Thinking in Time

What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?Six months before he was assassinated, King spoke to a group of students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia on October 26, 1967.I want to ask you a question, and that is: What is your life’s blueprint?Whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint, and that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, and a building is not well erected without a good, solid blueprint.Now each of you is in the process of building the structure of your lives, and the question is whether you have a proper, a solid and a sound blueprint.I want to suggest some of the things that should begin your life’s blueprint. Number one in your life’s blueprint, should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your worth and your own somebodiness. Don’t allow anybody to make you fell that you’re nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.Secondly, in your life’s blueprint you must have as the basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor. You’re going to be deciding as the days, as the years unfold what you will do in life — what your life’s work will be. Set out to do it well.And I say to you, my young friends, doors are opening to you–doors of opportunities that were not open to your mothers and your fathers — and the great challenge facing you is to be ready to face these doors as they open.Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great essayist, said in a lecture in 1871, “If a man can write a better book or preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”This hasn’t always been true — but it will become increasingly true, and so I would urge you to study hard, to burn the midnight oil; I would say to you, don’t drop out of school. I understand all the sociological reasons, but I urge you that in spite of your economic plight, in spite of the situation that you’re forced to live in — stay in school.And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.— From the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Grow Your Mindset Which mindset do you have (fixed or growth)? Answer these questions about intelligence. Read each statement and decide whether you mostly agree with it or disagree with it. 1. Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can't change very much. 2. You can learn new things, but you can't really change how intelligent you are. 3. No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit. 4. You can always substantially change how intelligent you are. Now, look at these statements about personality and character and decide whether you mostly agree or mostly disagree with each one. 1. You are a certain kind of person, and there is not much that can be done to really change that. 2. No matter what kind of person you are, you can always change substantially. 3. You can do things differently, but the important parts of who you are can't really be changed. 4. You can always change basic things about the kind of person you are.

Is your training providing value commensurate with its effort and expense? Challenge homeostasis/comfortability to not just reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. 50-hours to basic competency.

www.CP-Journal.comwww.Emergence.com

Enough with what others get wrong or don't do. Here is what we do and why we do it. This is a broad overview. Functional Movement ScreenPostural AssessmentPerformance TestingKnowledge BaselineTacit -v- Explicit KnowledgeDysfunction -v- CompensationPlayful Reasoning

What is your Grand Strategy? This episode introduces the concept of grand strategy and how it applies to you, and more specifically, to personal protection.

In this episode, we further explore what defines an expert, how to acquire expertise, and the relationship of Boyd's orientation, Robert Greene's Life's Task ("The first move toward mastery is always inward--learning who you really are and reconnecting with that innate force."), and answering the question, Who you are?

