Craig Weller: Facing Real Life Challenges: Lessons From Elite Soldiers

Many people take on stressful challenges by going with their gut, but those on-the-fly tactics often don’t work, especially for soldiers trying to stay alive in the battlefield.

Former U.S. Navy Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewman (SWCC) Craig Weller shares a different, mentally-focused approach to managing stressful situations by tapping into your emotions and why the ability to withstand high amounts of pain just isn’t enough in this very tactical Living 4D conversation.

Learn more about Craig, his book, Building The Elite, and the courses he offers at his website. Follow Craig on social media via Instagram at Building The Elite and Precision Nutrition.

• Craig had to learn to swim to qualify to become a SWCC. (8:02)
• Motivational slogans won’t help you improve your performance. (11:06)
• In the special ops community, soldiers have a deeper understanding about the difference between hurt and harm. (25:20)
• “Panic is the first stage of death.” (31:45)
• Bootcamp doesn’t fix people with emotional problems. (45:31)
• Many soldiers wanting to be a SWCC or Navy Seal are terribly unprepared. (50:48)
• Stress inoculation training. (1:00:09)
• Successfully adapting to stress requires specific skills, objectives and purposes, not merely withstanding pain. (1:13:34)
• Single-minded toughness vs dangerous stupidity. (1:24:42)
• “Rational decision-making must involve emotion.” (1:33:59)
• It’s very easy to develop flawed gut feelings or instincts in the absence of negative feedback. (1:51:36)
• Do you have 10 years of experience in a career or 1 year of experience repeated 10 times? (1:55:52)
• The importance of normal jaw development. (2:14:53)
• People won’t feel the effect of eating highly processed, unhealthy foods for 10-15 years. (2:27:20)
• Craig’s tips for managing stress better, including the 3-minute rule, segmenting and sleep. (2:32:13)
• Relying solely on willpower over structure and a better system doesn’t work. (2:40:58)
• “Every bullet has a lawyer on it.” (2:44:45)
• Avocados drive an amazing amount of drug cartel violence in Mexico. (2:53:04)
• The difficulty with staying informed. (3:01:39)
• Experts in threat assessment: Bartenders and bouncers in strip clubs. (3:17:16)
• Avoid echo chambers and improve your media information literacy. (3:24:02)
• “If you need to be staring on your phone at the news or social media, something is fundamentally wrong with your environment.” (3:31:23)

• Drownproofing
• Underwater hockey
• The work of Antonio Damasio, Cleve Backster and Edgar Mitchell
• The Iowa Gambling Task
• Secondary emotions
• The HeartMath Institute
• The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence by Gavin de Becker
• Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic by Sandra Kahn and Paul Ehrlich
• Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Norbert Wiener and Cybernetics
• The gut-brain axis
• Authoritarianism
• Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin punches a flat-earther on YouTube
• Paul’s Living 4D conversations with Nir Eyal, Jamie Wheal, Tim Welch and Sean O’Malley, Robbie Maddison, Dr. Monica Gagliano and Michael Holt
• Paul explains the CHEK Totem Pole on YouTube
• The HeartMath Solution by Doc Lew Childre and Howard Martin
• The Secret Life of Nature: Living in Harmony With The Hidden World of Nature Spirits From Fairies to Quarks by Peter Tompkins
• The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird
• Thus Spoke The Plant by Monica Gagliano and Suzanne Simard
• Occupational Biomechanics by Don Chaffin, Gunnar B.J. Anderson and Bernard Martin
• The Abdominal and Pelvic Brain by Byron Robinson
• Paul’s Primal Pattern® Eating course available in the CHEK Store
• Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal
• The Social Dilemma on Netflix

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