Excellence Under Pressure Transcript (045)

PHILLIP ELLIS: Greetings, fellow listeners! My name is Philip Ellis, and you are at the Point of Learning with my good friend Peter Horn. Pete and I just finished our one-year term as inaugural fellows in Democratic and Civic Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania. At our last in-person meeting in Philly, I introduced Pete to another good friend of mine, Coach John Havlik, who's a retired Navy SEAL and West Virginia University Hall of Fame athlete. I'm a huge fan of Coach. It's not often that you find somebody who's so accomplished in life, yet so down to earth. He just finished his doctoral dissertation, which is a fascinating study on how elite performers manage stress that he and Pete will be discussing in this episode. Coach has a lot of great wisdom to share, so I hope you enjoy the show!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, retired Navy SEAL Captain John Havlik punctures Hollywood stereotypes about Navy SEALs.

JOHN HAVLIK: We’re just a bunch of guys who go to work every day. We have a unique mission and we train hard for it. And we're ready to act when called upon.

[VO]: A Hall of Fame competitive swimmer himself, Havlik recently interviewed U.S. National Team swimmers to study how they managed stress:

HAVLIK: Positive self-talk was huge. Swimmers often commented that “You know, when you get up on the block to race, physically, almost all of you have done the same thing to get there. Now it's really about the mental side: who wants to win the most.” And that's really the difference between those that are up on the podium from those that aren't on the podium.

[VO]: He also interviewed retired Navy SEALs with experience totaling 40 deployments over 139 years of honorable service.

HAVLIK: You train and work with your fellow operators. You get to a first-name basis, you know their families, you know everything. So ideally, when you go into a very high-threat environment, you want to perform at the highest level, and you want to take care of your brother and come home—everybody come home safely.

[VO]: We talk about the four strategies both high-performing groups deploy in high stress situations. It's great advice for the rest of us too. So stick around!

[VO]: Capt. John Havlik retired from the Navy in 2014 after more than 30 years of distinguished military service, nearly all of them in the Naval Special Warfare community, most commonly known to civilians like me as the Navy SEALs. John graduated from West Virginia University as a 4-year lettered athlete, the first swimmer in WVU history to qualify for the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials, in 1980. He served as tri-captain of the first undefeated men’s swim team in WVU history his senior year. In 2017, he was inducted into the WVU Sports Hall of Fame. The following year he was inducted into the Mountaineer Legends Society, WVU’s version of a sports Ring of Honor. John's career in the Navy began in 1982 and included a full range of worldwide duties in the SEAL and special operations community, including an assignment at the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, the SEALs' most elite operational special mission unit. It's tough to know how to address this guy! A Navy captain known affectionately as "coach" to his comrades—because he first enlisted while he was pursuing a job as swim coach and PE instructor—John Havlik also holds the academic rank of doctor. In fact, I first met him in Philly last April,   the day he defended the doctoral study we'll be talking about today. Captain Havlik also earned an M.A. in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College in Newport, RI. and a M.S. in Education from the University of Pennsylvania . The book he co-authored with Bill Treasurer is called The Leadership Killer: Reclaiming Humility in an Age of Arrogance. It focuses on humility as the fundamental leadership attribute. Havlik is also the CEO of JRH Consulting. Based in Tampa, FL, he consults with individuals and teams on building and leading high-performance teams.

[04:39]

HORN: Your military portfolio includes deployments across the globe in the seals and Special Ops, including an assignment at the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or as they were known when I was a kid, SEAL Team Six. That was the group responsible in 2011 for the killing of Osama bin Laden, for example. It's the most elite and top secret special mission unit. So let's start there. Tell us everything!

HAVLIK: I wish I could tell you a lot, but I really can't.

HORN: I was trying to catch you off guard by opening with that, but well played, Captain! Seriously, because they’re so badass, to use a technical term, Navy SEALs have ranked high in the U.S. public and movie-going imagination since I was little. (One of my first G.I. Joe action figures that I wanted to get was Torpedo—he was the SEAL.) In your experience, what are the biggest misconceptions people have about Navy SEALs?

