Mental Resilience

AOSB is designed to put stress into the candidates to see how they respond and if they can cope under pressure, most of it self imposed. As an officer you will need to be able to make decisions in very high pressured enviroment and therefore must have the resilience to deal with this. Good new is that like most things this can be developed.

Stress Managament and Mental Resilience training is a growning element of the Army Training Syllabus. Research and time has been spent to better undertsand this subject and now formalised training is available under OPSMART.

Controlled exposure to stress improves one’s ability to manage it, like physical training you can’t run a marathon on week one of running. But after following a graduated running training programme where you run further and further you eventual will be able to. This technique is referred to as stress inoculation training and is used by the Israeli Special Forces as well as other military and civil organisations.

OPSMART

Optimising Performance through Stress Management and Resilience Training


Mental Reilience

The key benfits of building you mentral resilience are improvments in:

  • Self-confidence

  • Motivation

  • Anxiety

  • Attitude/mindset

  • Resilience/ hardiness

  • Sleep

Mental Resilience is built up of 7 pillers that once developed will controbute to your overcall resilience:

The Big 5

When approaching a task you need to set a goals for the TEAM.

Think Positive

“Fear will kill more dreams than failure ever will”

  • Replace negative thoughts with positive self-talk & positive self-statements

  • Positive self-talk – Very useful psychological skill

  • Increases confidence and self-belief

  • Coach ourselves through difficult times

Emotional Control

"Are you in control of your inner chimp?"

  • When emotional we act without thinking about consequences, irrational, impulsive.

  • Emotional responses trigger troublesome thoughts, which then influence behaviour.

  • Train your mind and having a strategy to deal with anxiety, stress, pain and discomfort.

  • Distract and divert attention away from chimp (negative thoughts).

  • Use mental skills for controlling your thinking increasing your mental toughness.

Anxiety Regulation

"Feel the fear and do it anyway"

    • Anxiety and stress causes arousal

    • Regulate our arousal to tasks to maximise performance

    • Too low arousal we under preform

    • Too high arousal our performance drops and we perform poorly.

    • Understand and identify the cause of anxiety

    • Develop techniques to manage anxiety such as breathing exercises or tempory mental compartmentalisation.

Mental Rehearsal

“It’s like doing it again for the second time”

  • Can be as effective as actually practicing the event

  • Used to learn and practice new skills and to evaluate performance

  • A visualisation skill but can also include verbal rehearsal and motor movements

  • Beneficial for skill mastery – Practicing motor skills e.g. weapons handling, drill etc.

  • Improves performance, motivation & confidence

  • Creating a mental script/picture of an experience that includes all of the senses and emotions of a task

  • Increase positive emotions and how we feel

  • Lowers performance related anxiety

Goal setting

  • Give direction in what to do

  • Define the outcomes before starting

  • Set SMART Goals