follow the same pattern begin before I even get out of bed. The alarm goes off at exactly the same time every day. I follow the same routine beginning before I even get out of the bed. On most days, I have followed the same exact routine between 4:30 am and 7:00 am. Children are a chaos quotient. Fire calls are a chaos quotient. Everyone will have their own chaos quotients–variables that you have to learn to accept and navigate. Working out in the morning may be impossible for you. (My wife makes it possible for me.)

This is just an example; you can apply it elsewhere as I have. I have routines related to getting task work done that apply to sitting/computer work and to active engagement work. These are three to four things I always do to prepare, including at least: (1) naming the intended task in my end of day-planning time the day before I want to do it (assuming it can be planned); (2) writing down any tools or things I need to gather to get it done; and (3) defining the time window when it will happen. If I’m going to sit and focus for a long time on things I don’t enjoy, I always turn on “work music” like binaural beats or instrumental jazz, get a cup of decaf coffee or tea and a glass of water, and turn on my lamps instead of my overhead office lights. These are all cues that I am in “focus mode” and they all make it possible for me to sit down and roll through 50 emails, draft 20 pages, or whatever.

Think about what it is you need or want to accomplish. You might start with figuring out how to eliminate or mitigate the distractions and start a habit pattern (routine) related to naming and killing distractions. Then you can move on to saving the world. Or whales. Or the Western hemisphere. Or whatever you are on this earth to do–which is not be distracted.

Apply Progressive Overload

I’m really in it for the exercise analogy here, so I chose “progressive overload” – a term usually applied to building muscle, strength, and endurance. The idea is that by systematically and gradually increasing the stress (challenge) placed on the musculoskeletal system, one can build more and more capacity without breaking the system. The same principle applies to attention control. You can’t expect that you can hold your attention for a very long time right off the bat; you don’t have the foundational conditioning to do it. So start small. If you’re undertaking a mindfulness exercise, do it for three minutes to start. Practice until you can recognize and release thoughts continuously for three minutes without getting bound up in one. (If that sounds easy, just go ahead and pick any bodyweight exercise, do it continuously for three minutes, and get back to me.) Use a timer. When you have that, do five. And so on until you can focus continuously for twenty minutes. If you can do that, congratulations! You now have a normal healthy adult human attention span. But, keep going. Your goal is total control over your attention.

The Recovery of Mental Health

Maybe I’m just tuned into it, but it seems like everyone is hyped up about the autonomic nervous system right now. (That’s the “fight-flight-freeze-fawn” response.) I think it’s a good thing for everyone to understand how this system, which comprises the sympathetic (reactive) and parasympathetic (recovery) nervous subsystems, seems to work. Humans seem to perceive all threats in the same way from a sympathetic system point of view. It doesn’t matter if the threat is a loud but benign noise, a cranky or emotionally abusive boss, or a live lion in your living room: possible death!

On one hand, this response is very helpful. If it is actually a live lion, you are suddenly imbued with some wicked superpowers. But those superpowers come at a serious cost: your normal functions go on hold. Getting sufficient oxygen and nutrients to your organs. Digesting food. Prefrontal cortex cognition. The parasympathetic nervous system is designed to kick in and flush out the threat response chemicals–but only after the threat has been neutralized. So if you have a chronic stressor that is never neutralized, or if you have constant low-grade stress responses that never get resolved, your body will adapt to a constant vigilance state. And your critical functions will decline. Over time, you may have many nasty symptoms that all add up to not yet medically defined conditions like Feeling Like Crap All the Time, Being Really Fatigued, or Generalized Blah.

When you exercise frequently and/or you exercise hard, you can feel the aggregated soreness in your body. Your muscles might ache, you might feel more tired. You might fall asleep on the couch at 7:51 pm. It is hard to deny that you need rest and recovery activities like stretching, myofascial release or massage, or an active recovery day. By contrast, the very same build-up accrues in your body and mind from nervous system activation–but you can completely fail to perceive it. At least initially, it doesn’t hurt. It isn’t crying out for resolution. Or you may feel it (being “wired” or feeling like you are “stressed out”) but have no strategies to address it. And this is why I think the “recovery” part of mental health maintenance is really critical.

Before you can really engage in the recovery, you should have a sense of what you’re trying to recover from, or what you’re trying to let go of. I know that much has been made about having morning and evening rituals that you follow every day. I also recognize that lots of “thought leaders” have prescribed routines that, if actually followed, would basically take up your whole day. You have to drink seven glasses of purified water, undertake 47 minutes of breathing exercises before standing on your head, making a pilgrimage to an abandoned monastery, staring at the horizon at exactly one minute before sunrise, journaling your thoughts in the shape of a yin yang, and forgiving all of your ancestors over the smoke of palo santo. And then you can begin your ritual.

I’m glad those work for someone. But I think there is more value in finding two or three things that help you tune into the things that you are carrying with you–either into your sleep or into your day–so you can make intentional choices about whether you want to carry those things or not. Practices like scanning your body (simply trying to relax into an upright but not rigid posture and breath deeply but naturally while systematically scanning your body from the crown down to identify places where you are holding stress), exhaling stale air (breathing deeply into the bottom of your belly and visualizing the release of stale air when you exhale, replaced with fresh air when you inhale, repeated until you feel that your body is refreshed), or box breathing (inhaling, holding, exhaling, and holding for the same number of seconds repeated between 5 and 20 times to shift the body into a relaxed breathing state) all help attune your awareness to your body’s stress status.

Mark Divine describes a recapitulation process by which you go over, simply reminding yourself of exactly what happened from the time you awoke to the time you’re ready for bed, identifying moments where you experienced stress or where you have unresolved emotional reactivity. After reviewing the day, decide to let go or write down what you need to work on the next day so that you can let go. You may find another strategy that helps you tune into what’s sitting in your body or your psyche that needs attention so you can feel fully engaged in the “rest and digest” part of your parasympathetic nervous system’s activation.

Now you need to consider ways that you can actually let go of the stress that you find through these processes. Your days are filled with nervous system involvement in a variety of ways. It’s beyond the scope of this particular piece to delve into the ways that exercise, especially intense exercise, taxes the nervous system (largely in a good way, with some exceptions), but that is one source of activation. Your interactions with others, whether someone cuts you off in traffic or lets you in when it looks like you’ll be waiting for days, affect your nervous system. Your thoughts and how much you identify with them affect your nervous system. And your mind-body awareness affects how you experience threat and resolution. That is, how tuned into the ways that your body processes or holds your mental and emotional byproducts affects how well you function.

All of the things I’m drawing out here are part of the natural stress response cycle. Think about it like a laundry cycle. You need your rinse cycle and your spin cycle to get to clean, wearable clothing. Without them, you still have dirty laundry that is now even more inconvenient. Plus you’re naked. Yeah hahaha, but if you have unresolved stress, you are basically showing up to your life bereft of any protective resilience. So how do you get your mental clothes clean?

You do the things that flood you with safe, positive chemicals. Maybe counterintuitively, exercise can help you. Exercise (or any body movement) and reset your stress (e.g., norepinephrine, cortisol) chemicals. It can also release endorphins. Creative expression, like playing an instrument or painting, which bypasses the verbal processing centers that can hang onto stress and also release dopamine, can help. Visualizing recovery can also activate the same pathways that natural systems follow. In a later piece, I will say a lot more about visualization. For now, I will say that your brain is easily fooled into thinking your visualization is your reality. It’s very powerful. Some of the more extreme expressions of emotion that we usually suppress can be extremely helpful: laughing and crying and screaming are examples. It turns out that everyone should seriously consider a regular barbaric yawp. Try all of these. See how they affect you. Find one or two key practices and do them regularly.

• Five core principles define health. Health recognizes the body’s adaptive intelligence; transcends the physical body alone; can be shaped intentionally; changes across the lifespan; and requires integrated functioning across physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual domains.

• Integrated traditions point to health as harmony and flourishing. Philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, Nietzsche), Ayurveda, psychology, and evolutionary theory converge on health as balance across physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual domains—not merely physical metrics.

• Science is necessary but insufficient. While scientific insight is invaluable, it captures only part of health; lived experience, meaning, adaptation, and the unseen aspects of human functioning must also be honored.

• Modern healthcare is not a framework for health. It is frequently narrow, impersonal, short-term, overly pharmacological, and insufficiently individualized—making personal responsibility and self-education essential for real health. For too many people, healthcare shapes the way they think about what health is. That simply doesn’t work.

• Becoming your own health expert is essential. Health begins with understanding your relationship to your body, experimenting to learn what “good” feels like, and systematically evaluating what you put into your body, how you move it, and what you are exposed to—physically, emotionally, and environmentally.

We use our bodies for so many things. We come to identify with our bodies and see ourselves through the lens of what they can and cannot do, what they are and are not.

But we are not our bodies, and the more we can shift our thinking away from being our bodies and toward inhabiting our bodies, the more opportunities we have to enjoy extraordinary health.

I’m going to give you a summary of some major lessons from my last five years of experimentation here, but I’ll also give you a takeaways summary over at the High Impact Humans blog if you already trust me and you just want to know what to do.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Eating

One powerful way I have seen this play out is through eating or, more specifically, eating mindset. We are hardwired to eat in the sense that when we put calories into our bodies, we are rewarded. Healthy functioning systems use hormonal and neurotransmitter-based signals to tell our brains we need fuel, and to make us feel pleasant when we have satisfied that need. Like any system, this one can be disrupted by a variety of variables. Research and experience demonstrate that several elements of our modern environment (assuming that environment is Western culture) are deeply disruptive to the healthy functioning of our hunger and satiety signals. Nevertheless, nearly every person I have ever worked with on nutrition blamed themselves for their dysfunctional relationship with food.

There’s probably a 10-part series about how wildly complex the interaction of dopamine and food-related hormones like ghrelin and leptin interact in multiple related yet separate pathways, but since I’m neither a biochemist nor a neuroscientist (yet), I’ll leave that to some other Substacker and/or your curiosity and your favorite LLM to explore further. The point is: it is yet another exquisitely complex and sophisticated system operating within the one that is your body. It is also why some of your food related behaviors probably don’t make logical sense to you. And furthermore, if you think you really have control over all of that, well, please standby for the “mental health” part of this series.

Let’s say for the sake of example that an eating system is disrupted and isn’t functioning optimally. If a person assumes that the underlying problem is themselves or their willpower (i.e., they should eat more or less or different things), the process of solving the problem will be long and likely unsuccessful. Even if the person believes that they know the root cause of the problem is that they are “an emotional eater” (i.e., they eat when they are sad, nervous, frustrated, angry, happy, content, excited … whenever they have emotions?) and therefore all they have to do is disconnect food from emotion, the effort to make the system healthier will probably fail. Why?

It’s not because developing emotional awareness or cultivating the capacity to better handle emotions is a worthless exercise–far from it. Rather, it’s because we think about eating as a simple machine when it is actually a series of complex machines. Why would anyone need or want to understand the complexity of their eating machine? Does a complete understanding help you achieve nutrition nirvana? Not that I know of. But appreciating the complexity of the machine helps to adopt the mindset of a caretaker rather than the mindset of an owner. It also helps adopt the perspective that everything you do with and for your body has the potential to affect how it operates. If that’s true, what you eat (and drink) can help you be healthy, and it can help you heal. Or, it can make you sick and ultimately kill you.

If you thought of yourself as the caretaker of a car, you wouldn’t put motor oil or antifreeze in the fuel compartment and expect it to function. You’d take care to understand what kind of gasoline your car requires and fill it accordingly. Clearly eating is more than fuel, and it interacts not just with bodily energy, but the concept holds. If you understand that everything you put into the system affects the system, you start to approach it differently.

Once you can internalize this mindset, you might start to see how you exercise a lot of control over three building blocks of physical health: nutrition, exercise, and recovery. You might also start to see your body less for how it looks on the outside, and more for how it functions on the inside.

Nutrition

I talked about nutrition a lot in the Physical Health framework pieces, so here I’ll share what I have found through experimentation with my own nutrition and give you some ideas for how to develop a better understanding of how your nutrition affects you.

Lesson 1: You have to learn to identify the ways foods affect you.

As far as we best understand right now, the pathways that signal hunger are related to but separate from the systems that signal satiety. This is important because it may be part of the reason that you keep eating food that you know makes you feel like crap. Your brain literally doesn’t connect the desire with the result. You may need an intentional intervention from your prefrontal cortex to connect the dots, which might look like a food journal. You may also have lost track of what “feeling good” feels like (see previous Physical Health piece on how to figure this out), which also means that tracking what you eat and how you feel later could help you. I know (I really do) that tracking food is on a lot of people’s top five list of “Shit I Hate and Will Never Do” but: it’s worth it. I’m telling you. It’s my number one lesson.

Here are some examples of what I have learned:

• I tolerate higher levels of fat and lower levels of carbohydrate in my diet better than the average person. [Note: I also affirmed this with a genetic test.]

• I cannot tolerate legumes (sorry, hummus).

• Most people do better with oats than wheat. I’m the opposite.

• Corn makes me feel awful.

• Bread products don’t miss me, either.

• I do tolerate dairy in all forms, including whole milk. Lucky me.

• For me, alcohol and sugar don’t really lead to weight gain. They do, however, crowd out other nutrition, increase body fat and degrade performance. Jerks.

Lesson 2: Protein really is a big deal, even if you are not an athlete but especially if you are.

I am 42, which means that according to this very handy summary of all the ways that the U.S. government has offered terrible nutrition advice, I have lived through seven iterations. Thanks to the new guidelines (which might actually represent progress), this includes the advice to eat almost no fat and essentially the opposite, among other wild swings. I have also lived through eras of Ultra Slim Fast, Olean, low-fat cookies, the Adkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, the Cube of Cheese Diet–and that list only includes the things I can think of in 30 seconds.

At this point, it’s pretty easy to assume that every form of dietary advice from any source is baloney. The only alternative is to form your own observations about what works for you within some kind of logical boundaries. Here are two basic boundaries that are timeless:

• Consume food that is actually food

• Consume calories that come from food, not drinks (not talking about your protein shakes here)

Within that, my own observation is that simplifying your food choices to align your energy needs and your body composition goals is the best way to achieve the body you want on both the outside and inside. A 2018 study demonstrated that even when there was no total caloric intake cap, participants who increased their protein (~.8 grams/pound lean body mass) and fiber (~35 grams/day) intake lost weight. These people spontaneously decreased overall consumption because they felt more satiated. More research has demonstrated that consuming between .8 and 1.2 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass supports muscle retention and fat loss. When combined with intense training, it supports simultaneous muscle growth and fat loss.

In short, getting plenty of protein each day, along with the fiber and carbohydrate that vegetables and fruits provide, is a winning strategy for maintaining a healthy physical body that has sufficient muscle to keep you active and not too much fat to wear you down.

Lesson 3: You cannot rely on weight or BMI.

Implied above is that one reason you want a healthy physical body is that you want to be able to do what you want to do for as long as possible. Peter Atia has made one version of this famous. Another is that to achieve that, you need enough muscle and not too much fat.

How much muscle is enough muscle? Muscle and strength are not interchangable, but their declines are correlated. Beginning in your 30s, you will lose some muscle mass and some strength each decade at a rate of about 3-8% per decade until your 60s, after which it gets even worse. This can be slowed or even reversed with regular resistance training. So, you need enough muscle to do the things you want to be doing, and you need to do what it takes to maintain that muscle over time, which likely means you need to start with more than you absolutely need. You’ll know you’ve achieved this when you can push yourself 20-40% beyond your normal daily activity and feel well recovered within one to two days.

How much fat is too much fat? In general, the guidelines for healthy body fat percentage are between 6 and 24% for men and 13 and 31% for women. Until a few years ago, research on the actual risk factors associated with body fat percentages in the general population was very limited. So the real answer to this question isn’t settled science. However, the same principle as muscle targets above applies. Carrying weight that over taxes joints and cardiometabolic systems undermines overall health. Aim for a body fat ratio that lets you move and recover well.

The headline here calls out the problem with using weight and BMI as metrics here. That’s because weight is deeply misleading inasmuch as total body weight does not distinguish between muscle and fat, and the two are extremely different.

Here is example data from a year of In Body scans:

The overall weight variation moves only a total of 3.4 pounds between the highest (170.3) and lowest (166.9) total body weight readings. However, the skeletal muscle mass varies 5.9 pounds during the same period and the body fat mass shifts 8.4 pounds across readings. That means that even with a fairly steady top line number, there is considerable body composition difference. That may not seem like a big deal, but that translates into a basal metabolic rate difference of 78 calories per day. That means 78 calories burned before any movement. Adding normal daily movement, total calories burned just by having lower body fat and higher muscle mass is roughly 125 calories per day. That’s 45,500 more calories per year without changing exercise volume. A pretty big difference.

BMI is an even worse problem. Here is a snapshot of data for a 5’7” female.

The total weight of 169 pounds is considered above normal. However, the total lean mass (83.8 pounds) is way above normal and the total body fat mass (23.1 pounds) is well below normal. Even though the body fat percentage at 13.7% is considered on the low end of healthy, the BMI is 26.5, which is considered overweight. So by the BMI standard, this person would be directed by standard medicine to lose weight, even though they are already pushing the low range of adequate body fat. In this example, BMI is a terrible measure of health and can be counterproductive.

Important note for the keen observers: the scale numbers on the In Body reference ranges are fixed (e.g., normal weight looks like 85-115 lbs, which is really very not true; please DO NOT use these as actual reference ranges).

Lesson 4: Intermittent fasting can be good for metabolic health, and your strategy should be informed by your sex.

It’s important to distinguish between “eating styles,” which outlines the type of foods you choose to eat (e.g., paleo-style, Mediterranean-style, etc.) and “eating strategies,” which is when and how much you eat. There are two reasons for this distinction: (1) styles should match your personal biology and strategies should match your goals; and, (2) you will need both a style and a strategy, even if both are unique to you. Much has been made of fasting (not eating, or severely restricting calories) and people seem to have many interpretations of why to fast and how.

There are two kinds of fasting: intermittent (period-restricted eating) and extended (restriction of long periods of time). In general, our bodies are designed to have at least one long window of not eating per 24-hour period–ideally between 10 and 12 hours. The good news is that it usually aligns with when you are sleeping. Maintaining that window helps maintain the functioning of your insulin response system (although it can still be messed up by eating processed sugar) and your gut health. Intermitted fasting in which you extend that window by 2-6 hours can have beneficial effects on numerous metabolic pathways and can help achieve and maintain healthy body weight. If this interests you, I strongly recommend the work of nephrologist Jason Fung (for a general overview) and Mindy Pelz (for female-specific guidance).

Women in particular should be attentive to aligning fasting strategies of any kind with their hormone cycles. As a general rule, fasting is indicated for the menstrual and follicular phases, and not for the luteal phase. This is further complicated in menopause, so read more for your specific stage in life.

Lesson 5: Extended fasting is safe for longevity, but not ideal for weight loss.

I have been trying various approaches to extended (72+ hour) fasts for the last three years. The purpose of these experiments is to evaluate how feasible it is to carry out my normal (taxing) daily activities and responsibilities while also improving my metabolic flexibility (ability to use carbohydrates or fat for energy) and achieve cellular autophagy (natural harvesting and elimination of senescent cells that could eventually lead to pathology). I have found that it takes some time to get used to extended fasting, and that the experience improves over time. I have also found that there are some ways to jump start ketosis and protect muscle during these fasts.

However, I also believe that extended fasting is a very poor weight loss strategy. Why?

As you saw in the weight/BMI section above, muscle makes a huge difference in your ability to naturally burn calories over time. Extended fasts will harvest some muscle. You don’t want to continuously degrade your muscle stores because you may lose overall weight in the short term, but set yourself up for insufficient muscle and/or get undesirably fatter in the longer term.

I’ll share another post about my specific protocols on the High Impact Humans blog next week if you’re interested.

For now, you can get the high level practical summary of how to

put all of this in action here.

How to Become Your Own Expert

1. Understand your Relationship with Your Physical Body

The first step to becoming your own expert is to address your current relationship with your physical body. If I had to characterize the common thread across my coaching clients when it comes to their health, it’s some combination of fear and frustration.

They fear the confirmation that something is “wrong” with them; they are frustrated that their body isn’t as they would like it to be.

I chose the word confirmation rather than revelation because many people seem to hold the belief that something must be wrong with them. When they go to a doctor, they face the possibility of being confronted by data that supports their intuition. Whether they are avoiding the confirmation that they’re carrying around extra fat, have “high” blood pressure, or have biomarkers of cancer, it seems like it is easier to ignore something that hasn’t been confirmed. But the reality is that harboring a belief that something is wrong usurps a great deal of psychic energy. So people develop a constant low grade anxiety about the true status of their health. Confronting this fear and deciding how to address it is step one. (Great news: your doctor doesn’t get to define the status of your physical health, although they can help.)

The frustration experience is separate from the fear relationship, though it can be connected and it can also help overcome the fear. Sources of frustration range from a body type that doesn’t comport with your ideal (wherever that ideal may come from) to failing to perform basic functions as expected, to failing to perform more advanced physical feats (e.g., lift heavy weights, run faster miles, perform gymnastics, etc.). Essentially, any time your body falls short of your expectations, it reinforces a negative relationship with your body. Too frequently, the result is that we treat our bodies worse rather than responding to their messages with care and concern.

It’s worth noting here that people’s relationship with their physical body in particular is deeply affected by trauma experiences. In the United States, an estimated one in eight children experience abuse before age 17. An estimated one in three women and one in six men experiences sexual abuse. About 1 in 15 experience PTSD as a result of trauma, and many more find that they hold trauma experiences in their bodies even if not in their conscious awareness. That can show up as a markedly increased likelihood of being overweight or obese, in behavioral patterns, or in maladaptive psychologies. If these or other experiences have caused you to experience trauma, you may benefit from the support of a peer support group and/or a mental health professional who is specifically trained to help you. If you’re looking for further guidance, I suggest the extremely instructive work of Bessel Van Der Kolk, and I have also posted references consulted below for your reference.