HAVLIK: Most of the guys that I know and worked with are pretty quiet and humble and just go out and do their job. It's just another day at work. Yeah, we're in pretty good shape and, you know, we're all ruggedly handsome. You know, that’s part of the being a SEAL. But I think we're just normal people, and maybe that concept has been overplayed [in movies, etc.] We do a unique job, and we're heavily trained, and we're pretty good at it. But we're just like your neighbors or your family members, you know, we’re pretty simple people. And I think that's what's been forgotten. And that's what I found across Special Operations. You know, we [special military forces] have a moniker of “the quiet professionals.” Now some will argue that though all the books that have been out and the movies and some of the other stuff that's been going on, that maybe has been taken a bit too far, but in in general, like I said, we're just a bunch of guys that go to work every day and we have a unique mission and we train hard for it, and we're ready to act when called upon.

HORN: You were the first swimmer in the history of West Virginia University to qualify for the U.S. Olympic swimming trials. And you also served, in your senior year, as tri-captain of the first undefeated men's swim team in school history. I want to ask this question when it comes to coaching [swimming], did swimming come pretty easily to you? Or were there parts of it that you really had to work on to be competitive?

HAVLIK: I think, you know, when I was swimming, I had the opportunity to swim for some really good coaches. Even as a young kid growing up, the coach I had at the Naval Academy at the age group team there, was outstanding, and just start showing me the traits, the characteristics of being a good coach, and being there to help you improve in the water. Mostly it was speed, you want to swim fast, you know, you want to win, and okay, How do you do that? So he helped my technique and to perform in the water, which was what I wanted at that time, and then I went to college. I had a really good coach at West Virginia where I swam competitively, and he was very good. He gave me the opportunity to develop. He maybe was kind of like a second father to me. He gave me an opportunity, and he said, “This is what I expect from you.” And so whether it was staying in school or performing in the water, he kind of let me succeed or fail, you know, and he provided me the guidance, and he was there to help me if things didn't go right. And then I had a couple other coaches that I swam with, during the summers, between academic years. One of them was the Olympic coach at the time—this was in the late ‘70s. He had quite a lot of swimmers, and he has a great history in USA Swimming. And I learned a little bit of everything from all those coaches what I had to do to compete and do well in the water. And then once I was done with my eligibility, I wanted to give back and share and help others succeed, now that I was more of a coach or a figurehead than I was an actual competitor.

[09:43]

HORN: I wanted to move on to the real focus of what I wanted to talk to you about. The study that you did for your doctoral work is fascinating and groundbreaking, because it involves both of these dimensions, which is to say elite military operations and competitive swimming. So the full title of your doctoral study is Showtime: A Comparative Analysis of How U.S. Special Operations Service Members Cope with Deployment Stress, and How U.S. Senior National Team Swimmers Cope with Competition Stress to Maximally Perform. I imagine given your background, though, that neither deployment stress nor competition stress is foreign to you!

HAVLIK: Well I had close to 50 years of experience with competition or performance stress, and deployment stress, you know, with my swimming days, and then 30+ years in the Navy, conducting several overseas deployments in combat zones. So I've been exposed to it and I've had to learn to deal with it, and to do my job and do it well. And so the opportunity came up when I was at University of Pennsylvania for the doctoral study, the opportunity to do this. And so to study this just seemed natural to me. So I think I was in the perfect position to do the study and then I have a lot of experience in it. 

HORN: I mentioned that it was groundbreaking. It was groundbreaking because although it seems like a natural kind of comparison, if you're trying to think about high-stress environments, to take elite athletes and elite special ops and compare them, really you found that nobody had done that before. And so the groups that you're dealing with are members of the—was it 2021 U.S. Senior National Team? So you interviewed a group of them. And you interviewed a group of retired special ops military personnel?

HAVLIK: That's correct. Yes. When I was looking at the study, I did a pretty exhaustive scouring of the scholarly databases. And I found a lot of parallel studies on high-performing groups, whether it be athletes or doctors. I found parallel studies about how they handled stress, how they coped with stress to get ready to perform, but none that I had found that actually compared these two elite groups, okay, and what to implement. One of the past studies said, it'd be nice if how the U.S. special operations personnel trained to handle stress could be shared with sporting federations, as they prepare their athletes to compete at the highest levels, whether it's the Olympics or other world championships. So that kind of serves as the basis of why I wanted to do this and helps start forming the study. What I ultimately ended up coming down to was a members of the 2021-2022 U.S. national swimming team. I got several Olympians I got to talk to, and then retired Navy SEALs. I wanted to do the active duty side of the house, but there was some pushback from the Department of Defense and even the SEAL headquarters itself about interviewing active duty folks. So I reached out to several colleagues and talked to them. And the data I got was fantastic, because the folks I interviewed had completed over 40 deployments over 139 years of honorable service. So I think I got some really good data from the interviews of both groups.