Discussion on the altercation between individual and law enforcement officer. Remember, viewing the video, what is visible in the video and excluding all else, what do you observe?VideoExpertise DiscussionDeliberate practice involves two kinds of learning: improving the skills you already have and extending the reach and range of your skills."How can you tell when you're dealing with a genuine expert? Real expertise must pass three tests. First, it must lead to performance that is consistently superior to that of the expert's peers. Second, real expertise produces concrete results. Brain surgeons, for example, not only must be skillful with their scalpels but also must have successful outcomes with their patients. A chess player must be able to win matches in tournaments. Finally, true expertise can be replicated and measured in the lab. As the British scientist Lod Kelvin stated, "If you can not measure it, you can not improve it." Things to Look Out for When Judging ExpertiseIndividual accounts of expertise are often unreliable.Anecdotes, selective recall, and one-off events all can present insufficient, often misleading, examples of expertise. There is a huge body of literature on false memories, self-serving biases, and recollections altered as a result of current beliefs or the passage of time. Reporting is not the same as research.Many people are wrongly believed to possess expertise.Bear in mind that true expertise is demonstrated by measurable, consistently superior performance. Some supposed experts are superior only when it comes to explaining why they made errors. After the 1976 Judgment of Paris, for example, when California wines bested French wines in a blind tasting, the French wine "experts" argued that the results were an aberration and that the California res in particular would never age as well as the famous French reds. (In 2006, the tasting of the reds was reenacted, and California came out on top again.) Had it not been for the objective results from the blind tastings, the French wine experts may never have been convinced of the quality of the American wines.Intuition can lead you down the garden path.The idea that you can improve your performance by relaxing and "just trusting your gut" is popular. While it may be true that intuition is valuable in routine or familiar situations, informed intuition is the result of deliberate practice. You cannot consistently improve your ability to make decisions (or your intuition) without considerable practice, reflection, and analysis.You don't need a different putter.Many managers hope that they will suddenly improve performance by adopting new and better methods--just as golf players may think they can lower their scores with a new and better club. But changing to a different putter may increase the variability of a golfer's shot and thus hinder his or her ability to play well. In reality, the key to improving expertise is consistency and carefully controlled efforts.Expertise is not captured by knowledge management systems.Knowledge management systems rarely, if ever, deal with what psychologists call knowledge. They are repositories of images, documents, and routines: external data that people can view and interpret as they try to solve a problem or make a decision. There are no shortcuts to gaining true expertise. How to Practice DeliberatelyTo people who have never reached a national or international level of competition, it may appear that excellence is simply the result of practicing daily for years or even decades. However, living in a cave does not make you a geologist. Not all practice makes perfect. You need a particular kind of practice--deliberate practice--to develop expertise. When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can't do well--or even at all. Research across all domains shows that it is only by working at what you can't do that you turn into the expert you want to become. To illustrate this point, let’s imagine you are learning to play golf for the first time. In the early phases, you try to understand the basic strokes and focus on avoiding gross mistakes (like driving the ball into another player). You practice on the putting green, hit balls at a driving range, and play rounds with others who are most likely novices like you. In a surprisingly short time (perhaps 50 hours), you will develop better control and your game will improve. From then on, you will work on your skills by driving and putting more balls and engaging in more games, until your strokes become automatic: You’ll think less about each shot and play more from intuition. Your golf game now is a social outing, in which you occasionally concentrate on your shot. From this point on, additional time on the course will not substantially improve your performance, which may remain at the same level for decades.  Why does this happen? You don’t improve because when you are playing a game, you get only a single chance to make a shot from any given location. You don’t get to figure out how you can correct mistakes. If you were allowed to take five to ten shots from the exact same location on the course, you would get more feedback on your technique and start to adjust your playing style to improve your control. In fact, professionals often take multiple shots from the same location when they train and when they check out a course before a tournament.  This kind of deliberate practice can be adapted to developing business and leadership expertise. The classic example is the case method taught by many business schools, which presents students with real-life situations that require action. Because the eventual outcomes of those situations are known, the students can immediately judge the merits of their proposed solutions. In this way, they can practice making decisions ten to 20 times a week. War games serve a similar training function at military academies. Officers can analyze the trainees’ responses in simulated combat and provide an instant evaluation. Such mock military operations sharpen leadership skills with deliberate practice that lets trainees explore uncharted areas.  Let’s take a closer look at how deliberate practice might work for leadership. You often hear that a key element of leadership and management is charisma, which is true. Being a leader frequently requires standing in front of your employees, your peers, or your board of directors and attempting to convince them of one thing or another, especially in times of crisis. A surprising number of executives believe that charisma is innate and cannot be learned. Yet if they were acting in a play with the help of a director and a coach, most of them would be able to come across as considerably more charismatic, especially over time. In fact, working with a leading drama school, we have developed a set of acting exercises for managers and leaders that are designed to increase their powers of charm and persuasion. Executives who do these exercises have shown remarkable improvement. So charisma can be learned through deliberate practice. Bear in mind that even Winston Churchill, one of the most charismatic figures of the twentieth century, practiced his oratory style in front of a mirror.  Genuine experts not only practice deliberately but also think deliberately. The golfer Ben Hogan once explained, “While I am practicing I am also trying to develop my powers of concentration. I never just walk up and hit the ball.” Hogan would decide in advance where he wanted the ball to go and how to get it there. We actually track this kind of thought process in our research. We present expert performers with a scenario and ask them to think aloud as they work their way through it. Chess players, for example, will describe how they spend five to ten minutes exploring all the possibilities for their next move, thinking through the consequences of each and planning out the sequence of moves that might follow it. We’ve observed that when a course of action doesn’t work out as expected, the expert players will go back to their prior analysis to assess where they went wrong and how to avoid future errors. They continually work to eliminate their weaknesses.  Deliberate practice involves two kinds of learning: improving the skills you already have and extending the reach and range of your skills. The enormous concentration required to undertake these twin tasks limits the amount of time you can spend doing them. The famous violinist Nathan Milstein wrote: “Practice as much as you feel you can accomplish with concentration. Once when I became concerned because others around me practiced all day long, I asked [my mentor] Professor Auer how many hours I should practice, and he said, ‘It really doesn’t matter how long. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.’”  Please take a moment to rate (5-stars, please) review (written reviews expose the podcast to a wider audience), subscribe (subscriptions are part of Apple's ranking algorithm which helps with expanding our audience), share (share the podcast with friends, family, and colleagues who seek self-improvement or professional development), engage (send your thoughts, questions, and feedback to Ben@DistrictCombatives.com). Thank you for your continued support!

In this episode, we provide greater color on the practical application of mental models. In personal protection terms, how it can affect your ability to prevail in a violent encounter. Remember, mental models, are comprised of your Individual Experiences, Cultural Experiences, and Institutional/organizational experiences.

Mental models, like Boyd's Orientation, are informed by who we are. Mental models are comprised of our individual experiences, institutional/organizational experiences, and cultural experiences. Mental models gain sophistication and complexity as we acquire expertise. These are the two defining characteristics of an experts mental models.

The OODA loop is commonly cited as a way to beat an adversary or opponent. From the military to business, completing your OODA loop faster than your adversary is cited as a path to victory. Further, Observation is cited as the key to beginning the OODA loop process and Orientation is defined as orienting towards the critical element identified during observation. This is bullshit. And I'm going to tell you why. Don't just take my word, I will use John Boyd's, creator of the OODA loops own words to destroy this gross misrepresentation. First, Observation is NOT the first part of the loop. In fact, Boyd himself states: "Note how orientation shapes observation, shapes decision, shapes action, and in turn is shaped by the feedback and other phenomena coming into our sensing or observing window. Also note how the entire “loop” (not just orientation) is an ongoing many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of projection, empathy, correlation, and rejection." [Source:  The Essence of Winning and Losing, John Boyd]

What is Judgment?Judgment is an expression of a mental activity that may be exercised with greater or less skill.What are the three types of judgment?Action Judgment: What is to be done?Value Judgment: What difference does it make?Reality Judgment: What is going on?Key Considerations:Perfect knowledge of reality is not of much use without criteria for separating the important from the unimportant.Knowing clearly what is important is not much use in practical affairs without capacity for matching knowledge to action.Initial reality judgments can be sharpened by taking care to distinguish clearly what is known from what is presumed to be true.