2. Adopt A “Big Picture” of You

As a part of this series, I’ve decided to take on physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual domains separately for the purposes of exploring and making meaning of them for yourself. That said, we are often most in touch with our physical bodies as the primary route to the other parts of ourselves. For example, we often allow ourselves to experience our thoughts as if they are constructed by our physical brains and are a reflection of an absolute reality. But that just ain’t so.

It’s valuable to construct a bigger picture for yourself that more accurately (or at least helpfully) separates your body and mind into separate but related systems within a whole (you). Your mind is not your head. Even if we were being purely physiological about it, your brain operates with afferent (into the brain) and efferent (out to the body) pathways throughout your body. Your hands sense the cold barbell (afferent); your brain improves your muscle contraction sequence in a barbell snatch (efferent). The result of this framework is that it becomes easier to recognize that there is a big distinction between the words, logic, and meaning we apply to things and the things themselves.

Here’s what I mean: At work, you don’t trust that you’re getting straight information about the health of the company, and as a result you’re hyper vigilant. You respond by parsing every little event throughout the day. By the time you finish your work (if you’re lucky enough to “finish”), you feel exhausted. You get home and your partner asks you how your day went. “Stressful,” is your response. Maybe you elaborate on the suspicious events of the day. Maybe you have formed some specific hypothesis about how Kathy in accounting is trying to kill your project budget because of a nearly imperceptible slight. The next morning, you wake up and your neck and shoulders are sore. What happened? You perceived a threat (this is your interpretation of an event, not the event itself) which hyper focused your mind on protection, and your body followed suit. You braced yourself for “impact” even though no physical threat loomed.

I sometimes see people walk into the gym at 5:00 am and their shoulders are up by their earlobes. They carry themselves as if someone punched them in the throat the day before. It’s clear that they feel tight and are possibly already dreading some part of the prescribed workout. Even though they try to warm up, they aren’t recognizing the bracing in their body, so when they get into the workout they find it feels very hard, and perhaps even exacerbates existing pain–if not creating a new injury–when they try to use tense muscles to do hard work. Maybe the endorphins eventually overcome the fatigue, or if they are lucky the workout helps them transition from a sympathetic to parasympathetic state. But for a lot of people, it’s not quite enough and it starts to add up.

All of this is to say that by recognizing that mental and emotional systems have their own operating capacity and that those interact with the physical body, it becomes easier to connect with the physical elements of emotions (which, according to the researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett, arise in the body and are then constructed in the mind) as well as observe the influence of thoughts on the body and vice versa.

The “big picture” might look like a venn diagram of the parts of you rather than one complicated blob. Or whatever mental model helps you to see that there is an exquisite and complex relationship among your systems that opens up many entry points for change.

3. Establish What “Good” Feels Like

I’m intentionally saying “feels like” instead of “looks like.” Looks like will come later, and it will include the way things look on the outside and the way things look on the inside. For now, however, the point is to cultivate an intuitive sense of your body’s optimal functioning. Based upon my experience, most people will opt for between five and 1,000 electrical shocks rather than what I am about to say here, but please try to embrace it. If you want to know what good feels like, you have to experiment. And you have to exercise some discipline. It’s really not that bad. I promise. (Not that you should trust someone who experiments the way that I do.)

But let’s say you do embrace this idea. How do you experiment? First take stock of how your physical body is doing. What seems to be working well and what seems to be a problem?

You could consider a basic checklist. There are many available, but here’s an example.

• General functioning - Can you do everything you need and want to do throughout the day?

• Energy - Are you energetic or depleted?

• Digestion - Do you suffer from indigestion or bloating? Do you have healthy bowel movements?

• Sexual function - Can you participate fully in sexual experiences?

• Hair and skin - Are they vibrant or pallid?

• Disposition - Do you feel engaged and responsive or weighed down?

• Pain or discomfort - Do you experience any? When? Why?

• Social connections - Do you have meaningful relationships? Do you feel you are able to show up for others?

• Performance - Can you engage fully in your work and/or physical events or activities that you find meaningful (e.g., workouts, sports, performance events, etc.)?

It’s probably obvious by now, but some of this assessment will reveal physical elements to address while some will reveal mental, emotional, and spiritual elements to address.

Now think about three things that interact with your body’s functioning: (1) what you put in it [and on it]; (2) what you do with it; and (3) what it is exposed to.

1. What you put into your body: Food/beverages and Supplements, Medication, Topicals (soap, lotion, lubricants, etc.), Recreational Drugs

You probably put a lot of things in and on your body. Some of them have a positive effect, some are neutral, and some have a negative effect. Your energy, digestion and skin and hair are some of the “front line” indicators of whether these things are serving you or not. Keep in mind that using generalized guidance to assess whether the things you eat and drink are “healthy” is not the point. We’re way beyond that. Eggplants are vegetables. Vegetables are good for you. Therefore eat eggplants. Now you have acid reflux. Maybe that’s because nightshades bother you. So, eggplant is not actually healthy for you. You have to test them out. Some people suggest that elimination diets are the only way to do this. I’m not so sure. While it is true that some things stay in your system a long time, many people find that a week or two without something gives them enough signal to know whether it’s bothering them. What they need is patience rather than a full scale elimination. Better to have sustainable than perfect.

Notice my checklist didn’t include: “Fat - Are you?”. That’s not because I’m dedicated to body positivity. I do think there is such a thing as overfat, and that carrying too much fat has all kinds of nasty health implications. That said, whether you are carrying extra fat is not an assessment of how you feel. The thing you’re looking for here is more like “am I satiated or do I feel overfull and/or bloated at the end of the day?” Maybe you’re eating too fast for your body to keep up–either by failing to chew enough or by eating so quickly that your ghrelin signals can’t keep up with how much you’ve ingested. That’s helpful. Try slowing down or chewing more. You absolutely can’t because you have 2 minutes for “lunch”? Ok be realistic. Eat more easily digested foods or chop your vegetables up even more. I know that seems weird, but what if the tradeoff is having enough energy to get past dinner? In the next segment on nutrition, I’ll say much more about how to specifically construct an eating style and strategy that works for optimal health, but for now the goal is to recognize what makes you feel health–and what doesn’t.

I also don’t think getting lots of blood work and trying to make yourself score perfectly on every blood metric is necessary or effective in managing health but I do think that occasional functional panels can help you leapfrog to the supplements that might be most useful for you. In the absence of that, consider that most people are deficient in a handful of things and start there: Vitamin D, Omega-3 fatty acids, and magnesium. Men may also want to include zinc. Women may want to include iron or ferritin. Current research suggests that trace minerals like magnesium, iron, and zinc should be ingested every other day for maximum benefit. Creatine has been shown to offer significant benefits for muscular health and has a neuroprotective effect at higher (e.g., 10g/day) doses. You may also not need or want supplements, especially if your diet is already high in animal proteins (creatine), fish (omega-3s), or you spend considerable time in sunlight (Vitamin D). If you choose magnesium supplements, know whether you want the gut benefit (citrate) or the muscular benefit (glycinate) and choose your type accordingly.

To be honest, I am not sure if I am systematically ignoring any research that suggests coffee isn’t amazing for you or if there is simply a lot of evidence that caffeinated coffee has protective benefits for the heart and the liver, but I am pro-coffee. I am also pro-tea. In both cases, high quality really matters. There is some evidence that carbonated water has downsides, but you should evaluate for yourself whether those risks outweigh the benefits of drinking more water. Many people, especially those who sweat regularly, are not getting enough electrolytes. After that, I am hard pressed to identify beverages that are worth their calories. Even zero calorie beverages, which available research has essentially called inert, do contain substances that may have effects we haven’t yet identified. Alcohol is a neurotoxin. But again, you should evaluate for yourself whether the joy or social connection you experience is worth the trade-off. You don’t necessarily have to quit alcohol or added sugar, but you do have to know what effects they have on you. In the next post, I will get into specifics about what I have learned from my own experimentation in this regard.

People my age will recognize “This is your brain on drugs.” That is, of course, only part of the story. There’s a lot to be said about pharmaceutical and recreational drug use that is far beyond the scope of this essay. But your goal here is to assess how you feel as a part of your framework for physical health. So, if you are using drugs of any kind, evaluate that: how are they affecting your physical functioning? Have they had their intended effect? Are the side effects worth it (and do you even know what the side effects are?) Do you need help transitioning off of them or finding a superior alternative? Your goal is to know the answer to these questions. (Please be careful about abandoning a drug protocol without the help of a physician.)

Lastly, don’t forget about your soap, shampoo, lotions, fragrances, deodorants, personal lubricants and other stuff you put on your body. Could they be making you itch? Giving you dandruff? Drying you out and making you more susceptible to cuts and infections? Introducing microplastics or heavy metals? Inform yourself about what you put on your body and whether the tradeoffs are worth it. Take care that market-leading products may be major culprits. One of the U.S.’s most popular personal lubricants, KY Jelly, has an osmolality of roughly 2000, which is about six times higher than vaginal osmolality. The consequence? Tissue damage and increased risk of disease or infection. It is estimated to own 52% of the market share in the U.S.

2. What you do with your body

I can’t wait to share more about my journey over the last year as I slowly transitioned from an athlete (in the extremely broad sense of the word) into a coach and trainer. Look for more on that next month. In the meantime, I hope you will accept the premise that I have developed some experience through my own body and helping other people tune into and improve theirs. Here’s what I have observed.

Little kids (mostly) have incredible body mechanics, with only a few evolutionary (more accurately, dysevolutionary) exceptions. Around the world, people seem to suffer from chronic back pain in particular. Some cultures are excepted. (Maybe it’s the proactive practice of yoga.) These are tied to occupational and habit patterns that undermine our natural posture and mechanics. Tie that with the burden of excess weight that can compound pressure on sensitive joints, and you have a recipe for immobility. Heck, even a person of ideal body weight who sits in a chair all day may be doomed.

The underlying issue is that bodies are meant to move, and ideally as little encumbrance as possible. Not with shoes that shift gait or stride. Not with clothing that restricts motion or forces organs to contract. Not only on rare occasions when moving between desks or meetings or other seats.

The ways that your body is used has a huge impact on how you feel, and there are probably an infinite number of ways to break down how to do that well. Based on the best thinking right now, here’s a simple way to think about how you move your body so you can design some experiments for yourself.

1. How much do you move all of your muscle groups (full body movements such as walking, hiking swimming, etc.)? Can you accumulate 2.5 hours per day? (Whole day, including every time you move.) This action moves blood and lymph, promotes active recovery, and non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT).

2. How often do you raise your heart rate to between 60 and 70% of your maximum heart rate? Can you do this for 30-60 minutes 3-4 times per week?

3. How often do you raise your heart rate over 80% of its maximum? Can you do this 30-40 minutes per week?

4. How much do you sleep? Can you get 7-9 hours per night?

5. How much do you engage in stretching mobility exercises? Can you do 10-15 minutes per day?

These are some of the recommended ranges, but the idea is to test each one and find the right balance for yourself. To get really specific, start with baseline measurements of your resting heart rate (easiest to measure), your HRV (next easiest, with a device) and VO2 Max (can also be estimated with many devices or measured in a lab). See how those change when you get different amounts of movement and recovery.

If you are approaching the last quarter of your life, consider using the framework of a Centenarian Decathlon to set some functional longevity goals. Measure what you can do today, and shift your activity to achieve those goals over time.

After you’ve played around with these benchmarks, now consider what you really want (and need) to do with your body right now. Do you have young children or grandchildren who want you to play with them (or throw them in the pool)? Do you want to care for your home and property? You need to be able to move in lots of different ways and get enough oxygen to endure. Evaluate your fitness routine. Do your full body movements help you maintain or build muscle mass? Do they also help you build or maintain cardiorespiratory endurance? In the segment on fitness, I’ll dive into different exercise strategies and how to construct one that works for you.

3. What your body is exposed to

Environmental factors, including everything from literal climate to energy climate play an enormous role in how people feel.

It’s probably obvious that second hand smoke and smog lead to feeling poorly and generally poor health outcomes. But you may also be affected by a lack of exposure to sunlight (in winter or in cloudy climates), mold in your home, or faulty gas appliances. You may have high levels of radon in your basement. You may have bacteria growing in your sink. Or you might have mold in your humidifiers. It’s worth doing a little analysis of the things in your environment that you’re touching or breathing every day and testing whether they affect how you feel. You may have little control over some of them (e.g. loud traffic outside your door), but remember this effort is about understanding what really affects your functioning so you can decide what tradeoffs you’re willing to accept and making choices accordingly.

People are generally highly perceptive of other peoples’ energy even if they cannot name or define it. You do not have control over other peoples’ energy, and you also really don’t have direct control over your own emotional response. What you do have control over is recognizing how those things affect you and taking steps to manage them. Your boss might be a psychopath, or just a jerk. (In reality, your boss probably has shockingly low self esteem and constantly doubts their own competency, which I know is easy for me to say but trust me – I have probably worked with your boss in one way or another and you really should stop taking it personally.) Remember the people with their shoulders up literally protecting their necks? That could be you and you don’t even realize it. Try to sit down, be still, and gently scan your body from head to toe. Do you feel the tension? If you don’t intentionally release it, it just stays there until it’s forced out or it explodes.

The exercise here is to pay attention to the things in your physical and energetic environment. Can you change something and evaluate how it changes the way you feel, your energy, or your mood?

What’s Next?

After you have a sense of what you’re aiming for, or at least what you’re looking to change, you can begin to fine tune your approach to you, and over time you will develop a truly unique expertise. Being systematic will help you feel more confident, and feeling more confident will help you to be a better advocate for yourself and a more discerning participant in healthcare, fitness, and wellness offerings available to help you.

The next several essays will dig into each of these in much further detail, further unpacking the physical dimension, and then moving on to the mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions.

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Some relevant works consulted:

Trauma, body relationship, and health outcomes

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sexual Violence: Prevalence and Impact in the United States.

• National Institute of Mental Health. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): Statistics.

• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for PTSD. How Common Is PTSD in Adults?

• Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.

Mind–body interaction and constructed emotion

• Barrett, L. F. (2017). The Theory of Constructed Emotion. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Sleep, recovery, and baseline physiological needs

• Watson, N. F., et al. (2015). Recommended Amount of Sleep for a Healthy Adult. Sleep.

• American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Sleep Duration and Health.

Movement, fitness, and longevity

• World Health Organization. (2020). Guidelines on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour.

• American Heart Association. Recommendations for Physical Activity in Adults.

• Levine, J. A. (2004). Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT). American Journal of Physiology.

• Lang, J. J., et al. (2024). Cardiorespiratory Fitness as a Predictor of Mortality and Morbidity. British Journal of Sports Medicine.

• Addleman, J. S., et al. (2024). Heart Rate Variability Applications in Strength and Conditioning.

Nutrition, supplementation, and experimentation

• Malone, J. C., et al. (2024). Elimination Diets. StatPearls Publishing.

• Subramanian, A., et al. (2024). Vitamin D Status in U.S. Adults. Journal of Nutrition.

• Tian, Z., et al. (2024). Magnesium Intake and Health Outcomes. Nutrients.

• Forbes, S. C., et al. (2022). Creatine Supplementation and Brain Health. Nutrients.

Coffee, alcohol, and commonly consumed substances

• Ebadi, M., et al. (2021). Coffee Consumption and Liver Health. Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics.

• World Health Organization. (2023). No Level of Alcohol Consumption Is Safe for Health.

Topicals, lubricants, and epithelial health

• Ayehunie, S., et al. (2017). Hyperosmolar Vaginal Lubricants Damage Epithelial Barrier Function. Toxicology Reports.

Environmental exposures

• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Health Risks of Radon.

CDC / National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Mold and Health.

Even though I was an active kid and played several sports, some very competitively, I let a nasty car accident totally derail me when I was 16. After that, I never worked as hard because I believed I could never accomplish as much. Though I certainly didn’t recognize it at the time, it was one of my first and biggest lessons about the power of mindset.

Eight years later, I had a rude awakening. I had finished graduate school, feeling relieved to finally have my Ph.D. in hand, and was about to take a job in Washington, DC. Before I left, I was to accept an award given by the graduate school. I walked with the Dean to an office on the third floor of the Hall where I’d spent many long hours in the years before. This time, as we crossed the landing for the first floor, I realized I was winded and couldn’t keep up the conversation. By the time we got to the second landing, I actually had to stop to catch my breath.

I was 24 years old and I couldn’t even make it up three flights of stairs. It was embarrassing, but also terrifying. I finished graduate school in four years, but I had traded my health in nearly every sense of the word. Was the accomplishment all that impressive–and was it really even an accomplishment at all? That I could trade everything in my life to pursue one narrow mission might be a super power, but it could also be an achilles heel.

I decided I’d go home and weigh myself. But the scale was actually dead, and I couldn’t recall the last time I’d used it. I let weeks pass before I made the time to dig up four AA batteries. Finally, I revived the scale and stepped on: 223 pounds. I was sure it was broken. That’s insane. I weighed 155 pounds the last time I checked. As it turned out, I indeed weighed 223 pounds. Maybe more.

At the time I really had no idea what to do with that, but I knew it was bad. I realized I’d better see a doctor. The doctor promptly prescribed blood pressure medication and metformin because at that weight, my BMI registered 34.9. Setting aside what I think of BMI (nothing good), that was the metric he was using to measure my cardiovascular risk factor and a BMI of 34.9 is solidly “obese.” I have no idea what my specific body composition was at the time, but I feel certain that the weight was not mostly muscle. I was overfat. Really, alarming overfat. Plus, I couldn’t walk up a f*cking flight of stairs. We didn’t really say WTF back in 2009, but. You know. WTF.

Once upon a time, a person who was overweight and out of shape went to the doctor and the doctor suggested eating a healthier diet built around sufficient protein paired with more activity that included a good mix of resistance training and metabolic conditioning. The doctor took baseline blood work and evaluated how much the person’s blood markers matched the optimal, functional range and then agreed to check them again in 8-12 weeks after a course of exercise and diet change, ideally supported by a weekly meeting with a dedicated health coach.

That is a fairytale. And since I was recounting this sob story to you I thought you could use a little pick me up. It’s entirely fictitious, though. Here’s what actually happened.

I was prescribed a handful of pharmaceuticals. I took them. I became so sick that I vomited every single day for about two months. Miracle! I lost 30 pounds. All I had to give up was all my energy and will to live.

It would be easy for me to say that western medicine is obviously a dumpster fire, totally overrun by the market mongers that are pharmaceutical companies and the domestic terrorism agents that are insurance companies. I could say that there is no “health” or “care” in healthcare. My own experience has demonstrated that reality over and over again.

And yet, if I were writing a blog about any one of my friends who went to the doctor and were prescribed a severe chemical cocktail that also made them vomit, lose extraordinary amounts of weight, and then all of their hair fell out, I might conclude with complete earnestness that western medicine is a miracle because it saved their lives from cancer. (And thank God, because I really like them a lot more alive.)

My conclusion is that I went to the doctor for help, and I got the wrong solution because the solutions available in healthcare are:

1. Too limited (not enough)

2. Too narrowly defined

3. Too focused on short term efficacy

4. Too extreme (too severe relative to the underlying problem)

5. Too generalized (tuned to the average rather than the individual)

6. Too self assured (nobody really knows anything; science is one step less stupid, not The Truth)

7. Too impersonal (people just don’t trust someone they see 15 minutes per year)

(Ok. Kind of a dumpster fire. But not useless.)

So, what to do about this? You need to become your own healthcare expert. You cannot rely on anyone else to do it for you. If your healthcare provider is annoyed by this, get a new one. Usually, I am pretty circumspect about what I tell people. Context matters. But not here. This is a cornerstone of health that everyone must embrace.

Physical Health Unpacked, which will drop simultaneously with this introduction, delves into ideas for how to become your own expert. Check it out!

Health and vitality are associated primarily with physique, including optimal body composition and condition. We mostly associate health with our ability to function, perhaps because it is when we start losing functionality that we realize our health is deteriorating.

“Healthcare” here in the U.S. seems like it is actually “disease mitigation” or maybe even “reduction of untimely death” (if you’re lucky). We’re “healthy” when not diseased or broken. I find this to be deeply dissatisfying. That approach to healthcare is probably why there is right now a major reckoning between the medical establishment and the general public. (I think this goes well beyond the machinations of the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, although I confess that the recent publication of a new inverted food pyramid inspired me to share this essay.) Fortunately, the healthcare industry doesn’t get to own the definition of health, and that means we each must make the effort to find our own meaningful definition.

Out of curiosity, I asked AI for the most common definitions of health right now. Perplexity’s response highlighted the “lack of disease” concept as a shortcoming of the definition. Google’s Gemini helpfully incorporated “not just the absence of disease” into its aggregated definition of health. Several reference sources for both responses highlighted that health is “a state of total wellbeing.” So naturally I was curious about how wellbeing is defined. Turns out that both tools’ responses describe wellbeing as “a state of total health.” No wonder this is tough to pin down.

Over the last year, I took a deep dive into health coaching through the Institute of Integrative Nutrition. As part of the curriculum en route to a health coaching certificate, I spent seven months working through a broad cross-section of content related to nutrition as well as philosophies and strategies to unearth and address the reasons so many people have a challenging relationship with food. Unexpectedly, the health coaching course included virtually nothing about physical conditioning. Maybe they think fitness outlets like gyms, studios, and dojos own that segment of health.

Then there are the ways of thinking about health that derive from explorations of mental health. If you think that your physical health is essential to your daily functioning, consider how impossible it becomes when your mental health deteriorates. Bessel Van Der Kolk wrote in The Body Keeps the Score, a book about trauma recovery, that the standard for recovery should be that people are empowered to feel fully alive–not simply able to cope with their maladaptions. He went to great lengths to emphasize the critical nature of social relationships in the development and maintenance of mental health.

Philosophers and intellectuals (rather than physicians) seem to get the closest to integrating the mental, emotional, and physical elements of health in a more unified framework. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche observed that health unto itself was not a meaningful end, but that to have health enables one to pursue some greater meaning–and, perhaps, that having a greater meaning actually leads to better health. Nietzsche’s concept of “the great health” represents a dynamic, life-affirming state that one must constantly acquire and reacquire, integrating suffering and illness as sources of strength rather than mere absence of disease.