HORN: We're going to talk about each of these findings. But I'm going to tick off the four at the outset to frame it for people listening. You found that National Team swimmers and special ops personnel shared four key understandings—or they maybe didn't express it this way, but this is the way that you presented and synthesized what they were telling you in these interviews—four commonalities about how to excel under high stress conditions: So first, they had absolute trust in their training. Second, they adhered to a strict routine. Third, they focused only on what they could control. And fourth, they used healthy and adaptive distractions. So we're going to work through those, because part of what's exciting and interesting is that not only could the stuff that you found out about the military be useful for the athletic training organizations who were interested in your work, but you recognized as you were working on this that these are ideas about excelling under high-stress situations that anybody in a high-stress situation could rely upon. And so it's useful for lots of people, even if you're not in most elite tier of these particular fields. So let’s start with training. What does “absolute trust in their training” look like?

HAVLIK: Well, the basic commonality between the two is both groups put in so much time, whether in the pool, in the weight room, and the SEALs in the BUD/S training—

HORN: BUD/S—is that Basic Underwater …

HAVLIK: Yeah, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. Yeah, sorry about that! But, you know, you start there, you lay the groundwork, you learn the basics of what a SEAL does, okay? And then you go to your SEAL team, and as you get ready to deploy, you're going to go through a very intense pre-deployment training cycle, where you add more complex, more intense training, where you start bringing in supporting units that are going to deploy with you, and you know, start working together. Because really, you don't want to wait to get on the battlefield to work with somebody for the first time. So what they're doing now is very intense, and they actually train with the units they're going to deploy with, before they actually go overseas.

HORN: So would those also be naval units, or would those be units from other branches of the military as well? Or, it depends?

HAVLIK: Well, it's still a combination of both. But really, in special operations, it's the joint environment: you're using assets from all the services. And so you may use Navy ships or submarines or aircraft. You're going to definitely use Army helicopters, you're going to use the US Air Force supporting assets. You name the gamut, it's out there. And so if it's available, you're going to use it. And so the idea is to not wait until you get over in [the] theater [of war], wherever you're deploying to; it’s to try to train in CONUS, or Continental United States, to work together, get some semblance of “Hey, I know you.” The worst part is going to do something and you meet the pilot for the first time! It's like, “Hey, can you do this job?” you know, “Who are you?” If you have already worked through that beforehand, it's a little more comforting. It brings the stress down: Hey, I've worked with these people. I know they can do the job. Stress level comes down, I'm ready to go out and operate. And so that’s the SEAL side of the house. With the swimmers, you know, they've put so much time into the water, and working on their basic fundamentals and their skills with their coaches and their teammates. And they're so ingrained in what they do and what time they put into it, that they know they've done the requisite preparation to get ready to perform at a major international competition. So in both cases, you draw that all together, whatever group you're in: Hey, I've done this training, I am ready to perform, let's go do it!

[18:42]

HAVLIK (cont.): You talk to the swimmers, they try not to change anything as they get closer to competition. You know, they've worked on their fundamentals, they've done what they've needed to do. When they start their process of tapering—that's when they start resting physically and mentally and emotionally. You know, as they start prepping their bodies and minds to compete, they tend to stick to their routine. And this is why all the findings start coming all together is they stick to their routines that have worked on the past, and gets them into that mindset that I've done all my training. Now I'm doing the things I need to prepare to get myself ready, to step on the block and do the best race I can. And those events I can't control—I talk to the swimmers, especially at the Olympics, there's just things they can't control: media requests, transportation, where they sleep in the Olympic Village, the size of the bed … there's just little things they can't control, but they can add up to the stressors that could affect their performance. And that just goes to finding three: just control those things I can control. And the same thing with the SEALs is you can't always control what the enemy does. You know, they have they have a say in what's going to happen. And so you train to the best of your abilities to prepare for what you need to do. In our planning, we do a lot of what we call “what ifs.” What if this happens? What if this? you know—extreme events that may arise that at least we've thought about it and we kind of come up with a plan of action in case that arises, but you can't plan for everything. In either case, you can't plan for everything.

