Chapter 4

How to Master Emotional Mechanics Like the Experts

It’s okay to have butterflies. You just have to get them to fly in formation.

—Melissa Lukin, Outward Bound

LIKE ALMOST EVERY OTHER ABLE-BODIED Israeli citizen, performance expert and psychologist Dr. David Ouahnouna has spent time in the army. He also happens to be an expert in Krav Maga, the unique Israeli method of self-defense training. He told us the story of what happened the day after a terrorist got over the fence near his village and stabbed a yeshiva student, not far from his house. Yeshiva students are members of an Orthodox Jewish sect that studies ancient Hebrew texts for hours a day. Pretty much the opposite of a football lineman on a Texas high school team. The whole neighborhood was almost paralyzed with fear after the attack. Parents wanted to keep their kids inside, and the kids felt depressed, violated, and vulnerable.

Dr. Ouahnouna went down to the school the next day, got the kids together, and gave them a special course in Krav Maga. “After a couple of days, there was this transformation in these kids,” he said. “The kids were walking around with their chests out, heads high, ready to jump in and defend their friends if it ever happened again. They didn’t really know any Krav Maga, only one or two moves I taught them. But the difference was, they now believed. They knew what to do, they knew they’d always have a chance. They said, ‘It’s possible for me.’ All they did was switch their thinking from victim to defender. It was amazing to see.”

Making emotional mechanics work for you is as fundamentally simple as what Dr. Ouahnouna did. It involves just a little bit of mental magic, a few rules of thumb, and repetition in real conditions so that as soon as possible, you can function, improve, and enable yourself or your team to believe. The central UnStoppable theme is to learn the essence in a short time, then start doing and practicing it for a long time. It’s the same process for fear training or anything else.

TRUE TEAM: THE NUMBER ONE FEAR TAMER

Navy SEALs are some of the most extraordinary individuals on the planet. Yet once they make it through the most rigorous training in the world, you will never hear them talk about themselves as individual SEALs; they only talk in terms of team: “He was a team guy.” Or “When I joined the teams . . .” Or “I’ve been with the teams for 18 years.”

This is because SEALs know that nobody ever does it alone. And as great as any individual’s power might be, it goes up exponentially in the mutual support structure and creative circuitry that exists in a small team. The elite of the elite consider this the ultimate multiplier of motivation and the ability to tolerate and manage risk, discomfort, and fear.

Teams spread out the fear and share its burden, which automatically helps to control it. They are a kind of love power plant, generating the kind of love that overwhelms and tames fear.

But not fake teams. Not the clichéd kind that corporate speakers prattle on about. A true team is an entirely different organism: a fusion of individuals into one working being. Members of true teams need one another to succeed, and they all know it. Thus there is no advantage to doing anything but building each other up. They get scared together, fail together, struggle together, overcome obstacles together, and win together. Because of the love and trust that develops, they will put themselves at risk, suffer, and sacrifice for one another to a degree they would never do for themselves. A true team is an UnStoppable team—a secret weapon that can maximize anyone’s ability to achieve.

Chances are that as you’re sitting here reading this, you’re not yet a member of any such team. But don’t worry—no one is born into an entrepreneurial team. Every founding member starts by himself or herself, as an individual with a dream. Destined teammates who are “casting the net” in search of one another will find each other in time.

We’ll leave this concept here for now, except to say that it’s so elemental, it changes the entrepreneur’s eternal question. Most people believe that the entrepreneur should ask from day one, like a mantra, “What’s my idea?”

But the UnStoppable version of the entrepreneurial question has two parts, the order of which is unimportant: “What’s my idea? Who’s my team?” Both parts are equally essential.

THE MENTAL MAGIC OF REFRAMING

Given the immense power allotted to the fear center in the brain—led by the amygdala and its neural and hormonal support systems—it’s a wonder that we can trick and bypass the whole thing using a simple, conscious technique formulated in a recently evolved part of our brains, just behind our foreheads. But we can. As we discussed in Chapter 3, the most common way it’s done is by conditioning the prefrontal cortex to redefine and redirect the fear impulses.

