Train the mind and the body will follow
Too many people in our world think that owning the right gear and reading about a specific skill is enough. Well, it’s not.
During a podcast interview with Mike Moore, a former SERE instructor, I asked about a fundamental truth about survival situations that most people don’t understand. His answer was simple: “Not everyone is going to make it.”
The key differentiator between those who made it and those who don’t is the unyielding belief that you’ve got this.
In this section, you’ll find all of my articles, podcast episodes, and marksman challenges about training your mind to naturally achieve success. This takes work, practice, and discipline. Reading an article or book about it is a start, but truly developing your tactical mindset means challenging yourself to succeed.
Small victories lead to big victories. I implore you to start with goal setting and make winning a habit in your life.
You rarely get to choose “the moment.” Instead, the moment chooses you. Are you ready?
/// Mindset Archive
Four Years from Friday: Approaching Your Training Life in Seasons
Let's talk long term. Too many people think that success is just a few weeks or months away, when that is far from the truth. In reality, success is a culmination of long term effort often years in the making. In this piece, I take a little known two day challenge and show you how I would break it down into a series of seasons and blocks that could be repeated over and over again, always driving closer and closer to success.
Thinking Beyond the Drill, or the “Teaching to the Test” Fallacy
I've got a little bit of a bone to pick with how a lot of the shooting culture talks about drills. Much like weight lifting and gym bro culture, it seems a lot of shooters are more interested in flexing their egos than actually using drills as a way to improve. But how, exactly, should we approach that?
Prioritizing Your Marksmanship Training Zones
My recent post on establishing a fitness hierarchy made me realize that I need to do the same thing for marksmanship training. So here we are. Today I'm discussing my breakdown for prioritizing training distances and my reasoning for them.
Transformation Requires Sacrifice and Other Uncomfortable Facts
In the last episode, I mentioned something called the homeostasis problem. It's a way of viewing why big changes in life are so difficult to make. It was going to be a large aside in that article, so much so that I decided it was worth its own post. So here we are: the homeostasis problem.
The Martial Marksman Mindset: A Deeper Dive
Mindset is one of the core topics of The Everyday Marksman, and it's one of the four corners in our pyramid of performance, but I've never planted a flag in the ground about what exactly I mean by, "Mindset." So let's fix that.
The Martial Marksman’s Training Philosophy: Simple, Not Easy
In the last episode, I discussed the Martial Marksman ideal and how it relates to the various topics I talk about here. One of the challenges that anyone going down this path quickly runs into is the fact that there is a lot of “stuff” to learn and practice. It’s one thing for a professional soldier to do these things, but it’s a very different beast for Everyday Marksmen like you and I.
Agon and Aretê: A Foundation for Life
This is a philosophical one. For the last month or so, I've been obsessed with an Ancient Greek concept of excellence and how to apply it. Today's post is about presenting the core concepts and how I think it works within the construct of The Everyday Marksman. At a broader scale, this will weave throughout my work and form the bedrock what I want you to achieve.
The Four Corners Approach to Unlocking Peak Performance
Today I'm discussing a concept that's been brewing in the the back of my brain. While working on the book, I've needed a way to illustrate how different things we do relate to improving the whole and take use to new levels of performance. I think I've figured it out, and this is my first go at explaining it.
The Power of Cumulative Effects on Success and Failure
Too many people are looking for the easy out, as if finding the one perfect piece of gear, or just the right training technique, will take them to the next level of capability. But that's not true. Success and failure are lagging indicators of our choice to make deposits or take withdrawals from our internal investment account.
What Bench Are You Sitting On?
While reading through some of Coach Dan John's work, I came across a philosophy for breaking your annual training cycles. It's impossible to do everything well all of the time- something must give. Instead, we should think of our training, all of our training, from two perspectives: the bus bench, and the park bench.
Just Say No to Flex Culture
Like many enthusiast topics, we've got a problem with flex culture. What is that? Today we're talking about it, how it manifests, why its a problem, and what you can do to combat it.
Chasing Optimum and Other Marketing Failures
Everyone loves talking about optimization. Entire industries spend huge amounts of money convincing you that their new whiz bang gadget or service will take you to the next level with no additional skill required. Today I'm putting a stake in the ground to tell you that optimum is a myth, and our constant pursuit of it only detracts us from focusing on what's actually important for our success.
Are You a Tactical Minimalist?
The longer you're in this community, the more you realize that there's almost an overwhelming number of skills to learn. One of the biggest traps people fall into is trying to become a master of everything. Often that looks like learning infinite variations of each skill. I think this ultimately becomes a distraction, and prevents us from thinking about the bigger picture.
Marksman Live: How to Build Your Team
In this session of Marksman Live, I talked to Brent0331, Doc Larsen, and Les from Pegasus Tests about the structure and capability of your survival team in Scenario-X. We dug into posture, weapon selection, mindset, and more.
Scenario X: Our Realistic End of the World Situation
I've been having a lot of conversations lately about the right mixture of skills, equipment, communications, and other elements of a theoretical emergency situation. With that, it's time to revisit Scenario-X, our fictional disaster first introduced in the load carriage series. In this post, I want to build out my thoughts a bit more and discuss some of the nuances and reasoning behind it. Why? Well, because it's going underpin a lot of things coming up soon.
Guns are Fun, and Fun Isn’t a Crime
MLC, a long time reader and supporter, adds his thoughts on the idea of fun being allowed in the shooting sports. We often get too tied up in being too tactical, too serious, or too focused on winning the match. While firearms and competition are certainly serious pursuits, it's easy to forget that we're also the ambassadors of shooting for the next generation- and the best way to hook them is making it fun.