HORN: So you mentioned, just to hang out on [Finding] Two [i.e., swimmers and SEALS adhere to a strict routine] for a second, you mentioned that tapering is this process of getting ready for swimmers so that you're not like, obviously, swimming as hard as you can as long as you can right up until the day of the event, right? That you're there preparing for it. So tapering, that makes sense. What kind of routine for the SEALs, or maybe especially in deployment, but what does the “strict routine” look like?

HAVLIK: Well, I mean, most of the special operations-type events happen at night. And so, really one of the first things you have to do is you have to get on a night routine. Whereas a lot of people work during the day—even though you're overseas, there's always a 24/7 process going on. But you'll find in large organizations, the heaviest amount of participants or people that are working is during the day, you know. Flip it all around: in special operations, most of their operations are going on at night, and so they're sleeping during the day, or they're resting or they're planning, they're coordinating. And so there's a reversal right there. That's not the norm of what you're doing back in the States, you know, so you have to get into that mindset. In the military a big thing we do is called our “battle rhythm.” And it really defines everything you have to do for a day, you know, to get you ready to get you through the day. And it kind of outlines all your events. And battle rhythm defined for me when I got up, when I went to bed, you know, and everything else in between, I tried to fit it in: the outside meetings, outside coordination. And then, when do I go eat? When do I work out? When do I call home? All those little things that are important to you, but may not be important to the war effort—to try to mix it all together and find that battle rhythm, that routine, that gets you going. I found, and I think a lot of people would back me up on this, is that the sooner you get over to a deployment area and you get on your battle rhythm, it really brings the stress down, because deploying to an unknown area brings stress, just by the deployment factor itself. And then you get into an area where the stress level will rise because they are deployed in a battle zone or a or combat area, you know, and then you may go out and do something and then your stress level goes way back up. But it comes down to that baseline level. Deployment seems to be a sustained stress level, with peaks and valleys of when you do operations that you do not face when you're back home, when things are a little bit more normal.

HORN: So for example—and despite my opening question, I'm really not trying to prompt you to divulge military secrets!—but like, what would be standard, if you knew that you had—and I know it doesn't work like this, but let's suppose we're going to have a mission 10 days from now, obviously a night mission, like how long before that would I want to be shifting into my “battle rhythm” and maybe sleeping accordingly or trying to adjust? You said as soon as possible, right? But like, what would be the minimum advisable time, like a few days in advance? Would you want to be for a week …?

HAVLIK: The swimmers—even when I was swimming, like if you trained on the East Coast and your major meet was on the West Coast, you tried to get into the routine and adjust your training schedule so that Hey, I'm swimming at the time I'm going to swim on the West Coast. So that may be an adjustment to your workout hours. You’re finding that rhythm so that when when you make that transfer over from East Coast to West Coast, it's doesn't affect your body, your circadian rhythm, all that other stuff. You’ve already done that: Hey, I'm already into this cycle. And that's it. So they were doing that. Swimming may not have been going to a battlefield, but we started our tapers. Hey, we're going to we're going to change our workout routines a little bit because instead of swimming at three o'clock in the afternoon, you're gonna be swimming at noon on the West Coast, we're gonna have to adjust our workouts here to get you on that pace. So your body starts getting used to that cycle. And that's why I say when when you went on deployment, the sooner you got on that battle rhythm, the better off you were to start preparing for— Ten days, that's a long time! I mean, there's guys I know that deployed and they turn over and they were out the next night, you know, conducting operations. So if you've got an opportunity like that for 10 days of preparation, the sooner you get into it, the better off you are.

[26:22]

PHILLIP ELLIS [ad]: Hey there, it's Phillip again. As you might suspect, Pete tends to work the fact that he makes a podcast into casual conversation. On a Zoom call last fall, we were checking in and catching up, and Pete mentioned that he'd just released an episode on How to Write the College Application Essay. This was about a month before the public launch of ChatGPT, but let me tell you, it's still good advice! I listened to the episode as the father of a high school senior who spending months writing and revising these types of essays, and let me just tell you, that's when I started supporting Point of Learning. If you agree with me that this podcast provides valuable, carefully presented information about what,  how and why we learn, in a wide range of subjects—from school leadership to sociology to the intersection of stress and sports and special ops in this conversation with Coach Havlik—consider joining me in supporting this work. You can do it monthly, or make a generous one-time donation like I did last fall. Although this ad copy is reminding me that it might be a good time for me to re-up? Anyway, it's worth it, so click the link on the show page to learn more about contributing, and back to the show!