The Indian tradition of Ayurveda emphasizes balance and contentment as hallmarks of health, ranging from the balance of energies to the balance of the physical body to the contentment that one derives from accepting and appreciating where they are and what they have (beyond the material sense of the word). In Ayurveda, perfect health is defined as “a balance between body, mind, spirit, and social wellbeing,” where Svastha (wellbeing) means living in harmony with both the world of nature and one’s own inner nature, achieving contentment through alignment of body, prana, senses, and mind with the Self.

Plato and Aristotle similarly approached health as a matter of harmony and order within the personal systems (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual). For Plato, health requires the correct proportion between body and soul, with the rational soul ruling the body to achieve harmony. Aristotle regarded health as subordinate to eudaimonia (flourishing), viewing it as a condition that promotes wellbeing but does not constitute wellbeing itself.

The Stoics held that the truest expression of health was character: the ability to hold high personal standards and meet them. This moral-psychological integrity represents the primary form of health, making physical health secondary and instrumentally valuable but not constitutive of the good life.

Of course I’d be remiss if I failed to cite the extraordinarily prolific and influential Charles Darwin, whose collection of works shed light on (or at least offered a coherent overarching story of) the ways that “man and animals” came to exist and what enabled them to thrive and propagate. Darwin not only undertook to offer evolution, or the large scale changes that occur as a result of continuous adaptation, as the explanation for why our bodies function as they do, but also explained in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals the deeply social nature of evolution and the critical role of relationships to thriving. Darwin demonstrated that social instincts such as sympathy and moral sentiments evolved through natural selection, strengthening societies and enabling cooperation among individuals.

All of this is to acknowledge that the effort to define health has and will continue to be ongoing, and will undoubtedly be approached by every social and physical science discipline in its own way. I have the bias of a traditionally trained psychologist and burgeoning physiologist and I am enamored with good logic.

That said, I have also found myself blown away by that which is not visible, measurable, quantifiable or generally scientific. As I look over all the threads I’ve shared above, I see that when we worship at the altar of science as the one real pathway to truth, we become narrowly focused on a tiny subset of that which is the full expression of health (and, as I’m sure I’ll explore in future writing, every other domain). So my definition of health is going to honor and respect the tradition of science, but also recognize that science has profound limitations. It is useful, but not sufficient.

My first principle of health is that our bodies are exquisitely designed and function with incredible elegance. We still do not fully understand them. Bodies want to live. They can adapt and cope with unimaginable hardship. They are feats of engineering well beyond our most advanced capacity. They naturally adapt to keep us alive. That means our bodies can withstand and achieve amazing things. It also means that we must understand and address our adaptations to achieve extraordinary health because, over time, adaptations can turn into maladaptations when context changes.

My second principle of health is that we are not our bodies. We are something much more profound and sophisticated than the bodies we inhabit, and that means health cannot be limited to the domain of the physical body. It means that we can achieve extraordinary health in bodies that do not meet some standard criteria. And it also means that we must incorporate other domains of who we are into our pursuit of good health.

My third principle of health is that we have two modes of functioning: intentional and unintentional. This is different from conscious and unconscious, which is how most body function is distinguished. Intentional means we purposefully focus our attention on something; unintentional means we allow something to happen without giving it our attention. Even unconsciously controlled things can be changed with intentional action. For example, blood pressure can be modulated with breathing, muscle relaxation, and other techniques even though the beating of the heart is an unconscious activity. Likewise, we can rewire the neuronal networks in our brains by choosing to think and behave differently. We can even shift the experience and expression of emotions by directing our attention to them.

My fourth principle of health is that it is mutable. We do not always exercise control over our circumstances or our environments, and even when we make intentional effort, much of our lives are outside of our locus of control. We should expect that the natural course of our lives will affect our health, and our behavior and thinking must shift accordingly. A core example of this is the effect of aging on our body. We cannot reverse time, but we can adapt our practices to maintain the most functional body-mind possible.

Lastly, my fifth principle of health is that it is comprehensive. There is a spectrum of unhealthy and healthy functioning across our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions and a healthful life requires a balance of good functioning among all of those domains. They also do not operate in isolation, and must align and integrate with each other. One cannot be healthy without attending to all four of these domains regularly and with intention.

I think everyone should take the time to decide how they will define health for themselves, and I hope these principles provide a way of thinking about how you define and pursue a healthy life. Over the next six weeks, I’ll dive more into possible ways of looking at health in each of these domains with the goal of giving you the tools to construct a vision for our own health. After that, I’ll share more about what I’ve learned about change and how to make it work!

At the end of something, I always try to pause and write down what I want to take away from it. I find that if I intentionally frame my memory, it becomes a tool rather than just an echo. The end of the calendar year isn’t necessarily a real end of something, but this year’s end also marks the culmination of extraordinary things.

In 2025, I completed a formal health coaching certificate; I completed over 200 hours of fire fighter training and passed the pro board examination to become a Firefighter I; I completed the third in a series of increasingly difficult physical and mental endurance challenges to become the 21st woman to ever finish the 50-hour SEALFit Kokoro crucible; my wife and I welcomed our fourth son; I launched a new business focused on helping people overcome the barriers that impede their health and happiness; and, I said goodbye to the company I co-founded in 2020 so I can focus on building the new business. Along the way, I started putting my training in personal training, yoga, and CrossFit coaching to work first to help some fellow firefighters improve their fitness, and more recently coaching CrossFit group classes. I also made progress such that I’ll finish up three more certificates in 2026 to support all of my coaching efforts.

This was a hectic and challenging year that would not have been possible without the support of my wife, who has been willing to make sacrifices to make all of this possible for me. We also could not have done it without our families and our nanny and babysitters, all of whom have helped make sure that our children are cared for and supported when we cannot be present ourselves. My dad probably spent over a hundred hours just driving back and forth to our house to help make all-day training and work travel possible. My mother in law traveled to our house for weeks at a time and also to Chicago and Hawaii to make work travel possible.

All of this is to say that my first and most important reflection is that no matter how hard I work, nothing I accomplish is a result of my effort alone. It is humbling to think about how much work I did in 2025, and then to notice how many other people had to take action just to make it possible for me to have the opportunity to do that work. It is an enormous privilege to be able to do what I am able to do.

Undertaking all of the year’s work has also revealed a few more reflections that I want to hold in my mind as I go into 2026 and beyond. I tried to think about it in terms of who I have become rather than what happened in the last twelve months. Here is what I have distilled.

I’m still changing.

Over the last couple of months, as I’ve shared more about leaving my role as the CEO of a company I co-founded to start again and create something entirely new, I’ve received many reactions and questions from people. Most of them come down to a kind of skeptical amazement. Why would I leave my own company instead of just telling everyone else to leave? Why would I elect to start something new from scratch? Why would I do this now, with four small children? And what is this anyway? (Didn’t “life coaching” die in the 90s?) In other words: Am I crazy?

Yes. I am a little bit crazy.

It’s not normal to walk away from something you work very hard to create. It is not typical for someone to let go of a CEO role to dive back into a business-building hustle. And it is definitely not normal to walk away from 20 years of experience in a field to become a beginner again. But you know what? I did all the normal things for long enough to realize that I didn’t find them fulfilling–and, worse, that I could see critical needs that I was powerless to address. When I stepped back and looked at what I found most compelling, I also had an opportunity to apply some of what I already knew in a way that would allow me to really help people. Not just help them get work done. Help them live an optimal life.

I’ve finally stopped accepting bullshit!

In 2020, I was suffering from crippling headaches and frequent loss of feeling in both arms. The symptoms had grown progressively worse over roughly five years, but my doctor told me these were normal signs of aging (for someone who was in their early 30s). He suggested Advil. After much convincing, he eventually sent me for epidural analgesic treatments. They initially provided limited relief. Then the pain came back, only worse. Eventually I prevailed upon him to get an MRI of my head and cervical spine, as I was by then convinced that I had a brain tumor.

The MRI revealed not a tumor (whew!), but a cervical disc that had penetrated 90% of the space in my spinal column and was pressing on my spine. No wonder I felt as if someone had outfitted me with a helmet that was three sizes too small. I saw a surgeon who said that surgical repair was “urgent”. Immediately after surgery, my headaches vanished. Five years of suffering could have been eliminated if I had either recognized the issue sooner and undertaken therapy to repair it naturally or proceeded to surgery if those efforts failed. Among other things, this experience taught me that suffering just because something is “normal” is the height of foolishness. It’s not just okay to reject normal; it can be critical to one’s health–physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually, if not all four.

I shifted the way I think about my life.

After my first son was born, I experienced something that had never afflicted me before: overwhelming anxiety. Immediately after he was born, I found that I was deeply moved by the incredible helplessness of a new baby. As I held him in the dim light of the recovery room while his mom was patched up by the OB, I looked at him, still very alert from the excitement and trauma of not just being born, but getting stuck and being pried out backward. He looked at me and for some reason I thought of all the babies born to people who cannot adequately care for them. I cried. Then I told him I hoped I was up to the job, but to be honest I didn’t know yet. (Good thing he doesn’t remember that moment, because I am certain he’d let me know how much I’m failing every time he doesn’t get his way!).

After that awareness abated, I found that it wasn’t the extraordinary task of raising a child that made me anxious. It was the overnight shift from only having to care for myself to having to also care for my child. It suddenly mattered if I was alive or dead. I don’t mean that in a “nobody cares if I am here” kind of way. I mean it in a “if I am not here, my child will be missing a parent” kind of way. It made me acutely conscious of everything happening in my life that was healthy, safe, and enabling of good parenting. I found it heightened my awareness in everything that I did from my work to my health to my relationships. Shortly after my son was born, I knew I needed to leave my job and heal my body as soon as possible.

Everything has led me to right now.

At various times in the last twenty years, I have experienced almost overwhelming regret, shame, and disappointment in myself. I failed in personal relationships. I failed to meet goals I set for myself. I failed to enforce my own boundaries. I failed to care for my body and my health. I then wasted time wallowing in my feelings about those failures. And then one day in 2022, I went to a chiropractor to help resolve a pain in my low back. He adjusted my back and thoracic spine before I rolled over on the table for a cervical spine adjustment I’d had dozens of times before. This time I had a strange foreboding feeling as he held on to each side of my jaw and just as I started to protest, I heard a pop followed by immediate vertigo. The ceiling became the wall and I couldn’t regain my spatial awareness. My body started sweating and my stomach was immediately nauseated. I was terrified. I asked what was happening and the chiropractor told me it was just a normal side effect of “crystal displacement” in my inner ear. He left the room. I couldn’t move because I couldn’t tell which way was up.

A while later he returned and attempted an Epley maneuver, but to no avail. Finally he put my neck in traction and the spinning stopped. I have no idea how long I lay there trying to recover. When the nausea subsided and I could walk, I left the room. The rest of the office seemed to have cleared out and I had no idea how much time had passed. I got in my car and drove home. When I got home I found that I had an overwhelming urge to go to sleep. I slept for several hours before my very concerned wife woke me up and took me to the hospital.

In the emergency room, I was evaluated and given an MRI with contrast to rule out a dissected vertebral artery. The contractor radiologist saw nothing. I was sent home with no conclusion, no referral, and a several thousand dollar bill.

I felt fine, so two days later, I went for a run. When I finished, I found that every step I took turned me to the right. I thought I should be going forward, but my body kept going to the right as if I were stuck in the body of Derek Zoolander. The next day, I went back to the chiropractor to get a massage because I thought the issue was a stiff neck. This time, I got an unexpected neck adjustment that also resulted in immediate vertigo. Except this time, I also lost feeling in my left arm, my eye drooped (ptosis) and I heard a primordial tone in my right ear. I lost my voice. The chiropractor refused to call an ambulance, so I drove home and was quickly escorted back to the hospital for another round of tests with the same result. I was despondent. My wife was incensed. She marched across the street to our neighbor’s house to ask for help from the incredibly gracious physician-nurse couple. They immediately got me into a neurologist.

The neurologist read my MRI and subsequent CT, and confirmed that the first cervical adjustment had resulted in a vertebral artery dissection; it created a pinch that tore open and then collapsed the internal wall of my artery. That dissection, missed by the radiologist, resulted in a clot at the site of the tear. The second adjustment threw the clot loose and resulted in an ischemic stroke that caused a constellation of neurons in my medulla to die. The loss of medullary neurons caused the left side of my body to lose temperature sensation, a ptosis in my eye, and loss of vocal capacity. When I told him that I had been released from the hospital twice without so much as a referral for further analysis, he was apoplectic. But that was the standard of care. He told me that I might be able to recover, but he had no way to know. The best advice he could offer was to challenge myself until I regained all of the capacities I had previously. It might work, but there were no guarantees.

So, I challenged myself. Four weeks later, I ran a half marathon. It wasn’t my best, but I finished it. (The neurologist suggested that running was the best possible recovery exercise because I was least likely to injure myself if I had a secondary stroke, so that’s what I did.) The coaches at my gym helped me modify my resistance workouts, which I slowly ramped back up over six months of diligent effort. I took on more and longer speaking engagements, which forced me to practice modulating my speaking and rebuilding my voice. This was the most infuriating recovery of all. I would find in the middle of a sentence that my mind thought I was making a sound that I wasn’t actually producing. Or, also annoying, my volume would change while I was speaking, making me sound like I was losing confidence in my statements.

In the end, I regained my temperature sensation in about six weeks (this seemed to happen without a concerted effort, which wasn’t possible) but I could not reverse the ptosis. After about nine months, I felt that I was back to normal and had made it through the highest risk window for a secondary event.

Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe it was the universe doubtless unfolding as it should, but it was at precisely this time that I found myself stretching among two recent SealFit graduates.

Sometimes I find myself in trials of my own doing, sometimes I find myself in trials over which I have no control, and sometimes I seek the trials that forge the person I want to become. Having experienced all three, I can finally let go of the self judgement that results from bad choices. What does it matter where the lessons come from? The point is to learn something and get better. They have all led me to this moment. The rest is history (in the making).

Happy New Year. May your 2026 liberate you from all that stands in your way.

It has been one year and one month since I joined a volunteer fire company. I spent a lot of that time in beginner fire school and at the station trying to learn fire fighting. During that time, I made a lot of progress on the skills side of firefighting. I even made progress on the mental and emotional side. Over the course of the year, I also spent a lot of time thinking about the first why: WHY did I join? There was no extra time to kill or energy to expend. I knew that my family was expanding and my professional obligations were growing even more complex. Yet I was compelled to join.

So, Why Do People Join?

Only a few people who are not firefighters have asked me why I became a firefighter. Maybe it seems obvious that someone who decides to join up at 41 years old must really love fire or have a knack for opening up asphalt roofs with a chainsaw. (I never even considered becoming a firefighter before last summer and, frankly, you should only ask me to cut a hole in your roof if you’re in the market for a not particularly symmetrical trapezoid.) I have, however, been asked by almost every other firefighter I have met. And I have asked them, too. We all seem to be wondering: why would anyone do something like this?

Young Joiners vs. Old Joiners

Some members joined in their teens. They always wanted to be firefighters, but they didn’t necessarily want to pursue a career in the fire service. They are satisfying the desire to be a part of the community and fulfill a love of fire work. Many joined because their fathers or grandfathers were firefighters. This group of people comprises about a quarter of the membership in our department.

Why Old Joiners Join

1. Sense of Obligation to Serve

There is an overarching theme among the responses from those who joined later on, when they already had careers and families, related to satisfying a missing element in their lives. Many people told me they always thought they should have joined the military, but didn’t and now either regret the choice or feel the need to add a dimension of service to their lives. That resonates with me. I nearly joined the Army ROTC when I was 17, but two weeks after I took the ASVAB the United States was attacked and the landscape shifted dramatically. I chose not to join, while my brother became a Marine. I felt guilty.

Twenty years later the war finally ended, and I looked around and saw that 7,057 U.S. servicemembers died in the War on Terror while more than 30,000 servicemembers who survived the war later committed suicide. I felt helpless.

Something has also shifted for me in the years since COVID-19, during which I had two major accidents and consequently made significant changes to my health and fitness routines as well as my overall approach to life. These have changed the way I comport and carry myself. One strange consequence is that people regularly assume I am a veteran. They don’t ask me if I served, they ask me when and where I served and in which branch. Having to respond “I never did” to that question makes me feel like I‘ve failed to fulfill an obligation.

None of this is to say that anyone, especially me, thinks that being a volunteer firefighter is a replacement for serving in a war. But it is to say that one significant dimension of the decision to become a firefighter is about fulfilling a sense of obligation to the community to be of service in emergencies and to help keep the community safe. If that sense of obligation is in someone, it never goes away. That sense of obligation to serve is one powerful reason, but it is also incomplete. Something else seems to bubble up as a common denominator among later joiners.

2. Honest Work

It sometimes amazes me how grueling and time consuming knowledge work can be. We go to school for a long time. We learn many things. We produce no “things.” Yet we are among the highest wage earners. What is knowledge work? Peter Drucker called us the people who think for a living as opposed to those who labor for a living. We use our minds rather than our bodies. Somehow that places us higher in the social order. But it seems like the joke is on us. Many of us trade our health and our energy, compromise our relationships, give up our hobbies, and generally burn ourselves out for the benefits associated with knowledge work. Through that lens, the pay is shit.

There’s something else. For the most part, the fruits of our labor are invisible. Or worse, they show up in the form of thousands (millions?) of emails, reams of paperwork, publications that are quickly outmoded or irrelevant, lost sleep, disrupted family life, and weakened bodies. At some point, the creeping concern that vital life force is being wasted becomes impossible to ignore. (Plus, our butts hurt from sitting in what feels like every “ergonomic” chair on the market and we are pretty sure we have carpal tunnel syndrome.) This is not to say that knowledge work is not useful or even important. It is to say that knowledge work can be extremely unsatisfying.

Six months working on a series of memos and reports somehow pales in comparison to one weekend spent building a real tangible thing–even if that thing is a 4-foot long bridge over a usually dry creek in the middle of a trail you only visit once a year. Why is that?

Maybe it is because human bodies are meant to labor. Labor is a part of what makes a healthy person. And so is drawing on knowledge and mental skills. These are pieces of a single puzzle, and neither is optimal in isolation. Maybe labor and knowledge blend together in thinking work. Thinking work is very satisfying.

Last month, we arrived on the scene of a car accident in which a mid-size SUV had turned a curve so quickly that it drove up over the hood of an oncoming car and landed partially on the hood of the car and partially embanked on a ledge of land just off the side of the road. One tire was on the embankment, the opposing tire was on the hood, and the other two were suspended in the air. The driver of the SUV was still in the driver’s seat and seemed confused. We needed to extricate the driver.

Our first task in a motor vehicle accident is usually to stabilize the vehicle (assuming it’s not on fire, which follows a specific cascade of tasks). In this case, the car was not in a classic position. It was not on the ground. It was not on its side, and it was not on its roof. It was essentially balancing on a front tire and a rear tire exactly perfectly such that too much weight or pressure on any side could send it toppling. As a physics experiment, it was fascinating. As an accident, it was beguiling.

Fortunately, we carried a relatively old and simple tool that let us stabilize the vehicle’s chassis with a combination of a steel beam and air pressure. We were able to create a third leg of the stool strong enough to open the driver’s door and help the driver onto a stretcher. That was made possible by several things coming together at once. The first was clarity about the nature of the problem to be solved. The second was a selection of potential tools that included a best case scenario tool (we had a few other less ideal but still effective options, like cribbing chocks). The third was previous experiences that led to some former members building an air kit that ensured we put exactly the right amount of air into the prop tool instead of sending the car flying out of balance. The last was the ability to come to shared agreement about all of these things and then execute the tools effectively. Both knowledge and labor came together to make the response successful.

Many fire departments have limited means and have to work hard to raise funds for everything they have–from apparatus to bunker gear. And, over decades in operation, they also come to possess a remarkable number of tools for a very wide range of possible emergencies to which they will respond. Our department is especially fortunate to have a portion of our budget subsidized by the municipality and our largest expenses (e.g., buildings, apparatus) covered by the township. As such, we have an especially wide range of tools at our disposal. The upshot is that we can be very effective in many circumstances. The downside is that we often have several potential tools for a single task. And we have to be trained to use the tools we have.

And then we have to agree on which tool should be deployed for a particular problem. This is not to say that emergency response is democratic; we are all trained to be good followers of an incident commander. But much of what we do is not an emergency, which means we have choices and opportunities. Choices and opportunities make for fertile ground for thinking work.

A few days ago, a fellow firefighter and I were tasked with taking about 60 reels of old hose out of service. That means we needed to remove the metal couplings (120 of them) and toss the hose. The prescribed way of removing the couplings was a sawzall, which proved painfully inefficient. Inefficiency drives ingenuity. So after several attempts at following the prescribed route, we evaluated the other tools available to us.

We considered a chainsaw. Pro: Cutters Edge saws will cut through pretty much anything except a rubber roof pad. Con: we only needed to remove the couplings, not an entire wing of the fire station. We thought about shears. Pro: one big slice should do it. Con: we probably needed about 500 foot pounds of pressure to cut through the hose. Then we realized we had a pretty powerful cutting tool that should be able to cut through anything, colloquially known as “the jaws of life”. Pro: it can cut through anything. Con: Con?!? we get to use the jaws of life!!! (Ok. It’s kind of heavy.) We fired that thing up and zipped off 90 couplings in about half the time it took us to take off the first 30 with a sawzall. It even produced a very satisfying crunch when it went through the hose. Something about that effort made it enjoyable. It was thinking work.

Some people suggest that honest work is labor while everything else is bullshit. I see their point; it can be hard to see what knowledge work really produces other than a lot of headaches. But I think that honest work is work that fully employs the parts of human potential that need to be expressed to address real problems and deliver real results. I call it thinking work, which is some balance of using the mind and the body to get things done. The second “why” of volunteer firefighting is that it offers clear and compelling thinking work to those of us who have been locked up in the knowledge work tower for far too long.