This kind of strategy is what neuroscientists call cognitive reappraisal, a conscious, proactive shift by the cortex that says, “You know that thing you thought you knew? It’s really something else—something better.” Advertising agencies used to use these thought shifters every day.1 They called it positioning a brand. For example: Pork isn’t a salty, fatty meat that clogs the arteries, it’s really “the other white meat,” and we all know white meat’s good for you. Don’t worry about getting chapped hands when you do dishes; Palmolive Liquid is really hand softener in disguise. Guinness isn’t beer; it’s nourishing food. It all comes down to a simple message: you thought this was less, but it’s really more.

The best term for this is reframing: taking an idea out of one context or frame and sticking it into another that casts it in a completely different and usually better light.

When reframing is done right, it changes perception instantaneously and permanently, extinguishing our notions and thus changing emotions. Reframing is one of our universal tools. For example, it will be our most vital Accelerated Proficiency tool when we discuss branding and differentiating for any business later on. Reframing is also a power tool in selling. Even irrational impulses can be overruled by this conscious, rational tool—especially fear.

Here’s a dramatic story I heard from a friend about how he cured his lifelong fear of flying in a single day. He did it with one momentous reframing thought. Whenever he got on a plane, his imagination ran wild. Every new bump or sound was it—just what the doomed passengers on flight so-and-so must’ve heard before the wing fell off. He knew he was suffering from a full-blown phobia, but he couldn’t shake it. Then by chance, this guy’s girlfriend got a job as a flight attendant and started flying dozens of places a week. He knew she flew with great pilots on safe planes. He never worried for a minute when she was flying because he knew she’d come back safely.

And then one day his girlfriend showed up with a pair of plane tickets. They were going to her best friend’s wedding. This was nonnegotiable, and a few weeks later, he found himself sitting next to her on the plane, about to leave the gate. He felt the usual nauseating panic. And then he looked at her, and had this thought: “Anita is here on her airline trip, sitting in her seat like she does every day. I’m just riding along on her plane. She’ll be safe and get home like always, so I’ll get home too. Anita’s plane is always safe and you just happen to be sitting on it with her.”

In that moment his fear literally vanished. For the next three hours, his mind and body experienced the thoughts and sensations of flying without fear. The next time he flew alone, he remembered his frame and talked to himself continually before the flight: “If I just substituted Anita for me in this seat, I’d know this flight would be safe. She’s sitting here instead of me. We’ll get home fine, like always.”

The rest of the story is that our friend soon became a Platinum-level frequent flyer enjoying hundreds of trips all over the world. Occasionally his amygdala would send him a few butterflies. But he always had his frame to tamp them back down.

Metaphors—the most powerful linguistic device used in storytelling, poetry, and song—are just ways to reframe. As we’ll see, they are also a critical tool used by the best reframers to make their frames convincing and memorable. A metaphor asks you to think of something you know as something else: “Golf is a fickle lover.” “Drugs are the devil.” “Speed kills.” “Your pain is your power.” “Fifty is the new forty.” Or that one James Dyson used: to an engineer, “a mistake is just a prototype.” “Failure equals learning.”

If you’re afraid of heights, you’d think the higher you go up in a plane, the scarier it would get. But to pilots, higher is just a different frame. It’s always safer and better. It gives you time to deal with emergencies and even better gas mileage when your fuel is low. So pilots live by the metaphor, “Altitude is your friend.”

When you recast mistakes and failure in your own mind as James Dyson does, their sting can vanish, all because of a deliberate, conscious thought that you control—one that is smarter than your amygdala.

You’ll get your reframes from a variety of places, including from the lessons and wisdom of teachers, coaches, and leaders. (We’ve already insinuated a handful into your consciousness through the pages of this book.) They’ll also appear to you in the process of getting in motion, walking the road, and gathering personal expert experience. What’s more, reframes happen most readily in teams because of the synergy of creativity and thought that happens there—yet another of a team’s multipliers.

THE SECRET OF SELF-TALK

In the brain, conscious thought speaks to us in the words of our native language, and reframing is no exception. The logic, snap, and memorable nature of this language is critical for recall when we need it most—under stress. You pick it up from others or originate it for yourself.

Peak performers don’t think it’s crazy or odd to talk to themselves. They think it’d be crazy if you didn’t. All performers who are operating under stress talk to themselves continually—while learning and practicing, but also when reminding themselves to execute key steps that are needed to avoid disaster, whether landing a plane, aiming a rifle, or preparing to deliver a speech before a skeptical audience.