[27:31]

HAVLIK: What I found with the swimmers and the SEALs, the commonality was, Hey, I did the training. I believe in it, I'm ready to perform. I can only control the events that I have influence over and I can't worry about the rest of it. And I kind of asked one of the swimmers. I said, “So what was it like to walk out on the pool deck at the Olympics?” Because I’m curious. You know, it's got to be a huge event, stressful. I mean, here it is, the pinnacle of competitive swimming. And he goes, “I don't know, I just dumbed it down to the way I could control it.” And I said, “Can you explain that to me?” And he said, “No, I can't. It's just worked for me. I just brought it down to the level that I could manage. Whether that was just walking from the ready room to the right block, and getting ready to swim …” I was like, “Man, that's amazing how you can do that. Because I would think that's the most stressful time! You know, I'm walking, I'm on the pool deck, this is what I worked out for. This is what I made it for. Now I'm representing my country at the biggest swimming event in the world! ‘And I just dumbed it down to my level’! How do you do that?” So whatever, like you know, it just kind of highlights a lot, a lot of what you do, to handle stress or to cope with stress is very individualistic.

HORN: And literally focusing on, you know, so I wonder … I don't suppose that swimmer was staring at a lot of people in the stands, for example, during that walk from the locker room to the starting block. Probably they were focused on the pool, rather than taking it all in.

HAVLIK: If you watch—and I didn't break down specifically what they did and didn't do, but they did identify a few things. But a lot of them comes into Finding Four: those healthy and adaptive distractions. Hey, I've got my music on, you know. A lot of them wear their headphones, and they're just pumping music, or they're listening to something, just something that distracted them from the enormity of the event, you know, help them really to better relate to what they had to do. And so if you watch a lot of the swimmers, when they come out of the ready  room, they've got the headphones on, they don't hear the crowd until they take off the headphones. Twenty thousand people—that’s what the normal audience is for a swimming event at the Olympics. So you may hear it a little bit more in the water, but the pre-race stuff, they work on those routines. Hey, what have I done in the past to do this? I throw my headphones on, I put my goggles on, I focus on the water. I don't watch my competitors, what they're doing, how they're preparing. And then when it gets very quiet, when it's the start of the race, they may not even hear 20,000 people screaming.

HORN: You know, I'm struck that in both of these contexts, the military context and the swimming context, you do have this team dimension: they're in it together. Does the aspect of having the other teammates, people who are going through the same thing as you are who have your back in a certain sense, who understand it—is that a dimension that they spoke about as well?

HAVLIK: Swimmers talked an awful lot about the stress and the pressures of being part of Team USA. And the past history of success of USA Swimming. And they have a lot to carry on! That's a tradition that is carried on from team to team to team, and the new team feels that and they know it and just by being on Team USA, there's a huge expectation of success that comes with it. And so you're talking not just a team, you're talking a nation. And they know that, and that's part of the deal, and n what they have to accept as being part of the national team. And if they need to work on that, there are sports psychologists there that USA Swimming offers up. There is help that they seek, but there is tremendous team and country pressure for being part of the US National Swimming Team. For SEALs, it's always been about your brother, you know, your brotherhood, having their back, you don't want to let them down. That's why it’s a very close-knit environment, and you learn, you work, you train and work with your fellow operators, you get to a first-name basis, you know their families, you know everything. So ideally, when you go into a very high-threat environment, you want to perform at the highest level, and you want to take care of your brother, and come home, everybody come home safely.

[33:02]

HORN: I’m thinking about how you translate these things to somebody who is not in one of these elite environments—