3. Meaningful Work

Implied in the mix of “honest work” I described above is a third “why” that bears its own spot on the list: meaning. One could easily conclude from what I’ve said about the shortcomings of knowledge work that I fail to see its value or have grown cynical from spending too much time in its darkest corners. Maybe. I see many knowledge roles as doing critical work and even helping people. These are not “dishonest” roles. But it is difficult to look at the arc of a knowledge work role and see the broader impact it has on the world or on the person in the role. Not everything a person does needs to send shivers of energy through the universe. But so much goes into our careers that when they are not adding up to meaning to the people carrying them out, it should give us pause.

Firefighting offers a dimension of meaning that can easily get lost in the work we do. Doctors may try to produce impact, but how much can be accomplished in 15 minutes per patient per year? Researchers may try to produce impact, but how much influence does one study have among millions? The value is there, but hard to see. It is worth doing these jobs. But they are often simply not enough. Showing up to help people on the worst day of their lives, or when they are more scared than they have ever been, or when they feel powerless and you can act on their behalf is immediate, tangible, and rewarding. We need this meaning in our lives in one way or another.

Of course, firefighting is only one (crazy?) way of satisfying these driving whys. But it has been a transformative experience for me. I expect it will only continue to evolve – and show me more about the underlying reasons my fellow volunteers and I continue to show up.

P.S. - If you’re an old joiner and you’re reading this, add some more" “whys” I’ve missed to the comments.

Every time I have taken on a new physical challenge, I have discovered that the physical part of the challenge isn’t really the challenge at all. The physical element is more like the pathway. It’s helpful in that progressions can be planned and progress can be measured. By contrast, the mental, emotional, and spiritual elements are very difficult to predict let alone plan and measure. The gift of the challenge is that it reveals the barriers, demons, and traps that are also portals for growth.

Like the physical challenge, firefighting is also a pathway. Fire dynamics is an interdisciplinary science in its own right and some argue that firefighting has evolved more rapidly in the last twenty years than in the two centuries since Benjamin Franklin founded the Union Fire Company in 1736. Here in Pennsylvania, the approach to educating and examining prospective fire fighters is evolving so much that the entire format of the pro board test will be new in 2026. All of that is to say: planning and measuring progress is now relatively easy in the fire service.

And yet, everyone knows that those metrics don’t tell us much about whether someone is going to be a great fire fighter. That’s because many other things dictate excellence, and most of them are about how people recognize and work through their invisible barriers, demons, and traps and learn to show up when others need them. Everyone finds these things along the way. They might show up when a person is faced with new training challenges, like navigating mazes in the dark–or perhaps when facing dangerous emergencies, like entering a burning building before an engine crew has water on the fire. Some people respond with a growth orientation, and some respond with self medication. Some ignore them.

I’d like to say I always respond with a growth orientation, but sometimes my response precedes my understanding.

My reputation, even to myself, is that I am calm and focused under pressure. When emergency situations arise, I tend to become deeply focused while also moving quickly and with clarity. I tend to be best at delegating in a crisis. I don’t have to think about it; I just become the director of action. And people tend to follow my direction. It seems natural.

The down side of this is that when the adrenaline gets so intense that I feel the wave of anxiety coming, I am so surprised that I tend to explode with nervous energy rather than stopping to recompose myself. I didn’t know about this until I started taking on challenging training drills and responding to emergency calls.

One of my first signs that I had a tipping point was very early in my training. I had just learned to use a self contained breathing apparatus and was curious to test out how my breathing affected my air intake. Having worked at length on breath control and deep breathing techniques, not to mention my obsessive dedication to improving my VO2 max, I was eager to beat the 30-minute time estimate on a cylinder. I put on the facepiece, fired up the cylinder and started walking up and down the stairs. It didn’t seem too bad; the stairs were mildly taxing, but we only had one flight so I had to descend between every ascent and that meant I was recovering a lot.

So I moved on to the treadmill. I picked up the pace. I added some incline. Eventually I was moving at a good clip at a challenging incline. And suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, I was overcome with panic and I instinctively ripped the facepiece off my head, gasping for air. It was jarring. Yes, it was jarring to panic. But it was much worse to realize that if I had followed that impulse in a fire, I would have singed my lungs and potentially died. What I had discovered wasn’t panic, but impulse. Panic is manageable; impulse is terrifying.

I met panic again when I first navigated an obstacle with my full bunker gear and pack on. This was later, after a lot of work practicing on the SCBA to ensure I never made the same mistake again. Now I was on air with limited visibility. I hit a hard plastic tunnel that was about 2’ in diameter. Looking at it, any reasonable person would assume that the pack must come off to get through. But the task was to navigate it with pack on, simulating an emergency situation with no time to doff. I made myself as flat as possible and climbed in.

Quickly, I realized that I had no way of orienting myself. The plastic was slick and I was enormous relative to the space. I couldn’t tell if I was moving forward or backward or at all. I couldn’t tell how long I was in the tunnel, or how long the tunnel was. Even though I knew that I was in a simulation, I felt the same wave of panic. This time, I didn’t lose it. But instead of pausing and recomposing, I burst forward and just kept moving until I felt the edge of the tunnel. I made it, but I was fully exhausted and struggled to navigate the next section of the obstacle course.

Several months later, when I had already completed all of my formal training and was well practiced in all of the basic activities of firefighting, I found myself unexpectedly jittery on a call. Following the officer’s orders, I jumped off the engine and began to don an SCBA, but in my extreme focus I put on my facepiece and Nomex hood out of order. It wasn’t even an emergency and I wasn’t actually in a hurry, but I failed to notice my mistake until someone pointed it out to me (though it should have been obvious). It was another sign that tunnel vision can activate at any time.

Taken together, these and other moments have highlighted that my behavior doesn’t always follow my own expectations. I know this happens in other parts of my life, but the consequences are so minimal that I can easily ignore the signals. Firefighting makes them clear and their consequences make them a priority for attention and effort. As I reflect on why I made the choice to become a firefighter and why I continue to dedicate so much time to it, I recognize that firefighting not only opens a pathway for growth, but it incorporates the incentive to take action and work on those areas for growth.

It’s not the event itself that determines our experience, it’s how we make sense of the event. I don’t panic because the situation inherently elicits panic; I panic because I am interpreting the situation to mean something. I cannot breathe right away, therefore I will never be able to breathe. I cannot move right now, therefore I will never be able to move. I must get this SCBA on right now, therefore I cannot pay attention to anything else. These things are not true, they are just my instinct trying to protect me. But that instinct will not serve my safety anymore. I have to retrain it.

Where else is my instinct outmoded? Where else do I need to retain my thinking?

The last time I took a test with any import was in 2023 when I decided to sit for a Level 1 CrossFit certificate. I realized then that it had been at least 16 years and probably more since I’d taken a multiple choice exam. To prepare, I read the 260-page training manual, Learning to Breathe Fire by J.C. Herz, and enrolled in a two-day course that ended with a written exam. I recall feeling a little nervous about the prospect of testing without extra study time after the course, but not terribly concerned. The test was straightforward and I left feeling like I was slightly better than totally unqualified to coach CrossFit. No big deal.

By contrast, taking the Firefighter I pro board examination felt like taking the Bar exam. It’s hard to say why. For context, the Firefighter I is the absolute bare minimum competency assessment for firefighters. Ideally, a Firefighter I is never on a fire ground without a Firefighter II directing the scene (although it certainly could happen, and for that reason it really does matter). Part of the reason it feels so significant is that the stakes are high. They are high because they make the difference between being an interior firefighter and staying outside the fray at our department. They are also high because of the visibility of performance. Everyone knows that the department laid out $175 for you to take the test, and everyone knows when the test happens.

The social pressure of the exam is a real factor, and one that was heavily present among the four of us taking the exam in November. But I think the reason it feels so significant for those who take the test as adult volunteers is that it marks the moment at which a person becomes qualified to do the truly dangerous work of firefighting. It shines a bright light on the reality of the risk that we are about to accept as volunteer firefighters who are also parents, partners, and people with a lot to lose if we mess up. Counter-intuitively, passing the exam may actually be the scary part.

Whatever the reason, our collective anxiety reached its peak somewhere between the end of everyone else’s Interior Firefighting module at the end of September and the exam in mid-November. Everyone, including me, spent at least twelve hours a week practicing skills, re-reading the textbook, and taking practice tests. The preparatory exam books don’t help the panic, as they somehow manage to include 900 items from across 14 chapters. Just taking the full review test one time took me about eight hours over two weeks. Then there was the handy app study guide. Each chapter included 40-80 items. I spent another two weeks going through each chapter and identifying the items I missed, then repeating the process until I correctly answered every item.

That was the easy part. The final exam is only 100 items and is a mix of recall and application. The real challenge is the practical skills exam, which includes twelve skills stations. Six are always included and six are randomly selected from among the remaining 22. These skill stations include everything from advancing and using a charged hoseline on a ladder to ropes and knots to maintaining and refilling self-contained breathing apparatus cylinders. Each one has between twelve and 25 steps, some of which have to be completed exactly in order to pass. The evaluators cannot tell participants what they have missed, or even if they have missed something. (At this point in life I can’t remember my grocery list, so this is a tall order.)

By the time the test arrived, we had passed around our anxiety like a bad cold. We all showed up on a Friday evening to take the written exam, and each of us completed one of two versions of the test. Each version had nearly mutually exclusive test items, so we truly had two different testing experiences. Among those who finished the test, there seemed to be agreement that Version A was much more straightforward that Version E. Despite our extensive preparation, everyone left feeling extreme uncertainty about their performance. It led to a universally bad night of sleep and a cranky morning the following day when we arrived at the station around 6:30 AM to gather our things and report to the testing site.

Once on site, we had to leave our belongings (including phones) in our vehicles save for our bunker gear and SCBA and report to a small staging facility. Before beginning and throughout the day, we reported to a paramedic who took our vital signs and cleared us to participate in the day’s events. A first round of blood pressure checks revealed that everyone was nervous as hell. Eventually we were all allowed to test and the festivities began. I was fortunate to be paired with a fellow firefighter from my own company who was also fortuitously “Candidate 1,” which meant that we were usually the first pair to complete each available station. Unfortunately, the speed with which 13 other pairs were able to move through was so slow that our testing day stretched from 7:00 am to 6:00 pm and we were destroyed by the end.

Our mandatory skill stations included a thorough examination of our SCBA, a demonstration of our ability to don and doff our gear, and demonstrations of our ability to pack and advance a hoseline into various floors of a building, dress and charge a supply line from a hydrant and a static water source, search a smoky building, and throw and secure a ladder. We were lucky enough to draw skills associated with refilling SCBA, which was a challenging feat at a test site with no operational SCBA cascade. My approach to this problem was to start talking about how I WOULD refill my SCBA and breathlessly continue in exhausting detail until someone asked me to stop. By the time I ran out of air in my lungs, I was staring down two evaluators with jaws ajar and no further comments for me. I asked if they wanted me to address anything else and one immediately (almost) yelled “NO THANK YOU!” I assume I won the war of attrition.

Next, we had to fight a dumpster fire without putting it out (because, of course, if we did put it out, there would be no other fire for the next 13 pairs …). This is sort of tricky. It means we had to turn on the hose for a moment while explaining what we WOULD do. Then we had to pick up a water can and put the fire out–but not put the fire out–with an extinguisher. Also a little tricky. (I look forward to not not putting out fires with extinguishers in the future.) Next, we needed to tie a series of knots and hoist things but not really hoist things with a rope. I enjoyed demonstrating the bowline, becket bend, figure 8 on a bite, clove hitch and half hitch like a Boy Scout. The evaluator was good natured and somehow made the evolution fun.

We finished with two stations that must have made the evaluators’ lives extra miserable and I really feel for them.

The first was roof ventilation. To be clear, roof ventilation is increasingly rare because it is not safe and is usually not necessary. We only do it when there is a life safety concern and we do it “quick and dirty.” It involves cutting a hole in a (usually) pitched roof with a chainsaw while standing on a roof ladder and (ideally) not cutting your legs off or falling off the side of the roof. Also ideally, we cut a 4’x4’ square louvre cut without getting off the ladder. If you have never done this, you might not realize that safely cutting a 4x4 square from a single 18” wide ladder while trying not to fall off a roof is really quite stressful. Add operating a chainsaw to that and you get … every evaluator’s worst nightmare?

Our testing site has an elevated roof prop with a fairly steep pitched fake roof that has apparently not been maintained in about 40 years. To operate it, the evaluators are supposed to attach four 4”x4’ wide strips of OSB around a metal louver panel and then we are supposed to throw a roof ladder and safely cut through the middle of each OSB strip to free the louver panel. When my testing partner and I arrived at the station, four evaluators were attempting to attach the strips to no avail. We proceeded to check out gas and chain oil and start our saws while we waited. We completed that and waited. Still no progress. So we tested the ladders. And waited.

About 40 minutes later, they concluded the roof prop was unsafe and assembled a new testing prop on an elevated flat roof out of OSB and old shipping pallets. FINALLY we were allowed to proceed. I carried my chainsaw and tools up the ladder, sounded the “roof” and started up my saw. I cut four sides that sort of resembled a parallelogram (turns out that shipping pallets are tough to navigate) and then stopped the saw and simulated a radio call to the engine company letting them know I was standing by to ventilate. The evaluator looked at me and said “get off this roof and leave your tools here.” I wasn’t sure if that meant I failed terribly or … something else? It turned out to mean that he was not at all excited about repeating this process 13 more times as dusk set in.

And, at long last, we hit our last station with some degree of relief. It was “standpipe operations,” which are a critical skill for high rise buildings (and some smaller multi-stories). We have no high rises in my community, so I have always found this to be kind of silly. But, I nonetheless loved learning this skill because our department does some work to measure and manage pressures in standpipe systems which I find fun and interesting. In any event, the standpipe skill is supposed to involve charging a standpipe through an FDC (“fire department connection”), packing a highrise pack, advancing it up one or more flights of stairs to the floor below the fire, attaching a gated wye or reducer to the standpipe, then advancing an uncharged line above the fire floor and returning to the fire floor to call for a charge and mount an attack.

Problem was … the high rise tower was positioned in such a way that no hose could be discharged in any safe direction. So, we spent three minutes taking a tour of the building with the evaluator, explaining what we WOULD do, and then departing. It was a little anticlimactic, but it marked the end and we were very excited to have completed twelve skills stations at long last.

The pro board exam rules provide that anyone who fails three or fewer skills stations can retest each one the same day. So, even though we were finished, we were required to stay on site while re-tests proceeded. The only way we knew if we had passed or failed really badly was that we were not asked to re-test a station. So, we waited anxiously. Eventually, we were recruited to start closing down stations. By day’s end, we were called back into the staging room and told whether we had passed the skill station. Mercifully, we eventually all passed the skills.

Whether we passed the written exam remains a mystery. Our tests were sent back to the state and we can expect final results in six weeks or so. In the meantime, we try to be patient and let the tax on our nervous systems abate. We have a few weeks to recover and celebrate the gratitude of the exam and its accompanying anxiety being over (for now). And, of course, respond to fire and rescue emergencies any day or hour in which they arise. We are all (almost) qualified firefighters now.

In graduate school, I once found myself explaining that I was “in the 17th grade.” All told, I went to school for 18 years of formal education, and then immediately began a professional career as a “Director.” I felt extremely educated and not very smart when I first went to work. It took the length of my career in three separate disciplines before I ever felt like I had sufficient experience to really understand the nature of how people operate and how professional teams (dis)function. Like most people, I found that my real education came from trying and failing at work.

When it comes to firefighting, trying and failing at work turns out to be a pretty bad way to get to know the profession. Pennsylvania, where I live, has historically topped the list of states with the highest number of fatalities even though many other states have higher rates of fire incidents. To serve as a fire fighter here, one must find a company and be accepted as a member. And that is all. Most fire companies do their best to train new members, but training isn’t always consistent, according to best practice, or doled out with equality. To overcome the consequences of unideal training, the state has engaged in major efforts to increase awareness, understanding, and skill over the last three decades.

Today, prospective firefighters in Pennsylvania still aren’t required to take any courses to serve their communities. But they are strongly encouraged to complete roughly 150 hours of “Essentials of Firefighting” training and to test for professional board certification. Having made the rash decision to join the fire service and realizing nearly immediately that I had no idea what I was doing, I looked forward to a more extensive educational experience. And so, even after having finished what I thought was my last formal education experience in 2009, I returned to a community college classroom in January 2025.

Three months and a few fire and CO calls after I was accepted as a new member of my local department, my first class began. I walked into a room with 34 other students who seemed to fall into one of two very distinct categories: the young (roughly 16 to 24) people who wanted to make firefighting their career and the old (almost all 41 years old, plus or minus a year) who wanted to make firefighting a part of their life alongside busy professional careers. If I thought I was going to be an anomaly, I was very wrong. (At least 15 other people were having a midlife crisis, too!)

The course was divided into four firefighting modules, two hazardous materials modules, and a CPR/First Aid course. It launched in January and ran Thursday evenings and most Saturdays through May, then started up again in September and concluded in November just before the fall pro board exam. As it happened, the first day of the course coincided with a massive house fire that engaged our entire department for a dayslong fire fighting effort. By the time I got to class, I was exhausted and still smelling like smoke. But the first day included an engaging lecture about the history of fire service presented by a passionate local fire chief. I thought I might enjoy learning.

By the end of the second week, it became clear that the biggest danger I would face in the coming nine months would be dying of boredom as I was quickly reintroduced to the hazards of higher education programs designed on the premise that seat time equals learning time. I made the mistake of reading the book and reviewing the slides in advance of class, which meant that I spent class trying desperately to keep myself awake but not so awake that I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep when I got home. It was a delicate balance. I found myself wondering what I had been like as a lecturer and if this was my penance for not being more interesting.

Having taught several courses myself, I really felt for the instructors. They are asked to present content that is less than riveting and, worse, not very aligned with what actually happens in fire departments and therefore not even a reflection of their own experience. I taught people a lot of theory that, approximately 20 years on, is probably not even accurate. I also taught a range of people from those who majored in my content area to those just meeting a distribution requirement. They also had to present the content to an audience that ranged from extremely inexperienced (and sometimes unfocused) to advanced professionals. Moreover, they had to do it during times when they probably wanted to be at home with their families, too.

Our Saturdays were spent mostly waiting for a chance to practice skills that we should ideally have been practicing several times over several classes with skilled instructors. Don’t get me wrong; very important skills are a part of the course. Having come to believe that time is one’s most precious asset, I found these days excruciating. I wondered how realistic this skill practice could possibly be, and how I might experience them when the stakes were considerably higher. It all seemed so insufficient. Over the months, I found myself spending my down time redesigning the course in my mind and imagining what might be possible if it were more aligned with the needs of people with jobs and families and an inexplicable drive toward service.

By April, I was ready to accelerate through and get the work done, so I signed up for a weeklong module in July that would culminate in the pro broad exam and put me out of my misery so I could focus on learning and practicing with my home department. Like all plans, that one pretty much exploded on impact when it met the surprise announcement of the last SEALFit crucibles ever on July 25-27, 2025. I had to cancel the testing plan, but I still wanted to finish the last learning module ASAP.

In an even more astonishing display of disorganization, I heard by word of mouth two days ahead of the course that the published dates were wrong, and that I would need to report to the class two days earlier than expected. Nevermind that I still had a full time job and four children, plus the looming specter of the hardest mental, physical, and emotional endurance test of my life. Even if I made it through the course without injuries or burns, my children might forget my name and my wife might file a missing person report. My clients might conclude that I had given up on them.

This is the kind of moment when a person has to come to terms with the naked truth that no matter how self reliant we try to be, we sometimes must ask other people for grace and support. Thankfully, many people were willing to be flexible and I got nothing but support and encouragement from my family, friends, and colleagues. It was deeply moving, and it also raised the stakes in my own mind for what I was responsible for doing with that understanding and encouragement, which was to deliver. Pass the final exam, complete the structure burn without incident, be organized so I could leave my family in the best state as I boarded the plane for my event. The stakes felt very high.

Ultimately, I was both lucky and prepared. The rest of that week is recorded history. When I got back from California, I could spend my time catching up on work and family life. One season of commitments gave way to another. I spent August and September focusing on a major transition at work and felt a new wave of progress in my life. It felt good.

Then October hit. The month was slated to begin with a fire dynamics and flashover simulation that became such a scheduling nightmare that it never transpired (ah, state agencies and their very consistent inability to navigate logistics). Then I was five weeks out from the pro board exam and I found that I needed to excavate everything I had learned between January and July out of the recesses of my memory. I decided to start with some test items in an old practice exam. On the first try, I scored a 54% where a minimum of 70 was required. Gulp. Five weeks to fix that and memorize 26 skill stations. Another dead sprint awaited.

I have decided not to count the very first firefighting drill nights I attended in the two weeks after I joined the department. That’s not because they weren’t helpful, but because they were possibly the most traumatic way to learn about some of the things that fire fighters really do.

Some people, like my former self, may think that firefighting’s biggest danger is being burned to a crisp in a blazing structure fire. But it turns out that burning to death usually isn’t even in the top three things that take fire fighters’ lives. The top reason is sudden cardiac arrest from overexertion–by a long shot. Well over 40% of deaths are attributable here. The next two reasons are typically being struck by an object or a vehicle. After that, exposure.

Exposure to what? Every year, all active firefighters must be re-certified in hazardous materials operations because those exposures are usually hazardous materials that cause immediate harm or long-term cancer. Sometimes those materials are byproducts of combustion, but many times they are not. I happened to begin my tenure on the first day of haz-mat re-certification, where I arrived with zero training and therefore zero “re” learning.

The instructor began with a refresher lecture, which was beyond Greek to me. He dutifully reviewed haz-mat labeling systems, which looked like a mysterious series of multi-colored diamonds and numbers and letters that somehow amounted to something terrible (“methly-ethyl-bad stuff”). I wished I remembered even a tiny bit of chemistry, but it turns out that 1999 was an impossibly long time ago from a stoichiometric point of view. This was basically hieroglyphics. Then he turned attention to an ERG, which is not an Employee Resource Group in the fire service–it’s an Emergency Response Guide.

