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Mastering Fear: A Navy SEAL's Guide - Hardcover

Webb, Brandon; Mann, John David

 
9780525533566: Mastering Fear: A Navy SEAL's Guide
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525533567 ISBN 13: 9780525533566
Verlag: Portfolio, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

From New York Times bestselling author and former Navy SEAL Brandon Webb comes a simple yet powerful five-step guide to transforming your life by making your fears work for you instead of against you.

Brandon Webb has run life-threatening missions in the world's worst trouble spots, whether that meant jumping out of airplanes, taking down hostile ships on the open sea, or rolling prisoners in the dead of night in the mountains of Afghanistan. As a Navy SEAL, he learned how to manage the natural impulse to panic in the face of terrifying situations. As media CEO and national television commentator, he has learned how to apply those same skills in civilian life.

Drawing on his experiences in combat and business, along with colorful anecdotes from his vast network of super-achiever friends from astronauts to billionaires, Webb shows how people from all walks of life can stretch and transcend their boundaries and learn to use their fears as fuel to achieve more than they ever thought possible. "Fear can be a set of manacles, holding you prisoner," writes Webb. "Or it can be a slingshot, catapulting you on to greatness."

The key, says Webb, is not to fight fear or try to beat it back, but to embrace and harness it. In the process, rather than being your adversary, your fear becomes a secret weapon that allows you to triumph in even the most adverse situations. In Mastering Fear, Webb and his bestselling coauthor John David Mann break this transformation down into five practical steps, creating a must-read manual for anyone looking for greater courage and mastery in their lives.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brandon Webb is a former US Navy SEAL, New York Times bestselling author, and founder and CEO of Hurricane Group, a media and ecommerce business focused on military entertainment, news, and monthly clubs. His titles include The Red Circle, Benghazi: The Definitive Report, The Killing School, and Total Focus.

John David Mann is Webb's co-author of The Red Circle, Among Heroes, The Killing School, Total Focus and the international bestseller The Go-Giver.

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1

Decision

Burn the boats.

-Alexander the Great, upon reaching the shores of Persia, thereby cutting off his army's only means of retreat

My face is grinding into the sand, my body is beyond exhausted. Four terrifying men are clustered around me, screaming at me and doing their best to kill me.

Not physically kill me. I'll grant you that. They aren't going to ship me out of here in a body bag. But make no mistake: They are planning to ship me out. Today. They want me as gone as last week's breakfast, and they are here to make sure that happens.

Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training is famous for three things. First, that image you've probably seen, a line of guys running on a beach, miserable but determined, carrying an insanely heavy log on their shoulders while being yelled at by their instructor.

Second, the fact that there's this brutal ordeal somewhere in there called "Hell Week."

And finally: the quitting. The desolate row of empty class helmets lined up on the asphalt, marking the passage of the vanquished, the goners, the losers. And hanging over the helmets, that evil brass bell: the bell you step up to and ring three times to make your defeat official. The bell you ring to tell all your instructors and your teammates: "I give up. I quit." In BUD/S, the quitting never stops.

In fact, it starts even before the first day.

Lying here facedown on the beach, my teeth biting on sand, I have a clear recollection of the day I showed up for registration ten weeks ago, sitting on a bench by that concrete-and-asphalt grinder, watching a BUD/S instructor pushing another class of SEAL candidates through their punishing routine of PTs (physical training, i.e., calisthenics), and being scared nearly out of my mind. Holy shit. Seven months of that?

There are plenty of would-be SEAL candidates who reach this point and don't even make it through the check-in process. All it takes is witnessing another class being put through their paces, and their SEAL ambitions crumble to dust. I understand why. The truth is, I had a hard enough time just passing the quals to get into BUD/S, forget getting through it. I was coming off years of regular navy service, the fat fleet guy fresh from his cushy tour on the USS Kitty Hawk and checking into BUD/S after barely passing the SEAL entrance PTs. The guy the other candidates will look down on and the instructors will mark right away for early elimination. Of the 220 guys in my BUD/S class, I was the guy nobody wanted to be. "That guy." That was me.