Since time immemorial, every new sailor has been taught to navigate into a harbor with this alliterative phrase: “Red right returning.” It means keep the red buoys on the right and you’ll stay in the channel. Every single time you enter the channel, for the rest of your boating life, a little voice will speak to you, or you’ll say out loud the three Rs.

As these examples illustrate, effective self-talk is essential for feeling in control and anticipating what comes next in high-stress situations. It lets you step aside from the most acute fear and steer the fear that’s left over.

MICRO-SCRIPTS ARE THE SELF-TALK SECRET

Peak performers from jet pilots to Olympic athletes use what we call Micro-Scripts over and over—those short, easy-to-remember phrases they trust, like “Red right returning.” SEALs and Israeli commanders train with them every day. For each life-saving lesson a SEAL learns, he also gets a pithy, unforgettable rule. “Tap, rack, bang” clears a jammed magazine in a gunfight. “Attack the crack” gets you into the room where a terrorist is hiding with a gun. “Suck the mud” is what you do when an enemy boat arrives overhead. “Canopy in sight, pull right” is how you yank your parachute away from a collision course.

After years of practice, you may not say these Micro-Scripts aloud, but your mind will still repeat them in a whisper. A sailor will hear “When in doubt, let it out” in his head during a big gust. And while the process of mitigating real fear can be complex, reframing it starts the same way, with a few potent words of self-talk: “Fear is my friend.” “You can sleep when you’re dead.” “You can do it because you’ve done it.” “This shit is what we like.”

We’ve talked about reframing failure itself, one of the big three fears, with phrases like “Failing is learning,” “You must fail your way to success,” and “Every No gets me closer to Yes.” We can find similar reframes for fear of humiliation, like the fear of public speaking: “Just imagine the audience is naked!”

But fear of uncertainty and the unknown—that’s a horse of a different color . . .

THE SIMPLE POWER OF “KNOWING WHAT TO DO”

Fear of uncertainty and the unknown is the big bogeyman for most of us humans. Fear of the unknown has it all: death, injury, loss, terror, failure—you name it. Our brains instinctively hate “not knowing” when something is going on around us that might affect us, so they will fill in the blanks with optical illusions and (often dire) assumptions when no meaningful answer is available.

Uncertainty makes everyone nervous. It makes SEAL candidates “ring the bell” and quit during basic training as often as pain, cold, or any other tangible form of suffering.

But just knowing what’s in store, knowing you know what to do because you’ve done it or seen it, is like a miracle cure for the fear of the unknown. Here’s one remarkable example.

As we’ve seen, SEAL training is world famous for its five-day set of trials called Hell Week. Most candidates fail to get through it and are dropped from the program. They must spend five straight days and nights with no sleep under brutal conditions. They swim long distances in 50-degree water, perform endless physical training exercises, and maneuver heavy rubber boats onto sharp rocks in strong surf, without letup. There are no performance waivers or excuses. If you stop, you’re instantly dropped from the program. Only those with serious injuries like broken limbs or pneumonia are allowed to “roll back” to try again with the next class.

None of the trials of Hell Week are described in advance. All the students know when the week begins is that they will be subjected to untold misery, pain, and pressure. The instructors use fear of the unknown like the Grim Reaper to induce the biggest percentage to quit the first day. They constantly tell exhausted, battered, freezing troops that what they’ve just suffered through is the easy warm-up. Not knowing what horrors are in store, and fearing that they’re already nearing the breaking point, students quit in droves because of uncertainty and doubt.

Here’s what blew me away. I talked to a SEAL who had done Hell Week twice.

He’d broken his leg after the first one, so he was rolled back to the incoming class. He got a second chance but had to do Hell Week all over again. He said, “The second time, I knew what the evolutions were, the instructors’ tricks, and I knew I had done it. It was just as cold, wet, and physically tough. But mentally, it was easy. The hardest part the first time was just that uncertainty. Without that, it was like a piece of cake. Ninety-nine percent of this is mental.”