My main takeaway was that somehow a firefighter is supposed to notice that a toxic substance may be present and then have the presence of mind to look up its chemical name and plan an appropriate mitigation response accordingly. Whatever I thought about fire fighting before, I definitely did not expect it to involve so much chemical awareness or proximity. I certainly didn’t expect to be one of the people who might happen upon a toxic chemical and have some idea what to do about it.

The next week was our practical. This time we skipped the slide show and jumped on our apparatus for a short trip behind the station for exercises related to possible haz-mat responses. I was assigned to the first response team. Our crew chief selected one person to conduct an evaluation of the scene and inadvertently walked directly through the toxic chemical spill. They both died immediately. A deputy then had to conduct his own investigation and concluded that the spilled chemical was ammonia. Based upon the ERG, it is classified under “Gases - Toxic and/or Corrosive” and listed as “may be fatal if inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through skin”. Also critical: “May react violently with water.” (WHAT?!?). Wear SCBA.

What is SCBA? Self-contained breathing apparatus (like its cousin, self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, SCUBA, with which many more people are familiar). Having been an active member for only 11 days, I had not been trained on how to use an SCBA device. I did have a mask, but I didn’t know how to put it on. I did not know how to attach an air cylinder to it. And I felt there was a better than 50/50 chance I might suffocate myself trying. I therefore concluded I was extremely likely to die of ammonia exposure in my first training exercise, possibly resulting in the shortest fire fighting career in history.

Very fortunately, the ammonia was fake and the exercise was primarily designed to demonstrate how cavalier people tend to be around haz-mat spills. Our dead fire fighters were allowed to get back up and observe the rest of the drill. The second team learned from our foibles and was immediately squared away with proper PPE, an accountability board, organized mitigation techniques and a systematic approach to ensuring the toxic spill was handled safely and efficiently.

On the whole, I was extremely impressed with how quickly people took in the lessons of the evening, addressed their attitudes and behavior, and adjusted their approach based on a combination of what they already knew and had just learned. Only rarely have I seen a team able to mobilize and apply learning that quickly and collaboratively. Even sports teams struggle to adjust when they meet adversaries that don’t behave as expected. Professional teams almost always struggle through learning processes that are impeded by ego and competition. This group was different.

Thankfully, I made it through our first major training exercise unscathed and slightly wiser about the nature of fire fighting. It was my first lesson in how much of a misnomer “fire fighting” really is. Fire fighters do train and orient themselves toward fighting fires, which can be catastrophic but are relatively rare. But they must also take responsibility for addressing an almost unlimited number of eventualities that can vary from retrieving high things to evaluating and evacuating toxic gases.

This isn’t too much different than the reality of life in general: we’re deeply trained on some subset of things. But life demands that we find some way of becoming experts on many others: health, relationships, automobile mechanics, travel logistics, household operations, parenting, pet ownership, plant growing, lawn maintenance, and so forth. Sometimes we educate ourselves and become highly proficient with these things, but sometimes we outsource responsibility to others.

We get ourselves into trouble when we outsource too much to others and fail to have a basic understanding of things that really matter. I knew that if I was going to be successful, I’d have to become much more proficient with many things I had long been outsourcing to others.

So right off the bat, becoming a fire fighter posed a big question for me: was I still mentally flexible enough to develop basic proficiency in several new domains at once? I was about to find out.

Part I: Backstory

Where I live, there are no paid firefighters. There are, however, fires. And other emergencies that require more resourcing than our police can offer (all due respect to our police, who have repeatedly proven themselves world class). That means we must assemble a group of self-selected volunteers willing to be trained and certified to fight fires, handle other emergencies, and respond to calls at all hours every day of the year. It’s a tall order, and not many people are willing to do it. So one day in the middle of 2024, after what frankly amounts to not very much thought at all in comparison to the gravity of the decision, I set up a meeting with our newly installed fire chief and expressed my interest in joining.

If you read my first series, you might be thinking that this is simply a reflection of a broader problem I have with being “completely insane.” (Many thanks to all of those who read the Kokoro segments and provided that specific phrase in their feedback.) Maybe it is. I think it’s more of a necessary evolution toward spending more time on things that actually matter to me because I need it for my psyche, and because I can no longer fathom living Thoreau’s “life of quiet desperation” while also raising children and expecting something different for each of them.

When I think back on my decision to become a firefighter at 40 years old with three young children and one on the way, at a moment when my professional life was entering its most uncertain period yet, it seems paradoxically foolish and inevitable. Strangely, I did not feel stuck or unhappy with the choices I had made in my life up until then. If anything, the opposite was true. It was as if I were on a roll with making choices that aligned with my true nature and I simply couldn’t stop. My life was very full and I didn’t feel I had extra time that needed a hobby.

I guess it was a midlife crisis of sorts. I’m not entirely sure what I thought before, but now I see a midlife crisis as a real thing that manifests for anyone who has held onto someone else’s idea of success for too long. It might even be a developmental phase that everyone experiences, and misalignment exacerbates the pain of feeling that half of life might be over. Some people feel compelled to break all the rules, as if it’s the rules’ fault they were followed. Some people just feel sad. A lot feel angry. I felt excruciatingly restless.

I felt as if I had missed my calling, even though I didn’t know what that calling might have been. And, worse, I thought that the path I had followed was my calling. Everyone else seemed to think so. Of course I would go to college, graduate school. Become a part of the thinking class. It’s funny that so many smart people subscribe to the value of an elite thinking class, even though participating in such a thing is a very good way for other peoples’ ideas to infiltrate how you think, what you think, and eventually what you think about yourself. What a dangerous game.

It’s fair to say that my own journey was very long and my lessons were revealed for a long time before I recognized them. I once heard a wellbeing lecturer describe the body’s signals as beginning with whispers that eventually become statements and ultimately screams when unattended. The intuitive mind’s signals are the same. The whispers aren’t always clear about the underlying problem; they only signal that there is one. Eventually, I decided to pay attention to the anger and frustration that slowly welled up and eventually overran the dams.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll write more about what I think led to this moment, in my personal and professional worlds. Each installment will focus on a dimension and try to make sense of what role it played.

But for today, which is almost exactly one year on, I’ll talk about what happened in the twelve months after the fire company accepted my application.

I didn’t have to tell my wife that I wanted to do it. A few months before I called the chief, I’d accepted an invitation to take our kids on a tour of a neighboring station. Our whole family attended, and we got a comprehensive overview of how the department works, and where all the fun is had. This station has a unique two-story fire pole (!!!) and also a combination of paid and volunteer firefighters who work together to cover a wide range of events in the town. Complete with a kitchen, bunk rooms, a large fitness studio, and personal laundry space, it’s set up for living and working. The apparatus bay has its own functional fitness set-up and is filled with apparatus marked by the former chief’s iconic deadhead homage. It has a real sense of personality. Suffice it to say: no one thought that the kids were most excited by the tour.

Later on, I was introduced to a few of the firefighters in my own community and stopped by for a tour. While our building is impressive and beautiful, it’s also quite different. Its design reflects the voluntary nature of its staff. They took me through the building and finally up to its mezzanine level, where there is a sprawling confined space maze. The maze is set up such that fire fighters can work through it while observers can watch from above. I took a look at the maze, filled with tiny compartments, a morass of wires, ropes, hose, and miscellaneous entrapments, and inquired what it was for. “We put on all of our gear and practice navigating it.” WHAT?!? Surely that could not be true. I didn’t think I could navigate it in street clothes and I’m only 5’7”. And that’s when I realized that I actually had no idea what firefighters actually do.

If I wanted to join, I’d need to pass a physical agility test (PAT) in under four minutes and undergo a physical exam. No problem, I thought. I do CrossFit. But you know what I don’t wear during a WOD? Fire gloves. And usually, unless it’s a serious burner, I can see the whole time. These barriers turned out not to be difficult, but I immediately understood I would need to develop a whole new dimension of dexterity and a more advanced sense of spatial reasoning (i.e., I would need to believe that I could fit through anything, which could be called “reasoning” or it could be called “magical thinking”).

After I completed these assessments, I was given a briefing on how to don personnel protective equipment, then issued a set of turnout clothes and a pager. “Next time the pager goes off, you come here as quickly as possible, put your clothes on, and get on an engine. Make sure you wear a seatbelt.” That’s…it? In addition to my PPE, I got a screw driver, a wirecutter, a folding spanner wrench (for spanning things?), a flashlight, and a long piece of webbing. Not wanting to seem like a total idiot, I decided not to ask what the tools were for. But that’s when I realized: I still had no idea what firefighters do.

In what I now realize was a miracle, the first pager call I responded to was a mutual aid call to a neighboring jurisdiction for a working structure fire. A plumber accidentally lit a fire in the basement of a balloon construction home, which meant it quickly traveled up the walls all the way to the attic and was burning out the kitchen cabinets when we arrived. (A balloon construction home doesn’t have any dividing beams between floors, so fire can easily propagate all the way to the top of the house and through the whole structure. Thank you, chapter five of the Essentials of Firefighting. Now I know one thing.)

We pulled up on the scene to something that looked more like a Phish concert than a fire ground. There were apparatus and hoses everywhere, and it looked as if it had snowed on the property. Smoke was coming through the venting at the top of the house and two dozen firefighters were standing outside looking at it. About a minute after we walked up, six firefighters emerged from the front door, also covered in snow, with air packs screaming. Six more went in. No one had a hose but everyone had an axe or a device that sort of looked like a pick axe and a claw hammer were stuck together.

Someone walked up to me and asked for water. Uh, like, a hose? No, dumb*ss. A bottle of water. It’s kind of hot in there because THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE! (Yeah, so then shouldn’t somebody around here have a water hose?). I scrambled over to our engine to find some water and brought back an armful. Everyone in a facemask peeled it off and grabbed something to drink. They looked gassed. I wondered what they were doing in there.

Mercifully, the pump operator gave me a job to do. He handed me a field decontamination kit and asked me to set it up so we could start hosing the foam (OH!) off of our guys when they came out of the house. Less mercifully, he then walked away. I didn’t understand how to use the decontamination kit or attach it to a water source so I tried to calculate how much trouble I would get in for touching the pump operator panel versus how upset people would be if they had to go home wearing foam pants. He came back, amused, and helped me attach a small hose to the panel, then run the device out into a yard so we could have a station running efficiently.

As people emerged from the house, they described the interior scene: there was fire in the walls behind the cabinets, so everyone was going into the kitchen and yanking the cabinets and drywall out until they ran out of air, then rotating. I asked if they found the fire and put it out, but no one seemed to know. In short order, we were released from the scene. About four hours later, another call came in for a fire at the same house. It had reignited and needed another round of effort. At the weekly drill meeting a few days later, I had to ask: isn’t our job to put the fire out? (Right. Still didn’t know what firefighters do.)

Two months later, we had our biggest fire in years in the early morning of a frigid January day. An outlet overloaded and set a three-season room on fire. It burned for a long time before the smoke reached a detector, and by that time, the family was fast asleep. The alarm company notified dispatch, which didn’t get enough detail to send police or fire “emergent” (lights and sirens can cause more problems than they help address, so we use them as little as possible). Two police officers entered the building and saved one of its residents. When the first engine arrived, the nearest hydrant was frozen so there was insufficient water to contain the fire before it really took off. By the time firefighters could get inside, the structure was fully involved and it wasn’t possible to save the last occupant.

It was a somber introduction to the reality of fire fighting. I spent some of the day helping in the station, and in the later afternoon I joined a crew using water to control the still burning fire within the collapsed parts of the house. I had never seen anything like it. But I will never forget the first time I put water on fire and worked with the team to make sure the work was done right. That night, I took the first class in almost 200 hours of training that I would undertake over the next nine months. Finally, I might understand what firefighters actually do.

In two weeks, I’ll launch a series about becoming a volunteer Firefighter. Please keep reading, letting me know what you think, and sharing this channel!

Part B

Lesson 3: Mental flexibility is as important as physical flexibility.

Even someone who has dedicated themselves to completing Kokoro must confess that the effort is rather absurd. Why would anyone subject themselves to buckets of water to the face while performing leg lifts on a gravel lot in the middle of the desert? Even someone planning to serve in a combat zone is unlikely to find themselves enduring a similar requirement. Even as a fire fighter, I am never hoisting a log over my head, let alone doing sit-ups with one on my chest. But the evolutions are not tactical training. In some ways, they are specifically designed to cause people to question why they’re there and just exactly what they hope to accomplish.

After 12 hours of work, we boarded a bus for a 45 minute ride out to Cleveland National Forest where we were to ruck up a long segment of the Palomar Mountain trail. (During the event, we were not given any information about where we were going or what we would be doing; we learned the specifics later.) We carried with us ruck packs that were 35-45lbs and “weapons” improvised from 2” diameter PVC pipes cut to six feet lengths and filled with sand. Our trek up in the moonless dark night involved traveling in two ranks at a fast clip while reciting William Ernest Henley’s famous “Invictus” poem.

The poem is four quatrains written in iambic tetrameter, which amounts to eight rhyming pairs that sound like a rhythm, but don’t follow a cadence like a march. The result is something that is on one hand inspiring, but on the other challenging to recite while rucking up a steep hill. Some people arrived familiar with the poem; others learned it on the spot. We recited it dozens of times–long enough to remember but also enough to start trying to dissect every word. Out of the night that covers me, it begins. How apropos. Black as the pit from pole to pole. It could not be more accurate on this night, literally as much as metaphorically.

The poem is best known for its final two lines: I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul. But for me, the most moving statement comes at the end of the first quatrain: I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul. I had quoted it dozens of times before this night. Somehow, even though I was quickly growing to resent the poem, its author, all of the people who designed Kokoro, and whatever gods may be for the existence of Palomar Mountain, I also achieved a new level of clarity about why that line resonated with me so much and why I might have been on that trail, on that mountain, on the night, on this earth.

Somewhere in the middle of the night, it (once again) occurred to me just how dumb this whole exercise really was. I wasn’t making myself any fitter. There was no need to hike up a steep mountain in the middle of the night, breathlesslessly reciting a poem ad nauseum. Certainly not when the whole point of a hike is to appreciate the nature around you. If you can’t even see nature, and you can’t be quiet and listen to it, what exactly are you doing?

You are demonstrating the strength of your resolve. You are demonstrating that no matter how miserable you are, and no matter how great the feat in front of you, you can remain focused on your task. You can prevail against resistance. And that resistance mostly comes from the stories your mind makes up when your body is uncomfortable. When your body is uncomfortable, you discover exactly how clever and shrewd your mind can be. Like the little devil sitting on your shoulder, it tells you what you want to hear: You don’t need to do this. You already know who you are. You already got what you came for. You shouldn’t do this to your body. You’re too old for this.

These messages came flooding in. I grew resentful. As the night wore on, we were somehow woefully behind schedule and needed to pick up the pace. No matter that we were already spread apart and struggling to keep up. We need to go faster. And still faster. When we mercifully reached the summit, there was no stunning view, but a truck turnaround. We were invited to huddle up to avoid hypothermia while we took ten minutes to wolf down our disgusting Meals Ready to Eat (MRE). I couldn’t stomach another one. I was sure I’d puke. How absurdly foolish this exercise was. How absurdly foolish was I?

It was time to go back down, which I told myself would be the reward for going up. We’d amble down and recover before we boarded the bus back to camp. But our ruck quickly turned to a run, and we found ourselves jogging down the steep pot-hole laden trail with steep cambers just asking for a twisted ankle. The return trip unleashed an entirely new set of mental messages. This is unnecessary. This is dangerous. This is going to hurt somebody. This is capricious. They aren’t looking out for our safety. This is a test to see how stupid I am. At least my resentment sped me up.

At long last, we returned to the bus and poured ourselves back into our seats. We were allowed to put our sweatshirts on for the cold bus ride back. People struggled to keep their eyes open, but my mind was too enraged to relax. As I fell back into the uncomfortable school bus seat, though, I recalled the overnight of the 24-hour crucible and how I’d been packed into the back seat of a Tahoe and couldn’t stretch my legs out. They cramped badly and I was in so much pain that I was sure I couldn’t climb out of the car when we parked. This bus, for its broken windows and threadbare seats, was comparatively luxurious.

And then I detached from my outrage and just watched my unhelpful thoughts float by. I didn’t have the energy to hold onto them anymore, and letting go of them was suddenly easy. It was a moment of enlightenment. I have always struggled with feeling enraged by even the smallest injustices. I sometimes find myself getting so wound up that I cannot let go of a behavior or interaction for days or weeks or more. The insight flashed in front of me: stop working harder on it. Just let go of it. Emotions cannot be controlled by cognition. They can only be managed. As Dan Millman put it in The Way of the Peaceful Warrior: let it flow, and let it go.

By the time we returned to the camp, I felt a deeper sense of peace and a renewed focus on the work ahead. Out of the blue, a classmate who had made it through the night announced that he was going to be a DOR. The rest of the class was stunned. “I got what I came for,” he said, eerily echoing my own mental chatter from overnight. “I have already gotten so much from this experience, I don’t need to keep going. I feel it in my soul.” My jaw probably dropped, if I still had control of it. “No!” I couldn’t help but try to persuade him, “Don’t believe that story! It’s just your mind playing tricks on you!” But it was too late. The sly fox of the uncomfortable mind had already gotten him.

Lesson 4: Someone else is hurting worse.

In parallel to the SEALFit crucible series, founder Mark Divine and his long-time collaborator Rob Ord have developed Unbeatable Mind, a training system that bears the same name as one of Divine’s books. It is often described in shorthand as mental toughness training, which is not wrong. But it is incomplete. The Unbeatable Mind framework immediately appealed to me because it outlines the dimensions of a human holistically, including physical, mental, emotional, intuitive, and integrated dimensions. It is premised on the idea that each of these must be focused and trained with intention because none can be healthy in isolation. It also incorporates a few essential strategies that make the difference between aspiring to accomplish things, and accomplishing anything. One of those, well-known to SEALFit crucible participants, is the “Big Four.” These are:

1. Breath control

2. Positive thinking

3. Visualization

4. Micro goals

Crucible candidates find themselves in highly stressful situations and they must constantly make the decision between giving into the overwhelm and choosing to hang on until their bodies give out. What do they do with their minds while their bodies are suffering? They either listen to the pernicious narratives of the uncomfortable mind, or they engage the Big Four. I credit my practice with breathing and shifting from negative thinking to positive reframing when not stressed with its ability to work when I am stressed. It’s not an accident that when I sat down, took some cleansing breaths, and had a positive insight about the comfort of the school bus, that I automatically started to let go and visualize myself continuing on despite the absurdity of it all. I did not have to finish the event. I just needed to finish the next evolution. In fact, I really only needed to finish the first exercise in the first evolution. Actually, I just had to get in the water and swim the first lap.

Sometimes, though, a positive thought is extremely difficult to come by. No matter how you slice it, you hurt. During the fourth evolution of the day, I not only felt exhausted from field exercises but I also badly sprained my ankle. It was not good. There was no silver lining. As I sat on a cot trying to muster the energy and courage to put my boots back on, I felt the overwhelming friction and I wondered if I was being foolish, going on with what could be a broken ankle. I am not sure how long I sat still–although I know it was too long, as I started to get a heckling from the coaches about getting my rear end back on the grinder. But as I searched my thoughts, I was reminded of everyone on my team. There were two shoulder injuries. There was a foot injury. Someone had really gnarly tears in their hands. Someone else had active tendonitis. Triceps cramps. Leg cramps. Large and growing blisters. In full accounting, my problem was small in that I started the event in relatively excellent condition.

I sprang off the cot, threw my clothes back on and joined my teammates on the grinder for what turned out to be one of our strongest evolutions yet. I wasn’t moving very fast. But I was moving. They were moving, so it was my responsibility to move. It was the least I could do.

That wasn’t the end of it, of course. It wasn’t too long before we assembled teams for the litter races, a part of the crucible that involves packing a field stretcher with six sandbags and racing it up and down a dirt course. My team was assigned to me based on height, so we were at an immediate disadvantage because the shortest people (“Smurf patrol”) are often the smallest people which means they often have to work extra hard to manage the weight and run against taller people with longer legs and more muscle capacity. No matter. (Adversity clarifies, remember?) What really made it tough was the dysfunctional ankle I brought and the cramped up legs my other Kokoro leader struggled to manage.

Our team was so far behind that it became comedic. No matter how hard we pushed, it seemed there was nothing we could do. Historically, I have loved litter races. I have a strong grip and I don’t mind jogging with weight, but this was different. It was not fun. And I was both extremely sore and sorely disappointed. To add insult to injury, the coaches relished in punishing the losers. (I had never done a “no hands burpee” before, and I plan to never do one again.) Maintaining positivity was not going to happen. All I could do was encourage my team and remind everyone that although we didn’t have strength, speed, or a chance in hell of saving ourselves, we had courage and spirit and they couldn’t take that away from us. When the evolution finally ended, I was forced to accept it as a weak performance that I would never get back.

By now I wasn’t cowing to the inclination to feel sorry for myself. I was trying to find the exact balance between accepting that which is out of my control and pushing myself to give everything I had without holding back even when the outcome seems inevitably miserable. In that mind state, I joined my team for another round of log PT and we brought enough energy to send the twelve-hour team out with a bang. Afterward, two members of my team expressed their gratitude for my leadership and suddenly my recollection of the afternoon’s evolutions shifted. I had been thinking about myself. Constantly reminded of my ankle and what a misfortune it was to try to run through the dirtbike trails with one fourth of a 100lb stretcher, I really wasn’t thinking about their experiences. That all changed when they shared how tired and ready to give up they were.

Sometimes the problem in front of you isn’t the problem at all. When it comes to doing hard work for a long time, many bodies can handle it. But training a mind to navigate the exhaustion and pain is a different process than training the body (even if they often happen in parallel) and the problem in front of me at the litter races wasn’t winning the race. It would have been nice to be something other than dead last, of course. Maybe we would have had a much-needed break, or at least endured fewer armless or legless burpees. The real problem to be solved was helping a group of people who had long since passed what they believed was their maximum capacity to dig deep and find a way to keep going. I thought I was hurting, but in many ways, they were hurting worse.