At the other end of the spectrum was Lars, a supremely athletic guy at the top of our class. An incredible specimen. Lars had thighs like tree trunks and could do push-ups from dawn till dusk. He could do anything you threw at him. He wasn't human.

And in our first week of training, about four thirty in the morning, Lars quit.

We couldn't believe it. The guy we all looked up to, the guy we all would have pegged "most likely to succeed" was gone, nothing left to say he'd ever been there but another empty helmet. Lying there in the dark, sun not up yet, hearing that lonely brass bell clanging out through the silence of the freezing morning air, I could practically hear the thoughts emanating from the heads of all the guys around me, guys who up to that point had believed they were doing pretty well. Shit!-if Lars can't do it, then I don't have a snowflake's chance in hell! By the time we got through our initial indoc period and entered First Phase of actual training, 10 percent of our class quit.

And now, here I am, on the beach near the end of First Phase, and oh boy, only five months of torture to go.

If I survive this particular, personalized torture, that is.

For a lot of guys, the moment of reckoning will come in a few days, when Hell Week starts. Not me, though. For me, Christmas has come early this year. This afternoon, these four professional sadists came over to our team and pulled me aside, separating me from the herd like a doomed wildebeest plucked by a pride of lions, and walked me out onto the beach, alone. Where they are now pushing me through an endless series of calisthenics, all the while shoveling sand in my face and screaming insults at me, all four at once, at the top of their lungs.

They've been doing this now for, oh, close to an hour, or maybe it's been close to a year, I'm really not sure at this point.

This is not a test, I tell myself. These guys are not trying to "see what I'm made of." They already know what I'm made of, I'm made of dirt and shit and weakness, and they don't like me, not even a little. They see me as a handicap to the team, and they are right. They want me gone, and if I were in their shoes, that's exactly what I'd want, too. They are willing me, with all the persistence and verbal abuse and sheer force of intention they can bring, to crawl from the beach up to the asphalt and ring that goddamn brass bell. I get it.

I look up at my instructor and tell him to go fuck himself. The only way they are getting me out of here will be in a body bag.

He drills me with a look that could bore a hole in a concrete slab. Then nods and lets me up. He looks over at his colleagues and says three words: "We're done here."

He can see it in my face: I've decided.

Of the 220 guys who started out in my BUD/S class, fewer than two dozen made it to the end. That afternoon on the beach in First Phase, I realized two things. First, that I was one of that handful who would be going all the way through. And second, why it was that so many others wouldnÕt. And it wasnÕt about weakness, or because it was hard.

The reason so many guys quit was just this: they never really started.

Those of us who went all the way through BUD/S were not the strong ones. Not the ones with greater ability or an excess of toughness. We were just the ones who had decided to do it.

Mastering fear starts with a decision. You might think that big decisions, potentially life-altering decisions, arise out of courage. They don't. It's the other way around. The strength and the courage to keep going arise out of the decision.

The decision comes first.

Decide to Decide

Decisions don't just happen. You have to make a conscious choice to be someone who makes decisions. You have to decide to decide.

I know that sounds circular, but it's the rock-solid truth. Plenty of people go through their entire lives never really making decisions. Not big ones, anyway. Sure, they may decide what to watch on TV, or which socks to put on that morning. What to major in at college, which career path to go into. But even those larger life choices are, for far too many people, decisions they more or less slide into, not out of any soul-shaking reflection and commitment, but more because it's just what seems to come next. Maybe it's what their parents did, or what an older sibling did, or what the people around them expect them to do. What their friends are doing. What seemed like the most reasonable choice at the time.

For me, that's not a life lived, or at least not lived fully. And it's surely no way to master fear.

The first and most critical step in mastering fear is to make a decision that has its roots deep in your bones, deep in your character, deep in your soul. To do that, you have to choose to be the kind of person who makes decisions like that.

You have to decide to decide.

I learned this from my dad, and at the time, I hated it.

My family lived in the mountains of British Columbia until I was eight years old, when my dad decided it was time to pursue a dream he and my mom had to sail around the world. They bought a boat and sailed us down to Ventura, California, where we lived aboard that boat for the next seven or eight...

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Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525533567
ISBN 13 
9780525533566
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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