HAVLIK: Well, I think the best best story I can tell you is I applied everything I've learned to the context of being a student. There’s the story of my final semester in the Penn CLO [Chief Learning Officer] program, and the final academic block, and all the work that comes with that. And then I had to finish up my Master’s. And then I had to do my comprehensive exams, or papers, all in a very short amount of time, just to finish the program and then be able to go on to the dissertation phase of it. And so I was kind of freaking out, I was losing sleep. I was trying to figure out how I was going to do all this, and I called a couple of my classmates. And I said, “What are you doing? How are you handling the same pressures?” And they explained what they were doing. But you know, for me, they were like, “Look, John, you've gone through harder things in your life. You can figure this out!” And so I just said, “Okay, I'll sit down and map out what I need to do, when it needs to be done. You know, how am I going to get through this semester and knock out all this work. And so what I did was I just kind of sat down, and I applied a couple sayings that I used in SEAL training to help me get through school. And so I took the SEAL motto the only easy day was yesterday. And I changed that to say “the only easy paper was the last one submitted.” I had the training: I definitely had the training in the SEALs, I had the training at Penn to do the dissertation. I got myself in a routine—I've carried a routine I learned when I was a young swimmer that carried me through the SEALs and a military career and carried me through the dissertation. I set up a routine to get through and complete school. And then I can only control what I can control—those smaller segments, instead of the enormity of the big project. I can't graduate in May without doing the work in January and all the things in between, and then I just used healthy and adaptive distractions. Working out has always been something big for me. For SEALs, it's our main healthy and adaptive distraction, you know, and so swimming, just doing some self-care things that helped me distract from Hey, I gotta go write another 20 pages in Chapter Four. It was like, Well, I can go out and take a bike ride, I can walk down the boulevard down here by the bay, just get some fresh air. So anything to distract it away. It really helped me, like I said, break down the enormity of a big project into the smaller segments I can control and still produce quality work. And I said, If I can take those findings and context of being a SEAL into being a student, then I believe my findings from what I did can be used by anybody, in any profession, any gender, any sex—because stress is prevalent in all aspects of life. You want to be a good parent, you want to be a good father, mother, teacher.

HORN: As we've been talking about this, it occurs to me that so many of these things have to do with mindset, have to do with belief, your state of mind, your approach to it. So that, for example, when we're talking about having trust in your training, it's the difference between saying, Well, I've been trained, but I don't know how good it was, what do these people know? You know, Maybe it won't work for me, as opposed to saying like, No, I've got this, I know how to do this! That’s the trusting mentality, or focusing on what you control. That's a mental exercise, as much as—I mean, that one is almost exclusively a mental exercise. Because there are these things that I care about, or I'm worried about, they're out here, and they could turn themselves into racing thoughts or anxiety about what I can actually do, but I'm going to bring it back, and take a breath, and recognize that This is the thing that I can have some kind of direct influence and control over. That's what I'm going to focus on. I can't worry about the rest of this stuff that may be important to me, but I can't let it take up my headspace right now. You know, a lot of this has to do with mental exercise in developing that mental stamina, that mental endurance, and I imagine there's a certain amount of self-talk in this, right? Like, I've got this. I trained for this—

HAVLIK: Yeah, positive self-talk was huge in both groups that I studied. The mental aspect—you know, swimmers often say something like, You know, when you get up on a block at the race, physically, almost all of you have done the same thing to get there. Now it's really about the mental side: Who wants to win the most? It’s hugely mental. And that's really the difference between those that are up on the podium from those that aren't on the podium. For one of the findings I had, one of the SEALs actually commented: “Just that confident self-talk … everything was positive self-talk about what was about to happen, and just keeping the negative out. All that positive self-talk really would lower the stress response. The negative was just—I would really go out of my way to keep the negative out.” And I think that pretty much summed it up with the SEALs, but it's the same thing with swimmers. It’s a natural thing to do, especially during the taper, when they're really fine-tuning everything and getting ready to race. There's a lot of self-doubt: Hey, have I done enough? Have I really done enough? And that's normal. I think you talk to any athlete when they're getting ready for a big performance, they're gonna look back and say, Hey, did I do everything I needed to do to be ready to perform at my best? And I heard that a lot with the swimmers and they did their best to try to push that out of the way. Yes, I've done that. And I'm ready to race. And they just keep that negative self-talk out. It was huge. Everybody talks about that. Everybody I interviewed talked about it.

[VO]: That's it for today's show! Thanks so much to Coach Havlik for joining me to talk about his study. You can learn more about him and his work at coachhavlik.com, which is linked on the show page. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music. Special instrumental versions of two more of his songs found their way into today's episode. See music notes on the show page for those titles. To learn about new titles of new songs Shayfer seems to drop every time I turn around, explore shayferjames.com. Finally, thanks to you for listening, and supporting this show any way you can. One free way to support this project is to share an episode with someone who might especially like it. If you can think of just one person who might appreciate these tips on how to function under extreme stress, please pass it along. It will mean most coming from you! If you listen on Apple Podcasts especially, please take a moment to rate and review the show. If you're not yet on the Point of Learning newsletter list, it's absolutely free and only comes out when I drop a new episode (so I promise not to crowd your inbox). Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered by me here in sunny Buffalo! I'm Peter Horn and I'll be back at you soon with a fresh take on what and how and why we learn. See you then!