If the message weren’t clear enough, it was reinforced for me by my fellow Kokoro classmates who stepped up and carried each other’s gear, encouraged and even literally pushed one another to keep pace. After the event, those who doubled the weight they were carrying said they discovered that helping others actually helped them more than anything else. It reinforced their sense of purpose by shifting the focus away from their needs and towards others. The tool of focusing on others is far from a platitude about a giving mindset. It is a very powerful tool for refocusing a struggling mind in a way that reduces the perception of pain and unlocks a whole new level of possibility.

Part A

Kokoro is a Japanese word that can be translated to “heart and mind merged in action” or “heart, mind, and spirit in harmony,” tapping into the true essence of one’s being. The 50-hour crucible requires a thoroughly trained body, but the body is rarely the limitation that impedes someone from completing the event. Nevertheless, somewhere between 20% and 70% of every class drop out before the event is over. Many, even the ultra fit, don’t make it through the first 24 hours. It is not the body, but the mind and the spirit that fail to withstand the challenge.

I trained my body thoroughly and with extreme intensity for ten weeks to prepare for Kokoro. But in reality, I trained intensively for three years to bring myself to a place where I could secure a 50-hour crucible. My physical training began in early 2023, and it waxed and waned over three years. My mental training gained momentum and grew more intense through a series of physical challenges and under the guidance of a yearlong facilitated Unbeatable Team experience that pushed me to develop an intentional breathing practice, a set of daily rituals, and an intensely clear and disciplined focus on my passion, principles, and purpose as a human being.

Although I tried to meditate when I was a teenager, I never experienced success with it until I began to subtly shift my daily practices using these tools. When I was younger, I operated at two speeds: as fast as possible, and asleep. (And I slept really well!) But I began to see the limitations of this approach, and it became obvious that operating at maximum speed all the time could never yield the results I was seeking. I thought that going faster would mean I could accomplish more, but the opposite proved true. Eventually, even the ultraproductive aren’t producing things of value or of sufficient value to carry them very far. That was me, and my effort to train my mind and tap into my emotions in a healthier way made the gap between what I wanted to accomplish and what I was doing painfully clear.

Each year, the SealFit crucible presented an opportunity not just to test myself physically, but to find the frontiers of my mind, where my unexplored assumptions and beliefs were limiting my ability at the gym, at work, and in life. This year was no different, although the challenge presented by each successive crucible has been exponential, not linear. Accordingly, the lessons I take from each are exponentially more complex and meaningful.

Distilling these lessons in a world where everyone is looking for the “Five Things that Will Change Your Life” has been thorny and delicate and, even a month out from the event, is still evolving in my own consciousness. The further I get from the event, the less detailed my recollection of it. Being awake for nearly 60 hours induced a dreamlike state that made it difficult for some time to discern between wakefulness and sleep. That makes the reality of the event in my memory more of a question than a clear recollection.

Fortunately, I have made an effort each year to capture everything I could possibly recall within 24 hours of the event. Those notes together with the photos from the event have helped keep my memory intact and separate actual memories from subsequent dreams (or nightmares, as the case may be). The reflections I’ve captured here are a summation of what I took away from my initial reflection, what I have seen play out in my life in the days since, and what I feel is different about me now than the way I thought and felt prior to the event. For clarity, I have organized them by theme rather than in order of personal significance.

1. Adversity clarifies.

The crucible event is extremely physically demanding. There is nowhere to hide. Dogging events only results in more work, which creates more fatigue, which only makes things harder. In my case, I rarely found myself on teams that were able to pull an advantage. That meant in most of the evolutions, my team was doing most of the work, or close to it. And that work added up. The way that work added up manifested for me not in feeling that I couldn’t keep going or giving it everything I had, but in the creeping self-protective thoughts. After a day of evolutions and a night of grueling rucking, I found myself feeling “fine” but nevertheless questioning why I had decided to spend my weekend this way. I began to hear myself thinking that the event was foolish, that doing all of this work for no particular purpose was dumb, and that maybe if I was really lucky I’d have an injury that would give me an excuse to go home. Well, it’s funny how much our thoughts can manifest in reality–even when we don’t want them to.

After a particularly poor showing in the swimming pool, which left me feeling relieved that I had made it but also disappointed that all of my effort throughout the training period hadn’t yielded the outcome that I had hoped, we paused for breakfast. I ate my breakfast quietly, thinking about how I might transition my mind from these negative thoughts to more positive, productive, and focused thoughts. I felt I had resolved to do better, and we began an evolution that included running (e.g., sprints, fireman carries) and bodyweight (e.g. bear crawl, crab walk) races. After a few rounds, my team continued to struggle and I began to cramp badly. At one point, my triceps cramped so intensely that I couldn’t move my arms, and an attempt at push-ups left me in tears of pain. The negative thoughts came flooding back in. What a stupid idea this had been. Why would any sane person do this?

In the next race, we ran about a quarter of a mile around a big field and tried to beat our earlier time as best we could. I tried to run hard, but also stay with our slowest runner and resolved to focus on helping him instead of thinking about how much fun I was not having. Just as we rounded the corner back to the group, I yelled out to everyone else to cheer for our last person. In that moment, I rolled my ankle on a hidden tree root and came down hard on my right leg. I felt a shock of pain run through my ankle and into my leg and I knew I had hurt it, if not broken it. I fell to the ground, and my training partner beckoned me to get up and keep going, but I knew I could not. Not then, anyway. I needed to wait for the pain to pass.

Moments later, the coaches were on me, evaluating whether I was broken enough to send back to camp. The EMT arrived and put me in the Tahoe, which he drove back to the medical tent. He looked at the ankle and offered to use the very limited medical tape he had to try to stabilize it. After a few minutes of icing, we taped it up and I hobbled around. It was excruciating. But somehow the specter of possibly getting my “wish” to be medically dropped landed so hard that I couldn’t accept it. I realized then that I did not want to quit, that I would not quit. There was nothing different about the pain I faced holding a plank and the pain I faced from an injury. As long as my body would move, I would keep moving. I resolved then to stop entertaining my “This is dumb” thoughts and replace them with “As long as I can, I will.”

2. Keep showing up.

In a 50-hour event with no sleep, it is not possible to take on the whole event at once. Thinking about the next evolution, and the evolution after that, and so forth is a recipe for failure. In marathon running, the maxim is to “run the mile you’re in” rather than think about whether you’ll be able to keep up the pace for the next 26 miles, or how you navigate the hill coming at mile 23. Those miles and challenges will inevitably arrive, and you have a choice. One path is to run them over and over again in your mind–which is not only intensely fatiguing, but also draws you out of the moment you’re actually experiencing right now. The other path is to be where you are, remain deeply present and undistracted by what has already happened and what may happen in the future, and take on each new challenge as it arises. In this way, you take on each challenge only once with your full energy and attention.

It’s easy to make these lessons a glib recycling of maxims from all manner of self help experts. I know I’m not the only one to learn these lessons. But the thing that is truly different now is that Kokoro made it abundantly obvious that knowing is not even on the same planet as doing, and doing is not in the same universe as doing while at my absolute worst, most fatigued, and in my least optimal state. At the end of the day, the way I performed in this setting is the truest reflection of myself and it demonstrates what is working and what needs to be changed about my mindset, my behavior, and myself holistically if I am to keep growing.

What worked about this version of me was to let go of each previous evolution and be intensely present in the current task. Everything I did could have been better, and under the circumstances of my daily life I would have picked apart each one, looking for necessary improvements and telling myself that the analysis was an essential part of getting better. But in this situation, I discovered that post-hoc analysis has a limited place. Spending too much time on it, and not enough time on what is happening right now only cheapens the real experience and the ultimate learning opportunity. In the same way, letting go of the uncertainty (and, in some cases, the full awareness) of upcoming evolutions also allowed me to give everything I was presently capable of giving to the work at hand. Somehow, all of this made everything feel easier.

I have frequently found myself in the middle of a challenging workout feeling as if I can give no more. I am constantly grinding against my mind’s desire to preserve energy and push harder to go faster or lift heavier. In those moments, I think the end cannot come fast enough and I wonder how I will hold up any longer. And then, just as quickly as the fatigue comes on, it seems to disappear and I suddenly wonder if I was ever actually tired at all. Often, I am surprised by how quickly my body bounces back and is ready to take on the next challenge. During Kokoro, I found that continuing to push in each evolution as if it were the last didn’t tax me. Paradoxically, it set me up to feel satisfied with my performance and able to let go and move on to the next evolution, even if I still wasn’t sure my body would hold up. I discovered what it really feels like to just simply keep showing up.

***To manage length, I have divided Lessons into two parts. Next week will be the six and final installment of this series, which will conclude with Part B. Thank you for reading!***

Going In

Going into Kokoro, I felt a spectrum of emotions and held several competing ideas in my mind. One stream of consciousness was an acute awareness of how little time I’d had to prepare and how mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted I was from the preceding eleven weeks of not only massively increasing my training volume, but also continuing to navigate added strain of completing firefighter training, keeping up with health coaching certification, serving current clients, and laying the foundation for a new business venture–all while adding a fourth child to our family and transitioning from a school year schedule into a much more nebulous summer with our older boys. I had a real question about whether that strain would rear its ugly head and interfere with my ability to complete the event.

A second stream of consciousness swirled around my physical readiness. In some sense, I was significantly stronger and more prepared for endurance than I had ever been, and I knew that would position me well for the physical elements of the event. At the same time, my incremental progress in swimming and very limited time to practice running under fatigue worried me. I moved from five dead hang pull-ups to eight or nine continuous pull-ups, which seemed like remarkable progress (especially since I first started working on them in 2022 when I could not do a single one!). I went from an 18 minute 500m swim to 12:06. But I had no time to practice pull-ups with a 10lb pack or swim under fatigue.

Yet a third stream of consciousness centered on all of the ways that the universe seemed to align to bring me to this moment. My son could have experienced birth complications, but he and my wife were healthy. I could have overtrained and burned out, but I did not. I could have been injured, dehydrated, or burned during firefighter training in 90 degree Pennsylvania summer heat, but I was fine. My last-minute flights across the country could have gone sideways, but they were on time. Work could have demanded my attention during these other activities, but it was unusually quiet. Even my typically critical reflections on myself and my effort could have put me in an overly self-conscious state, but I found that I was easily coaching myself to trust my training because I truly did all that I possibly could have given the circumstances.

All of this is to say that while I wanted to walk into the event with confidence and conviction, I instead walked in with ambivalence and uncertainty. So I responded in the best way I knew how, which was to try to help everyone else as much as possible, and give them any benefit from my previous experience that I could. I invited everyone to hear a few things that I thought would help understand the expectations of the coaches and the event, then led some stretching and breathwork. When Coach Mel arrived to check everyone in, she told me that only 20 women had secured Kokoro in its 19 year history, and that if I succeeded, I’d be the 21st. Only 20 women over 64 previous classes had pulled off what I was about to attempt. Suddenly the stakes heightened and the significance of the challenge ahead was irrefutably obvious. I became aware of my body tensing as well as overwhelming emotions.

Then the coaches pulled up and addressed the class with immediate reproach for the manner in which we lined up our bags and water bottles. I thought I had done us a service by encouraging everyone to be orderly in how they set up their belongings, but apparently we weren’t orderly enough. The coaches barked at us to fall into “push-up position” which amounts to a high plank. During the plank, which we held for some time, I faced my first test of resolve. The thing about a plank hold is that it feels easy until the small muscles of the shoulder and abdomen start to fatigue, and then suddenly it feels overwhelmingly taxing and impossible to hold without losing control of the arms and legs. There are two choices: yield to the pain and fall to your knees, or resolve to hold it until your body stops following your commands and falls to the ground. In retrospect, I realize this is a metaphor for the entire event. There are always two choices: give in to the messages from your brain, or let go of the messages and work until your physical body gives out.

Before I recognized that metaphor, I was simply in the moment. I resolved that I would hold the plank, no matter how long, and no matter what anyone else did, until my arms gave out and I crashed face first into the gravel. I felt a flash of fire run through my body from my quadriceps to my shoulders. I breathed. It went away. Another flash of fire. I had a flashback to two days prior, when I was in a burn building experiencing my first structure fire, watching the flames wail out from a burn room, envelope the space around me and seem to slow down time while I sat literally inside the fire. The flames raced out and I was in the middle of the fire, but I didn’t panic. Instead I felt calm. And just as quickly as the flames raced out, they disappeared–just as the fire in my body disintegrated. Then the exercise was over and we were jogging up a small hill to the grinder. Somehow at that moment, I knew without hesitation that I was going to finish. It seemed inevitable.

KOKORO

Event Recap for Kokoro Class 65 - July 25-27, 2025

This is what actually happened to the best of my memory. The evolutions are marked with letters to help readers understand where one activity ended and another began, although the activity was continuous.

Alpha - Coaches arrive, rules, ranks punishment, jog to grinder

We arrived around 7am and most of the class was already assembled. 15 total, with two med pre-drops and one no-show. We briefed them on everything we knew from our previous crucibles. Only two others had done any other crucibles. We led some stretching and breathing before the coaches arrived. When they arrived, our approach to organizing our bags gave them enough grist for a three minute plank. While they gave us three rules for the event (pay attention to detail, move with a purpose, and have a swim buddy/work as a team). We then jogged about a .25 mile dirt trail to the grinder where we left our bags in a tent and proceeded to get water bottles (gallon jugs) and sunscreen.

Reflections: I felt that I made the choice to secure the event during the first plank and then spent the rest of the time focused on just doing the best I possibly could. I even stopped feeling any anxiety about the fitness standards. I’m not sure why, but I just had a sense that I was going to get it done within the first five minutes.

Bravo - Breakout

Standard breakout with several iterations of squats, leg lifts, mountain climbers, push-ups, burpees, smurf-jacks, etc. while buckets of water are poured on candidates, hoses spray water in the face, and smoke, sirens, yelling and ice baths set the tone for the event.

Reflections: I expected this to be much worse, and I don’t know if they made it easier because we had to go for longer or we were just way more prepared for it.

Charlie - PST

Standard PST: 50/40 Push-ups, 50/40 Sit-Ups, 50/40 Air Squats, 10/8 Dead Hang Pull-Ups and one mile in <9:30. Our first drop happened afterward.

Reflections: 51, 58, 79, 8. Mile was 8 and some change. It was HOT. I felt good but struggled to hang on to the pull-up bar.

Delta - Sandbag games

We jogged to “the beach” inside Veil Lake Resort and filled our sandbags (20lb men/10lb women). We split into three boat crews and raced through the sand for a few rounds of bear crawls, running, lunging, and leapfrogging.

Reflections: My team won twice so we only worked for half the evolution. There was an enormous difference between the amount of work done by winning vs losing teams throughout the event.

MRE Lunch on the “Beach”: First of three MREs

Immediately wrecked my gut and I felt sick for the rest of the crucible. This was by far the hardest part of the event for me.

Echo - Litter training and races with sandbags through brush

Experienced participants taught new people how to use the litter and ran drills to practice. We proceeded to a narrow dirt trail for races with sandbags on the litters, which we executed poorly. We stopped several times for punishments.

Reflections: The exercise was rough because it was so hot and we did several rounds of PT along the way, but we started to come together as a team at this point.

Foxtrot - Litter races with people up and down long hill

We went to a wider trail so we didn’t kill any people while racing with the litters. This went considerably better. We did some PT along the way.

Reflections: Litter racing was more fun this time. My boat crew came together really well on this one.

Golf - Murph / “Body Armor”

We executed Murph with packs (20lb/10lb). Our second drop was a performance drop.

Reflections: Finished in 58 min with strict single pull-ups and a 10lb pack. That’s the exact same time that I finished in 2024, except this time I did it with a pack and felt like a beast.

Dinner (Mediterranean plates) - Change / Sweatshirts /Travel to Palomar

They let us change into clean, dry clothes and put on sweatshirts for the bus ride.

Reflections: By this point it was getting hard to eat anything and drinking wasn’t comfortable either. The change of clothes did help re-energize the group.

Hotel - Palomar Ruck up / MRE at the summit / Run down (Invictus practice)

We traveled about 45 min to Palomar Mountain State Park and rucked up to the summit on double time while reciting Invictus. We ate MREs at the top and then jogged all the way back down the mountain.

Reflections: Dark night of the soul. There was no moon and we hiked through the cloudline on a road with rocks, pot holes and other broken-bones-ready-to-happen terrain in wet boots. That was fine, except we also continuously recited Invictus by William Earnest Henley and that really ruined a perfectly good poem.

Travel back on Bus / Ice baths / Change to PT clothes / Jog to pool

We weren’t policed for napping so some people got sleep on the bus. We were immediately into ice baths, then changed into PT clothes and jogged .5 miles to the pool for a swim test and swim games. The third drop was a DOR.

India - 500m swim test

We all swam simultaneously for 20 laps in the 25m pool. Swimming competencies varied. The actual timeline was 12:30.

Reflections: I struggled with feeling sick at this point, which slowed me down. My last practice swim was 12:06, but it took me 15 min so I did penalty laps. Not ideal, but fine.

Juliet - Pool Games

We raced using varying strokes, raced to capture floating and sinking balls, and practiced jumping in and out of the pool for time.

Reflections: Definitely didn’t win very often but did pretty well. Fernando and I were on a team with two really strong swimmers so this was our chance to lean on teammates.

Kilo - Drownproofing FAM / golf ball dive game / treading water tests / gallon jug overhead

We went to a deeper pool and practiced a drown proofing drill which consisted of dropping to the bottom of the pool and using our legs to bound back up with our hand held behind our backs. We did some water treading practice and worked boat crews to tread and dive after a golf ball on the bottom of the pool. We then practiced treading water and treading with our hands out. We played catch while treading. As punishment, we each had to tread water for 10 seconds while holding a full gallon jug overhead and then hand it off without letting it touch water.

Reflections: I didn’t drown.

Breakfast burritos / Break in the shade / Group Stretch

We had breakfast around 10:30am. They started having us stretch for 10 min before every evolution from this point forward.

Lima - Running races in the grass

Running, bear crawl, crab walk and lunging races around a grassy field. The same swimming boat crew competed in a variety of land games.

Reflections: This was most memorable because I rolled my ankle in the midst of the last run. Definitely felt gassed for the entire evolution after doing so many punishment rounds of work in the prior evolution.

Mike - Sandbag PT with X crucibles (6 hour secured)

Kokoro changed back into pants and boots and joined the 6, 12, and 24-hour crucibles to complete a round of sandbag PT. It was clear that the X crucibles were struggling at this point. Basic 1-8 sandbag positions with lots of overhead holds.

Reflections: This was easy and fun.

Footlong Subs for Lunch

November - Log PT training with rams and big log

Kokoro had an intro to log PT with two ram logs (~150lb) and one wooden log (250lb?). The wooden log was heavy AF. We picked up the logs and ran them about .25 miles to a location away from the grinder so the 12 and 24-crucibles could complete Murph. Practiced shoulder carries, chest carries, and movements around the head as well as lunges, squats, and sit-ups. The coaches seemed very pleased with everyone’s performance.

Reflections: Overall, log PT was really strong for us. A few struggled but overall this seemed to make the coaches happy and we didn’t experience a lot of extra punishment. I personally felt like log PT was a strength in all three evolutions.

Oscar - Litter races with X and XL teams

All the crucibles were divided into boat crews and raced along a dirt path near the grinder. Both of us were on the same team along with the one other Kokoro who also had a walking/running impediment and four people from 12X with limited capacity. We lost every race and had some rough punishments, including no hands burpees and no arms army crawls.

Reflections: This one really sucked. Nothing we could do about it. I also think this is where most of my body got covered in scratches and bruises.

Papa - Log PT with X and XL teams - 12-hour secured

Classic log PT moves from ground to side hold to overhead over and over as well as races and sit-ups holding the logs with a lot of criticism from the coaches. A couple of boat crews struggled but overall this went well.

Reflections: Log PT was really strong. Seems like Fernando and I were extremely well prepared for it.

Dinner: Rice & Bean dinner - change to dry clothes - travel to Encinitas

Quebec - Overnight Beach Ruck (sand races, climbing game) - MREs / Situational awareness (bike rack navigation) - 20 minutes of PT / fireworks / stairs

We took a 45 minute bus ride to Encinitas and did about an hour of sand games that included foot races, bear crawl, wheelbarrows, and fireman’s carries. We then did a couple rounds of getting onto a lifeguard tower without using the stairs. Following that, we hiked along the beach and did a few sets of stairs with situational awareness exercises, and few sets of stairs just to make things harder, and then a last walk up to the bus to get to the beach torture spot.

Reflections: I don’t remember this being too bad. I just remember feeling like acid was eating through my esophagus and bouncing back and forth between imagining how awesome it would be if I could just puke and having a random Shakira song stuck in my head. I started to see strange things in the dark and hallucinated constellation lines in the sky. I think I was mainly relieved that the pain in my ankle wasn’t too bad so I could keep going.

Romeo - Beach Torture - wet & sandy / linked arms (Happy Birthday, Twinkle Twinkle)

Classic beach torture. Linked arms and walked into the surf. Lay down and took waves. Did the sugar cookie exercise. Did another round of waves and sang a couple of songs. Very brief.

Reflections: Fun and easy but cold AF on the bus ride back.

Return to base / ice baths

Sierra - Log PT with XL - 24 hour secures

We did another round of log PT. Ended with 20 feet-on-log push-ups, which were hard on the core and difficult to pull off on one log with six people jammed together.

Reflections: I was surprised by how quickly this went but made the mistake of thinking it meant that Kokoro was on an accelerated timeline too. Dumb.

Tango - Silent sandbag chest carry and reflection / letting the sand go

We removed our sandbags from our rucks and chest carried them about a mile or so around the grinder area. We went back to the first place where we saw the grinder and had a little reflection ceremony where they made an analogy between whether we carried our burden with us into the event and the opportunity to let go of the burden. They opened each of our bags and had us pour out the burden and let it go. We then jogged back to the grinder.