PROCEDURES AND AUTOMATICS

SEALs also deal with uncertainty using something that one called Procedures and Automatics. One of the best fear mitigators is the calming and confidence effect people get from simply remembering their training, mentally rehearsing rules and procedures as the pressure mounts. This is the simple effect of knowing what to do. Having these preset steps is a primary method that we all can use to avoid panic in the most stressful situations.

Imagine the fear and stress you’d feel if a loved one were suddenly injured and bleeding in front of you, evidently in the process of succumbing to anaphylactic shock. Now imagine that you had just completed an excellent first-aid course as preparation for a job as a volunteer ambulance attendant. Doesn’t that feel a little different?

Peak performers know that practicing the same procedures grooves their reactions so they become automatic. The combination of repeating them consciously and internalizing them unconsciously is one of the best tools for emotional mechanics that we have. “When things get particularly hot,” said one SEAL, “we can switch our brains onto our procedures. We know they work and we can work them.”

EXTINGUISHING

Author and neuroscientist Gregory Berns uses a term he calls extinguishing. He claims that fear triggers can be reset in the amygdala by taking repeated action. The amygdala expects that action to produce a feared result, but it does not. The effect is to extinguish the trigger for the response. Without the trigger, the action doesn’t generate the fear.

This is a big reason why entrepreneurs who are used to defeating obstacles and problems no longer automatically flinch when they encounter one. Instead, they can turn their power to attacking and solving it, because with practice, they’ve removed the fear triggers that distract other people. It’s an enormous advantage to have.

Extinguishing is probably 90 percent due to good old-fashioned familiarity and practice, and it’s one of the most basic antidotes to fear there is. It’s one more reason to get in motion ASAP and start doing to get over the unknowns. It can be that simple once you get started.

FEAR TRAINING

Trainers in the Israeli Defense Force have learned that by confronting controlled situations that reproduce real fear under the guidance of a deeply trusted leader-instructor, students can teach themselves how to flip their own internal switches and take action without hesitation.

The instructor-psychologists said that a remarkable bonus comes to the individuals who undergo such training. The mental process they internalize is translated into other fear-inducing activities in other parts of their lives, including their later professional lives. Their bodies learn to adjust all the variables of feeling and sensation that are unique to each of us and that can’t be scripted from the outside. Life-changing results can happen for students within six to ten days.

The big insight was that this kind of conditioning can be relevant to anyone who wants to habituate to risk and high-stress environments—including an entrepreneur.

There is much more to this story than we can cover in this book, but the Israelis make a compelling case that experiential training like this holds a key to accelerating a student’s vital skills in emotional mechanics. The trainers believe it can be the basis of an amazingly effective educational paradigm.

FEAR ENERGY TURNED AROUND

The net result of every tactic and strategy we’ve discussed is not that the flames of fear are snuffed out—they never can be. But their destructive power is transmuted into positive energy. The same flames that could incinerate your dreams can serve instead for cooking and heating, tempering steel and forging tools. Remember, the heightened heart rate, sharpened senses, and overall edginess caused by the fear response prepare us physically for action. No one who understands performance in competitive environments would ever consider giving up that advantage—it’s part of the UnStoppable edge. The solution is to block the path the amygdala wants us to take—escape, avoidance, or hiding in place—and let this energy rebound in the only direction that remains: forward.

GOODNESS

There’s a value at the beginning and the end of all this, one too big to get a number on a list. It’s not greatness, as in wealth or power or winning the most trophies. The word for it is goodness, and there’s no better or simpler one. It’s a different kind of measure, and we think every human being has a notion of what it is and wants it for themselves and those they love. They want it in the mission they pursue, in the companies where they work. They want to root for it and see it win in the end. They want to know it’s how they got the chance they had to touch greatness.

Goodness does not make you UnStoppable in this world. But it does make more people want to support you, asking nothing in return. It makes more potentially magnificent team members want to join forces with you. It makes your customers happier, your products better, your decisions easier, and your risks smaller.

Perhaps the best thing about becoming an entrepreneur is that you get to choose exactly what part goodness will play in your life from moment one. And whether or not goodness alone can make what you do bigger, it will always make what you do better.

1 We say “used to” because advertisers in the days of Mad Men were wizards at positioning, the art of the big, differentiated selling idea that could set a brand apart for decades. These days, we look at advertising and often can’t even determine what product is being advertised, let alone why it’s the best choice.