Building the Elite Podcast

Tom Satterly is a former Command Sergeant Major from the US Army’s Delta Force, also known as The Unit. During his 20 years at The Unit, Tom fought in and led countless high-profile missions including the capture of Saddam Hussein and the Battle of Mogadishu, also known as Black Hawk Down, which was the longest sustained firefight since Vietnam. That 18-hour firefight ended with Tom, along with se...

There is a distinction between pain and suffering.  Pain is what you experience, suffering is how you respond to it. Pain is built largely out of nerves and your brain telling you something is wrong. Suffering is you telling yourself something is wrong.   You can suffer without being in pain, and you can be in pain without suffering.  Learning to separate the two is an important part of what train...

Todd Bumgardner is a human performance coach at a tier one special operations unit. He works with operators during their qualification course. To do this well, he must balance their immediate physical training needs with the demands of their qual course, and ensure that he keeps them at a high level of performance without impairing their readiness for crucial work-related tasks and tests like CQB...

18-Delta, the Special Forces medic qualification course, and SOCM, the Special Operations Combat Medic course, are among the most difficult schools in the US Special Operations pipeline.  The people who attend these courses are special operators who have already been through their selection programs, and in some cases have already gone through several work-ups and deployments with their units. The...

Special operations selection teaches you to rethink your relationship with pain. The discomfort of doing something with a painful but partial effort isn't meaningfully different from the pain of giving it everything you have. One is just slower, and when it's over you wouldn't really remember the difference. For the world of SOF selection to become your home, and to eventually succe...

Eustress training is a way of training your body to do more work, easily by raising the baseline of movement or exercise that you can do without stressing your body out or making a significant demand on your recovery capacity. This means that you can eventually train harder, recover faster, and when you want to really push things in the gym or in your sport, you have a higher output potential. Sin...

Over our lifetimes, as years of experiences accumulate, we can begin to formulate a universal lesson: No matter how many bad things you went through in the past, you were still alive when they were over. This isn’t really something that you consciously decide. It’s something you teach a deeper part of your brain through practice. You have to know it, not just know the words for it.  As this settle...

In the second half of our conversation with Dr. Andy Morgan, we cover topics including:⁠ ⁠ - Advice for people seeking careers in the intelligence community⁠ - Andy’s work as an expert witness testifying at the International Criminal Court⁠ - The effects of trauma on memory, and why an inconsistent story of a traumatic event does not indicate lying⁠ - How people can be given false memories, and ho...

Dr. Andy Morgan is a Yale-educated former CIA medical intelligence officer, and one of the world's foremost experts on performance under stress in special operations personnel. In this episode we cover: - "The Warfighter's Stress Response" - What are the mental and physical differences between SOF candidates who perform well under stress, and those who don't? - SOF selecti...

Self-herding is when you refer to your past actions for subconscious guidance rather than mirroring what others around you are doing. This effect can persist a lot longer than the situation that produced the action. By taking advantage of self-herding, we can use temporary circumstances to shape persistent, long-term behavior.  A common method for doing this used by successful SOF candidates is to...

In SOF selection, you'll often hear instructors say "Don't set yourself up for failure."  From your viewpoint in the pushup position with wet sand abrading every inch of your body, this might seem like yet another form of casual derision. But it's an important reminder.  Many of the little tests in selection are assessing for conscientiousness and long-term planning, or th...

Metacognition is a fancy word for “thinking about thinking”.⁠ ⁠ To borrow definitions from research with Olympic athletes, metacognition can be broken into 3 forms:⁠ ⁠ - being aware of goals and how those goals relate to specific situations;⁠ - using specific psychological strategies (such as goal-setting, imagery, self-talk, relaxation, and activation) to manage and control your thoughts and visu...

Dr. Doug Kechijian is a physical therapist and CEO and co-founder of Resilient Performance Systems, which has locations in Manhattan, New Jersey, and Connecticut.  Resilient seeks to systematically explore the continuum between acute rehabilitation and athletic performance. Their clientele includes athletes and operators from Major League Baseball (MLB), the NBA, professional mixed martial arts, t...

When our secondary emotions work out well, we call them instincts. When they cause us to do stupid things, we shrug and say "I was in a weird place I guess" or "It seemed like the thing to do at the time." If we understand how secondary emotions work, we can shape them over time. With training, our secondary emotions can help us to think and react better under stress.  --------...

Stress makes us age faster, but not always. Some people remain healthy and capable throughout remarkably long lifespans, even when they undergo incredibly difficult circumstances. The difference in how we're impacted by stress comes down largely to how we think.  In this episode, we discuss several variables and strategies involved in managing our stress responses and becoming more resilient....

Those with a more internalized locus of control - who believe that they determine their path in life through their own decisions - are less susceptible to learned helplessness and are much more likely to succeed in SOF selection.  Send us a message

Some sled dogs will put just enough pressure into the harness to appear to be working while they’re actually taking a break. “Honest dogs” throw their full weight into the straps no matter how tired they are or how much further there is to go. These dogs take the lead positions in the harnesses so that they can set the pace for the rest of the team. Much of SOF selection is separating the honest d...

On this call, we’re speaking with Chris Merritt, a human performance coach at a tier-one special operations unit.  Chris has developed a set of principles that guide his training process: modular, mobile, and ready. Chris’ goal isn’t to make the operators he works with good at exercising. It's to make them good at doing their jobs and to stay that way for the duration of their careers.  This...

Contrast feeds appreciation.  We value warmth a lot more when we've just come in from the cold. Food tastes better when we're hungry. We're better able to enjoy the company of friends and family when we know what it's like to wonder if we'll ever see them again. In this episode of the BTE podcast, we discuss the inherent tradeoff in doing difficult and meaningful things: W...

A common mental feature in successful SOF candidates is that it's not just about them. When they reflect on their reasons for being there and suffering for the sake of a long-term goal, their thoughts often go to other people in their lives: people like their close friends, their teammates, and their loved ones back home.  This helps them to view the world through "self-distanced perspec...

A recent study on BUD/S students looked at the roles of mindsets around stress, willpower, and failure. The primary focus of the study was "stress mindset." This is whether you view stress as either enhancing (stress helps me perform) or debilitating (stress is bad and should be avoided). Those who view stress as a necessary and welcome part of coping with challenges did better. They had...

Edith Eger, an Auschwitz survivor turned author and trauma therapist, has a saying: "Trying is lying. You're either doing it or you're not." "If you say, 'I'm trying," she writes, "you don't actually have to do it. You're letting yourself off the hook. Stop trying and start doing." With that as our foundation, we'll discuss how to re...

In this episode we have a conversation with Casey Glass, who has been a strength and conditioning coach at an active duty special operations unit for the past eight years. Alongside helping the operators she works with to excel in their training workups and deployments, Casey also manages their preparation training for selection into tier one units.  On this call, we discuss the framework that she...

This this episode we talk about how our stress responses and pain perceptions work, how they’re affected by training, and how we can develop our capacity for productive suffering.  Send us a message

You don't know somebody until you've seen them make hard decisions. It's easy to be kind when kindness is easy. It's easy to be generous when generosity is easy. Until doing the right thing is also the hardest thing to choose, you don't know what kind of person someone is at their core. Send us a message