Reflections: This was an interesting exercise because it wasn’t physically intense, but it was challenging to hold a chest carry for half an hour. It was emotional for pretty much everyone.

Uniform - Disassembling pull-up rig

We were given a few tools and tasked with working as a team to disassemble the pull-up rig in under 20 minutes. We succeeded, but it was not pretty.

Reflections: Seemed like a personalized crucible just for me in which I had to undertake a construction project with 11 men. Just kidding. Sort of.

Victor - Talk and Yoga with Mark

Mark Divine lined everyone up in ranks and gave a long talk about recovery and yoga. Everyone did some yoga movements and ended with a savasana on the grinder.

Reflections: I don’t remember anything he said except that he implied that we should be doing something like Cindy as a recovery exercise on Tuesday. WTF. I was mostly distracted by waiting for the other shoe to drop and realizing that Fernando had fallen asleep during the last pose.

Whiskey - Breakout 2.0 with snorkel breathing in ice bath

We were violently awakened from savasana with another breakout style exercises with hoses, buckets, ice, smoke, sirens, yelling, etc. This went on for 10-15 min, plus some ice baths and a new exercise involving breathing through a cutoff water bottle under water.

Reflections: I’m glad they did this because I thought they were having family and friends show up just to see us do yoga on the grinder and that seemed … misleading.

X-Ray - Log PT - Kokoro 65 secures

We moved from PT back to boat crews on three logs. One crew struggled, but we were able to correct it quickly and we secured shortly thereafter.

Reflections: Last Log PT, best Log PT.

Class 65 Secure. HOOYAH!!!

Note: The subtitle of this post is a reference to taking on a major mental challenge, but also a reference to the book Staring Down the Wolf by SEALFit founder, Mark Divine.

My earliest memory of being coached was of my soccer coach telling me that the key to being an effective goalie is not always knowing where the ball is going to go, but deciding and committing to go for it with everything available. Run, jump, slide, all of those things at once, whatever was necessary. The point was clear: don’t let analysis get in the way of getting the job done. Much later, a martial arts instructor would get up in my face and remind me again: “When you think, you stink!” He was right. I trained so that I no longer needed to think. My body simply knew and acted (remind me to say more about unconscious competence later). And when I trusted it, I definitely did not stink.

Training, practicing, being very certain that I am capable of something before I take on the next challenge are all part of my personal ethos. It’s not that I don’t take on new challenges, but that each challenge comes with an incredible amount of preparation. Although it seems that most people have given up on reading books, I read. A lot. Several dozen books, many journal articles, some essays, and a lot of peer reviewed research in any given year. I want to know what I am getting into and how to be the best I possibly can. I don’t just want to crush it, I expect myself to be excellent. It is also my strong preference to be immediately perfect at everything I try, which leads to quite a bit of frustration. (Fortunately, frustration is motivational for me.)

While all of this may seem well and good, if not a little obsessive, it also has a glaring downside: I rarely take on new challenges that I am not nearly certain I can succeed at completing (which, by the way, is defined by me as obliterating the known standard). It’s safe to say that after the 24-hour crucible was complete, I had a day or two of ambivalence about whether I even wanted to attempt the 50-hour crucible. That ambivalence quickly turned to curiosity, which turned to warming up to the idea, which turned to deciding that I would give myself two years to prepare and envisioning a long, luxurious ramp-up period to prepare. Even then, I was still terrified that I may not be able to get my body and mind to “good enough.”

In February of 2025, I decided that it was time to take on a challenge that seemed like it might be beyond my capacity, but to give it absolutely everything I had. Another member of my CrossFit gym, one whose foray into the 24-hour crucible initially inspired me, agreed to train with me for the 50-hour crucible in September of 2026. We even made a video explaining our plan. He was already working out about twice as much as I was, but I intended to ramp up over the next several weeks to meet his volume before we turned on the turbochargers and laid into strength, endurance, and water training.

A few weeks into March, we decided to rev up our motivation with another video. During the conversation, we tried to lay out why we had made this commitment. I don’t think I had fully articulated it for myself before that moment, but after the conversation I felt more convinced than ever that this challenge was a mountain I needed to climb, even if I was blown off half way up.

We got started in earnest on April 1st by adding in an hour or so of accessory work after our daily CrossFit WODs, adding in five sets of 20 push-ups per day, plus the Fighter XRM pull-up protocol, and varied other work that we thought we’d need. We were especially concerned about grip strength and overhead mobility and strength, so we took on mile-long farmer's carries and lots of overhead movements.

One month later, SEALFit announced that it would offer one last Kokoro crucible. And that it would be July 25-27, 2025. Ten weeks away.

This was not according to plan. I had a few other things going on, not the least of which was a new baby due in four weeks, the last third of my firefighter academy training, and a full time job. The announcement arrived while I was walking into a celebration dinner for my sister’s graduation in Greely, Colorado. Adding three to four more hours per day to my workout routine seemed beyond the pale and I struggled to be joyful and positive even among extended family on a joyous occasion. I spent the weekend after the announcement feeling sad and angry. But when I returned home to Pennsylvania, my wife had a plan.

II. Making It Work

With only ten weeks to go from about an hour of CrossFit, some accessory work, and occasional martial arts workouts to full on preparation for a 50-hour event, I was beyond anxious. First things first, when would I even make this training time work? My wife and I agreed that the only time it could happen would be between 4:30 and 9:30 am weekdays, and whenever possible on the weekends. I’d figure out when I could get to the swimming pool and go any time I could string together 30 minutes or more. After the baby arrived, we would hire extra help to be at our house from 5:00 to 9:00 am so that the kids had the support they needed to finish out the school year and get to and from summer camps.

That left me with a plan to get up at 4, do some mobility work, go to a 5:30 am CrossFit class, stick around for two more classes, and do accessory work in between. All of that would be fine, assuming my body could keep up with the pace. I also had fire fighting drills every Wednesday and academy every Thursday and Saturday. Those kept me active, but also kept me out past 10:00 pm, which made for short sleep nights at least twice a week. Since I couldn’t get home and cleaned up before 10, I needed most of my days for work or swim practice and couldn’t add napping to my training regimen. My first plan was to drop training for Krav Maga and Jiu Jitsu until after the event, but about one week in, a belt test was announced for June 29th. Plan amended: Three hours of martial arts training couldn’t be moved off the schedule.

One week in, I was already exhausted. Realizing that I had only eight active weeks to train, one of which would also be spent with five days straight of eight-hour training days left me feeling demoralized. My coaches helped me adjust my nutrition plan so I could muster as much energy as possible, but it was bleak. This breakneck pace might actually break something, but it already seemed to be breaking my will.

After two weeks, we settled into the pace. I found a swim coach, joined a pool, and started doing everything I could to get more comfortable in the water. In retrospect, I imagine my fellow swimmers must have thought I was rather strange, flapping through the pool and then spending ten or fifteen minutes treading water with my hands flailing around in an attempt to teach myself “no arms” treading. And then my son was born.

I knew that I would need to make adjustments to support my wife in the hospital and in the weeks after. I did not realize how lonely and painful it would be to train for three hours throughout the day or night, whenever I could fit it in, even for only 10 days. It was brutal. The second darkest time in training came while I was in my garage, doing countless burpees over a barbell and suddenly I just started crying. I’m not with my family. I’m not with my friends. THIS REALLY SUCKS.

The next day, I went back to the gym. It was probably too soon, but it was worth it for everyone’s sanity. We rolled through another week of training, and then I added another few hours per week of preparation for my belt test. The last weekend of June would prove a serious test: on Friday night, we’d take on our one and only extended training bout with eight hours of continuous work over night. I’d have Saturday to recover (but not sleep) and then a four-hour belt test on Sunday. After that, I’d know where I really stood in terms of both strength and endurance, and then have two more weeks of intensive training before fire fighter academy week.

The weekend was intense but effective. Our overnight training went shockingly well. There was limited need for recovery. The belt test was successful. Our attention could shift to the last frontier of work: long rucks. At that point I put a pause on martial arts training, dialed back the morning workouts and put everything into swimming and rucking. We scheduled rucks all around the city, and drove an hour north several times per week to swim in a 50-meter pool with a coach. All of this helped us make some progress, but only two weeks of this part of the training still left me feeling like we may not have done enough.

Consistent with the theme for the year so far, I learned at the last minute that I would have to spend three more days than anticipated in all-day fire training and that would steal precious training time away from our final weeks of preparation. I was finally able to take the news with equanimity instead of outrage, and I shifted my calendar accordingly. I found a pool near the training facility and added evening swims when I could – and I never missed a chance to walk across the campus or up and down the several flights of stairs throughout the day. It was the least I could do, and it was the most I could do.

On Wednesday, July 23rd, two days before the event was to begin, I arrived at 7:00 a.m. on one of the hottest days of the summer for “burn day,” the culminating skill station of the last training module required to become a pro board certified firefighter. On burn day, everyone learns to take a hose into a burning building and put real water on a real fire. It’s terrifying and exhilarating, but most of all, it’s hot. Really hot. “Not enough electrolytes in the world” hot. “How could I possibly be well enough hydrated for this event?” hot. HOT. At 5:00 p.m., completely soaked in sweat and clutching my certificate, I got in my car and drove home to pack my bags, ingest as much sodium and potassium as I possibly could, and board a flight to California.

After a night of battling between utter exhaustion and pain, I found myself awake at 4 a.m. reading The Pentagon’s Brain. Along with my new journal, I’d picked it up at the bookstore while trying to find ways to distract myself before the event. While it might seem strange, I had limited knowledge of the Navy SEALs before I signed up for the event. In an effort to try to understand what I was getting into, I’d checked out a few library books about SEAL training. I had become so intrigued that I wanted to learn all about the history of the secretive program. When I walked into the bookstore and saw Annie Jacobsen’s tome on a table right in front of me, I decided the universe was telling me I needed to read it. (Incidentally, it’s a fantastic book and I’m thor

oughly glad I did.)

As I read the book, I learned about the storied history of not just the SEAL teams, but the many failed attempts at establishing a special operations unit under every branch of the military. It took decades of embarrassingly bad designs to achieve the “Sea-Air-Land” (SEAL) / “Basic Underwater Demolition” school) (BUDs) program that operates today. Iteration after iteration finally yielded a working program and led to the first two teams in 1962. And for decades thereafter, more people failed than succeeded in making it to an elite team.

The parallel between my own development and that of the program struck me. Maybe it was the reality of aching muscles that came from the rough equivalent of just 1/10th of one week of SEAL training that got my attention. Or maybe it was the idea that even the top military training programs in the world like the SEALs and the British Special Forces had to undergo major renovation to succeed that got me thinking. Either way, I was loaded for round two about 10 hours after I finished round one.

I hobbled across the street to a breakfast restaurant that had the good sense to open early on a Sunday, where I ordered a huge hashbrown and some corned beef hash and went to work on a comprehensive recap of my first twelve hours along with a summary of what I would improve the next time around.

The following March, I began a rigorous training program for the September event. Although I was set back several times by a series of toddle-borne diseases, I progressively increased the volume of both my cardiovascular endurance training and of my strength training routine to include several dozen push-ups and an increasing pull-up repetitions each day.

By now, I was drawing some inspiration from another book I’d stumbled upon, The Art of Resilience by Ross Edgley. I’m not very tolerant of “self help” books but I am a sucker for books about people’s challenges and what they learn from them. Edgley is an extreme endurance athlete who chronicled his 1,780 mile swim around Great Britain and his lessons along the way. Every time I was feeling demoralized, I read another chapter. It gave me the needed perspective to keep grinding.

The training was far from what I had envisioned, and I still felt uncertain about how I’d weather an event of double the length, including an overnight bout of intense exercise. Just as I felt the 12-hour event would test the boundaries of my capacity, I walked into the 24-hour event with severe uncertainty about whether I would succeed. This time, I was armed with a better sense of what to expect. But I had no idea how my body would hold up against 24 hours of work, a strong possibility of hypothermia, and lingering fear of what might be involved in “beach torture”--the infamous dawn evolution on the last day.

The week before the event, I joined a group of other business leaders for an Unbeatable Mind “Leadership Under Fire” event in Carlsbad that abutted the crucible. The event included daily work that ran from about 7 am to about 9 or 10 pm, and included some moderate physical activity. By the time it was over, I was mentally and emotionally spent and I had about 24 hours to recover and prepare for the crucible.

For reasons that I cannot explain, I had a vision from the 2013 film Wolverine where James Howlett (played by Hugh Jackman) becomes Logan/Wolverine after he is immersed in cooling fluid while his bones are infused with adamantium beta and nearly dies in the process. I found it disquieting because I am not normally a dramatic person and that seemed like an awfully dramatic interpretation of what I was about to undertake. Nevertheless, I decided it was just an analogy (or, I hoped so). The vision kept coming back to me as the event unfolded, I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.

On the morning of September 21, 2024, I found myself cruising down a completely empty California Route 79 in the cool predawn air with the windows down. As I drove from strip malls into a residential area, and then into the unpopulated desert, “Return of the Mack” came on the radio. It may have been the most absurdly and inexplicably soothing song I had ever experienced, and I pulled into the event feeling calm and ready.

The 24-Hour Crucible Recap

This is what happened. Each evolution is named by the SEALFit coaching staff, but the participants don’t know the names. I have labeled them by letter to make it easier to track each one.

Alpha: Introduction and Trail to Grinder

• Full group did 15 Burpees and 20 push-ups for sign-up infractions (“missed directions and stupid questions”).

• Rope run with circles; rope run with 10 push-ups per transition (approx .5 miles).

• Me: No problem; completed 100 push-ups.

Bravo: “Breakout”

• Welcome and introduction from Mark Divine.

• Grinder PT with hoses, buckets, bear walks and ice baths (head first into two ice-full baths).

• Me: Sudden excruciating knee pain on the right knee out of nowhere (WTF), hose gave me swimmer’s ear on the right that stuck around the rest of the event (super annoying but fine); movements standards fine (completed ~50 push-ups and ~30 burpees); overall fine.

• This is where most people started freaking out and at least two mentally dropped out here.

Charlie: PST

• Actual standards were 40/30 push-ups, 40 sit-ups, 40 air squats, 8/4 dead hang pull-ups, <9:30 run.

• Me: 50 push-ups, 58 sit-ups, 86 air squats, 7 pull-ups, 9:25 run (run changed from flat to hill)

• About half the group passed the PST. Most failed in pull-ups and/or run.

Delta: Sand Pit Games

• .25 mile run to sand pits with 20lb BruteForce (BF) sandbags; filled personal sandbags (20lb men, 10lb women).

• Pit games with BF bags dragging bags back and forth; timed rope pulls with four BF bags; non-working group did exercises selected by group (20 more push-ups).

• Carried personal bags back for PT, stretcher and ruck.

• Me: Fine. Like a recovery evolution.

Echo: SandBag PT

• Three command strategies and overhead holds; many people struggled with holds.

• Me: Fine. No problem with any hold. No pain in my shoulders or neck this time. Easy evolution.

6-hour secured

[Lunch - approx 14:00] - For Kokoro and XL, required to eat all food provided. I had to eat an 18” sub and I felt like a hot air balloon for the entire Murph which kind of pissed me off and wrecked my positive attitude for a while. Coupled with the swimmer’s ear that made it sound like I was under water with every step of the run, I was cranky but tried to be a good teammate.

Foxtrot: Murph

• 1 mile, 20 rounds of five pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15 air squats, 1 mile.

• Me: 58:02. Runs were hard because I felt bloated and nauseated. Switched from strict to jumping PU after the second round. Otherwise good. Push-ups started to fall apart and my left shoulder started to feel and sound like a soaking wet sponge with every rep. Got in my head about whether it would hold up but kept rolling.

Golf: Stretcher Games

• Put seven 20lb bags on two stretchers (14 people left with Kokoro added to the X and XL groups, so two teams of seven). Carried stretchers about a mile up and down a long hill. Played racing games. My team was failing badly so we started telling jokes, which the coaches liked and consequently made us the winners despite our relatively terrible performance.

• Me: I loved this evolution last year. This year it was much less fun because the trail was different and the teams struggled to get a good groove. Also because I loved it so much last time I had an impossibly high expectation for it. And my grip strength was fine but my callouses were excruciating. D’oh!

Hotel: Log PT

• Three groups of four on mini-logs with several iterations of picking up, holding overhead and putting down.

• Me: Felt way easier this year. Did so much better with overhead holds and didn’t really feel fatigued during this round. Surprisingly easy.

12-hour secured

[Dinner - approx 20:00] Six of us left; I was the only woman. We were allowed to change into dry clothes and loaded up a van for a 45 minute trip to the beach (must have been around Camp Pendleton/Oceanside). Again required to eat everything, plus a protein bar, banana, and apple. And again I felt uncomfortably full and very bloated. This was one of only two things we did where I really wished there was a modification for women or by bodyweight.

India: Beach Games

• Arrived at ~22:00 with 30lb rucks and a gallon of water each. Beach hike, but included walking up and down every staircase for the first two miles (each one was 54-69 steps--I know because we had to count them) and then doing beach games every hour. Ruck lasted until ~06:00. I think it was roughly Oceanside Harbor Beach to the end of South Carlsbad Beach, which is 9.5 miles. We did KIMS games and other mental exercises combined with physical challenges like boarding the lifeguard towers without using the stairs. Seemed like we spent most of the night stopping to pee. There were no open bathrooms so … that sucked.

Juliet: Surf Torture [~06:30]

• This is what SEALFit is known for, but overall the water was ridiculously warm and the whole evolution only lasted 30 minutes. I think it was cut short because we ended up going two more miles than expected so we were probably late. I was kind of bummed. We spent the return ride lamenting that no one almost downed and everyone did a stunningly good job of covering themselves with sand. Mostly bummed because we all knew that the worst part would meet us when we got back to camp, including consequences for those who fell asleep during the car rides.

• Me: This was fine. My knee continued to hurt but it wasn’t fatal. Biggest problem was being extremely stiff and feeling like my joints were malfunctioning. Wish I could pee standing up.

Kilo: Grinder PT & Log Gams

• Returned to the grinder for some stretching and more exercises that were pretty painful for everyone. Very cold at this point, so a few trips through the ice baths were really tough. Everyone had some trouble regaining balance and focus after going through. The ice did nothing for the stiffness, unfortunately.

• Spent most of the time as two teams of three on the 150lb mini-logs. This time they felt much heavier. Several log games, including sit-ups with the logs and lots of carry-and-runs.

• Me: Started screwing up a lot here. I missed the side call on three commands (ie. went left instead of right). Shoulder stiffness made lockout really hard, so I fatigued very fast. This was the “money hour” in terms of finding the point where my mind started drifting off course and focus got harder. My mind went to pain and thinking about whether I had fully wrecked my body instead of what I needed to be doing each second. Super frustrating, but I finally got it together.

24-hour secured

Overall Reflection

• The overall format and location underwent some big changes from 2023, partially because the grinder had to be relocated to accommodate a big bike tournament inside Vail Lake KOA this year. The first evolution was significantly different in that it required more upper body work before the grinder PT began.

• Way lower participation (two started 6-hour, both secured; 12 started 12-hour (one 63yo man completed the 12-hour HOOYAH!); nine secured; five started 24-hour, three secured; six started Kokoro, three secured).

• Sudden severe knee pain affected my ROM and hung in my mind the whole time because I was afraid it would knock me out. No idea where it came from except that it could have been a consequence of not sufficiently addressing whatever is the origin of hip/glute pain on the right. My left shoulder is probably going to need serious rehab.

• Generally felt like I showed up differently this time; much better, able to handle the whole event in a different way, and walked out of it feeling less sore and more prepared. I’m not sure if I actually WAS more physically prepared, or if the mindset made the difference. Nothing I worried about in advance (push-up and pull-up volume, overhead holds) was remotely a problem. I think I did ~700 push-ups in 24 hours and was still intact at hour 27.

While the vast majority of the event was a test of on-land endurance of mental and physical fortitude, the event involved some water activities. I was anything but interested in being tested as a swimmer. Based on their recounting, I concluded that these events seemed more like an attempted drowning than a fun way to spend a Saturday. My experience with swimming and watersports was spotty at best and I had little interest in terrifying (or worse, embarrassing) myself.

I wish I could say that I resolved to overcome my swimming deficiencies and turned a corner by diving in (figuratively) to training. On the contrary, I still felt that I was recovering from an accident the previous spring and remained focused on getting back up to “normal” performance. But sometime between that fateful October day and late the following January, I changed my mind.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am nothing if not intentional. Yet somehow some of the biggest and most influential decisions of my life have been almost accidental. I never intended to get a Ph.D. in psychology or raise my children in Pittsburgh, for example. But those decisions have always yielded amazing results. Unfortunately, they’re equally apt to be amazingly good and amazingly bad. This particular decision seems accidental inasmuch as I don’t remember a moment when I developed the resolve to participate. In fact, I only recall agreeing to show up for the training.

January 2023

On a hideously cold and rainy Sunday, I showed up for a three hour ordeal with a vaguely sore throat and strong sense of impending head cold. It’s safe to say that I hadn’t done my homework. I didn’t have the proper gear. I hadn’t even registered for the event. But after a few punishing hours of jogging with sandbags, basic training-style games, and a solidly terrifying dip in an ice bath, I was in. Over the next eight months, my experienced training partners dropped out. And so I showed up in Temecula, California alone to face down twelve hours of…something.

August 2023

About a month before the event, I was training in a back room in the gym when another athlete veered into a barbell I was holding over my head and behind my neck. The impact popped one and then the other of my shoulders out of place and I was immediately in pain. I couldn’t believe how quickly it happened and I couldn’t immediately accept the implications, but I stopped working out and walked out of the gym.

The next day the pain remained. The same for the day after. And the day after that. I soon worried that I wouldn't make it through the event, especially its physical standard test (PST): At least 50 (men) /40 (women) push-ups, 50/40 sit-ups, 50/40 air squats (each with a two minute time cap), 10/6 dead hang pull-ups, and a mile run in <9.5 minutes–let alone the “Murph”/Body Armour workout that includes two miles of running, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, and 300 air squats.

I saw a venerated orthopedist who looked at X-rays and prescribed a boatload of ibuprofen over the next three weeks. I was going to try to make it through, but fear welled up inside me. A week and a half later, my toddler passed along his strep throat. Things seemed bleak.

September 2023

At the beginning of the week prior to the event, my family and I headed to southern California for a series of meetings interspersed with family time, and I put them on a plane home from San Diego before taking the short drive up the I-15 highway to Temecula and the Veil Lake KOA. When I arrived, I had no more distractions and I felt inordinately uncomfortable. It was too close to the event for a workout. Instead, I walked to a Barnes & Noble and bought a journal.

In it, I wrote about how, despite my obstacles, I felt strong and committed. The event, as I saw it, would be a test of my courage. The courage to show up. The courage to keep going until I simply couldn’t do so anymore. The courage to do things that might prove beyond my capacity. I had never picked up a 300lb log before, and I had certainly never relied on the strength of four other people to keep that log from falling on my head. I wasn’t sure how I’d tolerate several dips in the ice bath. I couldn’t be sure of any of those things, but I would never know if I didn’t summon the courage to try.

In the end, courage carried me through and led me to finish 12 grueling hours of physical work despite my injuries and illness. But it wasn’t just my own motivation; when I arrived early on the morning of September 23rd, I was terrified. I met Coach Mel Sliwka, who would prove to become a valued advisor and trusted Unbeatable Mind teacher. Mel saw my fear, looked me in the eye, and said, “Women always crush this” and she was right. All of the women who started the SealFit X challenge secured it.

When I finished, I realized it would have been my late grandfather’s 91st birthday. A fitting tribute to his incredibly hard life and all that it ultimately provided me. I was humbled, but grateful and proud. Somewhere deep down, I knew I would be back for the 24-hour crucible some time soon.

Part II: The 12-Hour Crucible

Registration was called for 0600 hours, and it took about an hour to get everyone squared away. Discipline started immediately with running and burpees for failing to follow or communicate directions with others.

The actual event began when the SEALs arrived, jumped out of a pick-up and started yelling. The command was to gather rucks and make ranks, which no one communicated and few people actually understood so we were off to a rough start. Ranks should be roughly equal rows and columns. I think we all lined up in one long line. That was followed by a 1:1 encounter between each coach and each participant (19) to confirm registration and mark the specific registered event on each sleeve.

Roughly six athletes signed up for the 6-hour event, seven for the 12-hour, and five for the 24-hour. The Kokoro participants had started the day before and would join our group after the 6-hour evolutions were complete. Among those, one woman signed up for 6 and two for 12; the balance were men. In the end, no women DOR’d (dropped on request). Three men DRO’d by the time the 12-hour ended.

The first lesson was that all compound movements would include two types of counts: one by movement and one by rep. A leader would call the movement and then start the workout while everyone else would call out the reps. Push-ups can be taxing but not nearly as taxing as yelling out the rep while performing them. Unfortunately, the fools who kept making mistakes couldn’t seem to figure out a 6-count burpee, so we did many 8-count versions of something like a burpee throughout the day.

The ranks then followed the Head Coach (Rob Ord) for the 20X event on a short run up the first mountain (maybe .25 miles), where he gathered everyone at the top to look down on the grinder. The grinder was a roughly 50’x50’ dirt square surrounded by logs on two sides, a pull-up rig on one side, and ice baths on the fourth.

At the top, and many times throughout the day, Rob talked about intention, focus, self-management, and transformation. And then he raced everyone down the hill for grinder PT.

Alpha Evolution: Grinder “PT” (Physical Training)

Grinder PT began with everyone in ranks, and a 1:1 meeting with the three coaches who would spend the first 12 hours with the participants. Each coach wanted to know each person’s reason for participating so they could use it throughout the day. This information obviously hit close to home when it was used, but it was always used to push for better performance -- unless the information related to a participant's aspirations to join the Navy.

Immediately after the 1:1’s, the party began. I later learned this part of the day is called “break out” and it is designed to disorient and demoralize. Push-ups, butterfly kicks, planks, Smurf-jacks, burpees, etc. Along with hose and bucket baths for everyone, they played sirens and set off smoke bombs. Failure on the reps sent people bear crawling to the ice baths. The hosing was personalized. Anyone who winced when sprayed in the face was continuously sprayed until they could remain equanimous, which was tricky to achieve between counting reps and protecting eyes and mouth from filling with water. People struggled a lot with this. At one point, I opened my eyes and everyone else in my rank was gone (to the ice baths).

In all, this was less than an hour but it was the most intense and overwhelming part of the day. It concluded with everyone receiving one gallon water jug that would be continuously carried and refilled throughout the day (this was in contradiction with the posted gear requirements; no one was allowed to bring their own water bottle).

Bravo Evolution: Physical Standard Test

Following a short rest and water break, the PST was the second evolution. All movement standards were demonstrated and completed in partner groups. Minimums were 40/50 perfect push-ups, 40/50 shoulder-to-knee sit-ups with elbows at 90 degrees to chest (partner sat on feet and counted), 40/50 air squats (each in <2 min), 6/10 strict pull-ups with no time limit but all from the first hang on the bar, and 1 mile run in <9m30s (all completed slick), which was slightly different from published requirements. Anyone who didn’t meet the standard got a red asterisk demonstrating at-risk status and extra scrutiny in the Murph. I exceeded every standard except the pull-ups, as expected, which were pretty painful because of the left shoulder. I could have made the standard at this point in the day if healthy. Practicing planks and push-ups throughout the training season really paid off here.

Charlie Evolution: Sand Pit

Following a short break, the full group traveled in two “boat groups” to the sand pit to fill sandbags and complete the third and fourth evolutions in the pit. About a .25m run led to a sandpit, where sandbags were filled with 25-35 lbs of sand (lighter for females). The first game was to pass the sandbag effectively down a line continuously for about 100m as a team, followed by a bear crawl back to the start line. People struggled with the bear crawl across the hot sand. This was repeated three times.

The second game was to get sandbags across the same distance by using a drag throw, but no person could touch the same bag twice in a row. This was repeated twice, with each group in competition with the other. That was followed by a reverse bear crawl drag throw competition with the same rules. People struggled with the form in the drag throw and were repeatedly sent to start over until they completed it with proper form. There were no side lateral throws, but we used a pair strategy that required throwing the bags on a diagonal, which I wish I’d practiced. The drag from the sand also made the effort different from throws on the gym floor.

These evolutions ended with everyone packing their ruck with their sandbag and water jug and then proceeding in an “Indian Run” back to the grinder. At this point, several people started flagging.

Delta Evolution; Sandbag Log PT

After a bathroom break, we assembled on the grinder with our sandbags to practice 8-count log PT with our respective sandbags. This, like many “sets” included 10 sets, except that within each set, approximately 15-20 additional movements were added. In particular, the sandbags were held in “position 4” (directly overhead) at length. People struggled with this so much that it seemed to protract this exercise indefinitely. It sent a handful of people to the breaking point, and resulted in at least one DOR.

At this point, the 6-hour crucible was secured and the balance of the group broke for lunch. (Lunch was a sub sandwich, which some people couldn’t eat because of dietary restrictions, which were collected but ignored. This resulted in some energy issues later.)

Echo Evolution: Murph (75 min time limit)

The coaches shared their personal connections to Michael Murphy, but emphasized the symbolism of the Murph for the thousands of others who sacrificed to serve and protect. This was the tone of the workout, and the coaches only focused on counting and form with the goal of getting everyone through timely rather than breaking them down. The format was 1 mile run, followed by 20 sets of five pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 20 air squats, and 1 mile run. My shoulder was really in trouble for both pull-ups and push-ups at this point, but I finished in 1:03.15.

After the Murph, the Kokoro teams joined the full group for two evolutions.

Foxtrot Evolution: Stretcher

The stretcher exercise began with the creation of boat groups. Rob asked me to assemble mixed teams, which I did and then directed the Kokoro teams to instruct the rest on the proper assembly and use of the stretchers. Each group practiced a plan and then when all teams had established a strategy, they broke up the highest performing group and changed the rules. In three boat groups, all stretchers were loaded with sandbags, each person given a “weapon” and then humped about .5 miles to the sand race course.

Teams navigated these stretchers loaded with ~275 lbs around a 200m course with varying instructions (4 carriers, 2 carriers, no talking, etc.) about six times in competition.

After the competition was complete (and several times along the way) we stopped for push-ups and walking lunges with weapons for various infractions.

The last part of the stretcher evolution was to complete a 100m course back and forth, dropping one sandbag and one person each time, until groups of eight were reduced to groups of two. I made it through all six rounds and felt fine, which was a testament to all the grip strength work. Everyone else seemed to be completely depleted.

We reloaded the stretchers and humped them back to the grinder for the last evolution of the 12-hour crucible.

Golf Evolution: Log PT

The last evolution of the 12-hour is always the same exercise, which is Log PT in boat groups arranged by height with an actual log. After arms have been fully spent in the stretcher exercise, groups of six pick up a 300lb log and raise it in eight positions for several iterations. Again, a set of 10 included approximately 15-20 movements per, and increased at failure (e.g., dropping a log to shoulder from overhead resulted in more movements at shoulders or overhead). This included several holds to failure overhead. I was grouped with two men (with the worst shoulder mobility I have ever seen) and two women (who were not up to the task) which made this last evolution really, really suck. A log over your head with zero reliable people around you is a good way to get nailed in the head. Also, the whining. Ugh.

The last evolution lasted roughly 45 minutes and then the 12-hour crucible was secure.

The teams broke for dinner and the 12-hour group left with a couple of DORs while the balance of the group boarded a shuttle to the beach with glow sticks and space blankets.

Observations

• Counting - counting reps aloud while struggling was difficult and I wished I’d practiced it, along with the proper counting scheme when fatigued (1-10, hooyah!; repeat at 1).

• Overhead holds - there were so many of these, and people struggled so much, that they were very protracted; it was important to hold 35lb directly overhead for at least two min and ideally for five.

• Shoulder mobility - the sandbag PT and the log PT both required full range of motion about the body (kneeling, standing side hold on left, shoulder hold on left, overhead, shoulder hold on right, standing side hold, kneeling); especially at overhead, full lockout was critical for safety but very difficult with fatigued shoulders. I only had a problem with this in the left shoulder because of injury, but CrossOver Symmetry was a really big deal here and I probably should have started a daily routine ten years ago (or at least at the beginning of this training cycle).

• Ice baths - these were initially punishment, but they were used primarily as recovery. The task was to get into one, submerge fully (no count), get out; get in the next one (no count), submerge fully, get out. I was not first in line so I held my nose to go under (foolish, but worth it). A coach dogged me about it and I pointed out that it was absolutely filthy water that no one would want in their nose. Surprisingly, he just said “good point” and walked away. Takeaway is to practice fully submerging in ice water, but not trying a breath hold underneath. It would be better exercise to submerge 3-4x with 1-s count (water must be cold enough to create a “brain freeze” sensation) and to practice breathwork out of the water. This could include tactical breathing in 5x5 up to 10x10, “physiological sighs” after exertion, and Wim Hof cycles until two minutes of hold is achieved without distress.

• Cold/Cold Water - Temps swung from 50 degrees at start to a (relatively mild) 83 degrees at exactly the time of the Murph. Temp regulation in daylight was about hydration and leveraging the ice baths (cheating a little and staying in for an extra however long you can get away with). The sun fully set about 90 min before the 12-hour was secure, and temps dropped quickly. After we finished log PT, it took about 10 minutes for the group to get uncomfortably cold. After that, the XL and Kokoro groups left for the surf. For the longer crucibles, there is still not an ocean swimming component, per se, but they are in the surf with logs for a few hours overnight. This could be simulated with early morning/late night training with cold water to the face by hose/tide simulation -- along with breaks long enough for muscles to tighten and cramps to loom.

• Sandbags - Sandbag drag throws were not difficult for me, nor were bear crawls, but people struggled a lot with these. Practicing the ability to crawl forward and backward roughly 50 meters with a 25-35lb bag thrown in various diagonals would be helpful. I wish I had a good way of reproducing the drag from the sand without destroying a Rogue bag in practice. Overall, heavy focus on sandbag training (overhead, shoulder carry, rack carry, chest carry, throws, drags, etc.) will only help.

• Rucks - The longer crucibles hike for 7-8 hours at steep inclines with loaded rucksacks overnight. For a 24hr+, recommend a backpacking simulation starting at midnight for a sunrise summit. The 6 and 12-hour require relatively little running (maybe three miles total); not sure about the longer but the Murph in the XL and Kokoro requires a loaded ruck and the standard must be met to proceed at 12 and 24 hours (the XL does the Murph with the X group at roughly 7 hours, but either the PST or the Murph must exceed standard to proceed).

• Hydration/Nutrition - No idea what weird pink stuff they put in their electrolyte buckets, but it did nothing helpful unless consumed at volumes that sent people to the head hourly. Most people cramped at some point, creating safety hazards when they collapsed or suddenly lost use of an arm. Arriving excessively hydrated is fine, because head use is unrestricted. Meals are unreliable, so training with limited nutrition probably helps. Practicing taking more fluid on board than is comfortable is also probably useful. Nothing is allowed on course, but the medic keeps electrolyte tabs that should probably be given out preemptively. In the future, I’d ask for one before the situation got dire (with such high reps of push-ups and pull-ups, rhabdo has been an issue in longer crucibles). Day of, I was fine. Next day, heinous headache. I’d be in trouble on the XL if I followed the same hydration scheme.

• Operating norms - People recover with hands on hips, which they know and use against the group. Best to practice avoiding this well in advance, because even if it is learned cognitively early in the crucible, the habit returns at heightening levels of fatigue. The result is punishment. No walking, anywhere, ever. This should be the norm of all training. Running (not rushing) is good. Shuffling is fine. Walking is fatal.

• Communication - Even if training as an individual, practicing repeating the command is useful.

• Headspace - The worst guys were not the weak ones; the worst guys were the ones with a bad attitude. They infected their teams and made evolutions suck 10x more than people who just weren’t physically capable (although they were also sort of annoying in that they usually hadn’t taken their training seriously enough or neglected something obvious).

12-Hour Secured. HOOYAH!

Part III: Keep Going?

One September 22nd, I was terrified of what I had signed up to do and uncertain about whether I would succeed. On September 24th, I couldn’t relate to my thoughts from the 22nd.

My physical fitness did not change in those 36 hours.

But somehow, my mental fitness was exponentially stronger.

Suddenly I had a mental model for a crucible and a whole new calibration of my own capacity.

At the outset of every SEALFit event, the coaches introduce the concept of “the crucible”: a place where all the elements of who you are are put into a high pressure container where you learn what the sum of you really is. The body is incomplete without the mind and vice versa because they are not really separate. By the same token, we are not our thoughts, emotions, or the number of push-ups we can knock out in a single set. We are so much more than any of those things.

It’s safe to say that the mental shift I experienced after the 12-hour crucible blew my mind. Everything I thought about my physical capacity was wrong–or at least incomplete. What other aspects of my reality were inaccurate, incomplete, or flat out wrong? I couldn’t wait to find out.

I got back to Pittsburgh after my event, unsure of what to make of the whole experience but certain I had been transformed.

When I walked into the gym a few days later, my coach had only one question: when do we start training for the 24-hour crucible?

The Rules Are Changing

If you find yourself having taken an apocalyptic view, you can’t really be faulted. Signs that the foundation of our social order are crumbling have been growing since the COVID-19 pandemic, which for many of us only compounded the damning climate change data already flooding us (sorry about the pun). Then, immediately following his second inauguration, President Trump issued a flurry of executive orders directly aimed at unwinding policies advanced by President Biden and a Congress chastened by failures of initial COVID responses. 

Then Trump’s policies went even further, canceling programs and commitments among departments beginning with the U.S. Agency for International Development and followed by the U.S. Department of Education. Next came long-promised tariffs on goods from long standing NAFTA and other international allies. The dismantling of government and of the United States’ role in global order continues. We won’t fully understand the implications for some time. The uncertainty is inescapable. And distressing.

In recent days, Democrats have been broadly characterized as demoralized and disorganized, lacking a coherent strategy, clear leader, or even a center of gravity. Even for those who are not aligned with the Democratic party, there is no obvious alternative to the Trump machine. The unpredictable and insistently incendiary nature of Trump and his emissaries feels entirely out of control and dangerous. It violates all of our tacit rules for civil behavior. And it flagrantly violates some of our laws–seemingly without fear of the consequences that would surely befall any of the rest of us. This is as close to total chaos as many of us have ever experienced or witnessed.

Chaos is Opportunity

It would be easy to conclude that Donald Trump, who has, at various times, demonstrated himself to be racist, sexist, misogynistic, and xenophobic, has total and unique control over our institutions, our global reputation and relationships, and our livelihoods. Many believe their only recourse is to stand by helplessly while jobs disappear and incomes crumble–and that anyone who is not white, male, and a natural citizen is doomed. After all, we generally subscribe to a narrative that privilege can only be overcome when communities unite against it, and the reality is that there is little we can do to resurrect jobs we rely on our employers to provide. But what if our perception of reality is actually just a persistent illusion?

Disruption, by definition, breaks the rules of engagement. It abruptly throws open a “window of change” (or, a “window of opportunity”), which sets off a period of uncertainty typified by people lacking alignment, clarity, or focus, feeling unmoored as a result. Often, a uniquely positioned leader is the one to throw open a window of change by leveraging the power or authority vested in them, but anyone with leverage and willingness to violate the rules can do so. The open window, however, will not remain open for long because systems, even broken ones, do not tolerate entropy for long. Human nature demands closure (figuratively), and even a worse new world order is perceived as better than no world order at all. Change often elicits a sense of frustration and paralysis, if not a full-throated revolt. Even those who understand the rationale regularly block change as soon as it affects them… maybe out of principled disagreement, but usually out of fear. 

In my experience, people tend to respond to change they cannot control in one of three ways: (1) they see themselves as collateral damage, and as such gird themselves and do their level best to survive the impact; (2) they see themselves as above the change, and as such try to avert impact by going around the change; or (3) they recognize the change as a chance to shift and grow and try to leverage it for their benefit. This third response maps to what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “antifragile” framing. People often think they have succeeded if they survive, but a constant focus on survival leaves a lot of life on the table. It is the antifragile who thrive in change and who maintain the awareness that many things happen that they cannot control, but they also never lose control over their response. 

Patrick Van Horne, co-author of Left of Bang, developed a simple but powerful graphic that he applied to institutions, but which I think also effectively depicts the consequences of crisis moments on these three mindsets: 

However shocking the current pace of disruption from the federal government may be, it is not dissimilar from most crises. It may be somewhat predictable, but can strike at unexpected times and have unanticipated consequences. To paraphrase one of my most admired mental toughness coaches: whether you see yourself as the victim, the villain, or the hero, your behavior will follow. This period of chaos is highly uncomfortable and deeply distressing. If there is anything truly “unparalleled” about it, it’s the chance to construct an entirely new reality by shifting from being the victim to being the hero by jumping through the open window, rather than feeling it close on our necks. That could be the difference between suffering (and possibly surviving) this crisis versus leveraging it to our advantage. 

Practice Vigilance, Curiosity, and Conviction

Changing mindset is not code for accepting the unacceptable. It is actually quite the opposite. But it does require a personal clarity that cannot be clouded by the emotion of the moment. I offer three tenets that make it possible to leverage the opportunity of the moment rather than falling victim to its overwhelming force: vigilance, curiosity, and conviction. 

One part of practicing vigilance is paying attention to and recognizing the actual impacts of the changes, whether direct (unemployment) or indirect (reifying social battle lines) on your life and those in your communities. The other part is taking the time to clarify your own principles, and distinguishing between behavior that is frustrating, wrong-headed, or even odious and that which is a true violation of your values. This distinction matters because it has never been possible to affect change beyond your locus of control. Now is no different. You cannot fight all battles, and you should not choose battles in which your effort has no bearing. If you can focus your efforts within your personal control, you begin to see critical distinctions between what you must address and what is, however unfortunate, the collateral damage of change. 

When things are comfortable and predictable, approaching a situation with curiosity is relatively easy. But times of change bring uncertainty and often fear over what might result. Anyone who has ever become deeply engaged in an argument will recognize the difficulty of listening for anything more than weaknesses in their opponent’s logic. When emotions are high, seeing situations for what they are becomes exceedingly difficult. But cultivating curiosity can create a new understanding that better positions you to take the actions you need to get to the outcomes you want. Curiosity is like the master key to transforming a situation from frustrating and dire into one of leverage and opportunity.

Many pundits are baffled that the people on the fringes of society seem to wield so much power over the much larger moderate middle. These voices tend to be loudest and most audible because of their conviction. Many with moderate points of view have cultivated the capacity to understand multiple points of view and to empathize with alternative logics. They see this as a sign of intellectual maturity. And perhaps it is. But, to borrow from Jung, every psychic pattern has its shadow. The shadow of intellectual flexibility is a dramatic decrease in a sense of certainty over one’s opinion or point of view, and it can manifest as a lack of conviction. So much so, I argue, that those with moderate perspectives often lose touch with their own core principles and thus lose conviction for anything. When we do this, we expose ourselves to the tyranny of the minority. So, find your principles and be convicted about them–not just within the confines of your own home, but within your community and across your locus of control. 

Commit and Take Action

To be clear, I do distinguish between having conviction and being disrespectful. Having conviction is only the third prong in a triad that includes vigilance over yourself and the true nature of what is transpiring around you, and a curiosity that is founded on real listening. If you can balance among these three practices, you can escape from a future that is being defined for you, and begin to create one that will serve you. 

In times of chaos, some people naturally respond by seizing on a narrow objective and taking action while others respond by taking a broad view that often leads to indecision. These two approaches are not right and wrong, but complementary. Especially when chaos leads to a “fog of war,” one’s capacity to recognize and value these distinct approaches and collaborate to maximize both helps reify community and connect people around a common objective. This is an opportunity in itself. As much as you have a chance to cultivate antifragility in yourself, your example can support your community to do so as well.