New podcast: Rima Ziuraitis - Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) in Ukraine

Rima is a medic in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and a tactical medicine instructor originally from the United States. She came to Ukraine as an NGO volunteer in 2022 and began medical studies in 2023 before enlisting in 2024. Now, she works on medical evacuations of soldiers from the frontlines and works in stabilization points where they receive casualties and stabilize their injuries for transport to the nearest hospital.

Before enlisting, she taught tactical medicine per TCCC standards at the International Center for Tactical Medicine in Ukraine. In her spare time, she writes about tactical medicine for a wider audience based on evolving needs and lessons learned on the ground in Ukraine.

More about Rima:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rimamedua

Send Rima and her team medical supplies: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/3QM0WCUA0PBK2?ref_=wl_share

Or, snacks from home: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/390U40XEQSS4P?ref_=wl_share

Blue Yellow USA address for care packages:

C/O Blue Yellow USA NFP
PO box 641
Naperville, IL 60566

You can listen to the podcast here or on your favorite host.

Willpower is the result of a constellation of skills

Willpower is the result of a constellation of skills.

Often, when you struggle to do something, you'll tell yourself a story, such as, 'I just need more willpower.' This convenient narrative serves either as an excuse not to take responsibility or as a gross oversimplification that leads to a generic 'trying harder' without a specific strategy. Neither serves you well.

You need to try better, not just with more effort, which requires a combination of several underlying skills:

+ Emotional regulation: Decisions are driven by feelings as much as cold, hard thinking. Being attuned to your emotions helps you understand what matters and what doesn't, and keeps your cognitive brain engaged so you can problem solve when appropriate.

+ Stress regulation: Stressed people are stupid people. Regulating your stress responses enables you to make more informed decisions rather than reacting impulsively.

+ Conflicting values, thoughts, beliefs, and goals: Everyone has values and goals that lead to contradictory impulses. The more precise you are on what matters more and why, the easier it is to navigate these situations.

In practice, this looks like:

+ Identify and address your emotional and stress state first. Calm minds make better decisions and can interpret emotions and impulses more clearly.

+ Make tradeoffs explicit & reframe. Follow the consequences of decisions to their logical conclusion and see which path aligns with your values, needs, and goals, now and in the future.

+ Wait to decide. If you can, delay. When you want something you know isn't in your long-term best interest, tell yourself that you'll decide on it in 10-15 minutes. This is often long enough for the dopamine from the anticipation of the short-term reward to dissipate. Space almost always leads to more clarity.

Sustainable willpower comes from understanding that contradictory thoughts and motivations are normal. The better you become at sitting with conflicting emotions, impulses, and thoughts, the easier it will be to make the best decision for your future without repressing, ignoring, or hiding from uncomfortable contradictions.

The kind of difficult you need is not the type you like

The type of difficulty you prefer is probably not the kind you need to face to make progress.

Most people have a go-to form of hard. When stress or uncertainty shows up, you turn to what you know.

For a lot of SOF candidates, that's more training. Stressed out? Double down on workouts. Not sure you're ready for selection? Add miles. Frustrated or anxious? Grind harder.

That's the comfortable kind of uncomfortable. You already know how to do it. You know how to suffer physically, how to push through pain, how to outwork the person next to you.

But growth rarely comes from more of the same.

Your easy kind of difficult might be grinding out long rucks, sweating through extra sessions, or skipping recovery to prove you can suffer.

Difficult-difficult is forcing yourself to have the conversation you've been avoiding. It's asking for help when your ego is screaming to do it alone. It's slowing down enough to actually recover instead of hiding in the safety of fatigue and facing the anxiety of wondering if you've done enough.

Maybe you'd rather do an ice bath or a twelve-mile run than sit down and write out your goals or admit where you're falling short. Maybe it's easier to take on a second job or another project than to set boundaries or say no.

Maybe you'll ignore nagging pain because you'd rather "tough it out" than face the risk of needing time off.

This is how we trick ourselves: We confuse familiar pain with real progress. We fill our days with "productive suffering" to avoid the discomfort that matters.

Progress happens in the space you avoid. The conversation you're not having. The weakness you won't admit. The stillness you won't tolerate.
If you want to move forward, look at what you habitually avoid. Then face it head-on.

Real strength comes from doing the hard thing you need, not the hard thing you like. You can't out-train the parts of yourself you refuse to confront.

The obstacle isn't always outside you. Sometimes, it's the work you're dodging right now.

Whatever you're avoiding today is likely where your next breakthrough lives. And it's probably not found in your most familiar, reflexive kinds of difficult.

Don't try to be an expert in everything

'Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just rationalization.'

- Robert Sopolsky

One of the most important concepts to keep in mind when analyzing your behavior is that the more intelligent you are, the more likely it is that you're better at creating convincing arguments to support your impulsive behaviors, even when those behaviors, viewed from an objective distance, are not rational or even in your self-interest. 

We're very good at crafting stories and making them coherent. As Daniel Kahneman noted, a remarkable aspect of our inner lives is that we're rarely stumped. 

Another cognitive bias that we must be aware of is the Dunning-Kruger effect, which explains why people low in skill tend to overestimate their abilities, while those high in skill are more accurate in estimating their abilities.

This means that somebody can know all sorts of random facts about training, nutrition, or fitness trivia, consistently do none of them, and feel perfectly comfortable with that through the miracle of human cognition. All the while, the more confident we are that we're doing all the right things, the less likely it is that we actually are.

This is why successful people consult experts for nearly every critical aspect of their lives. They recognize that they can't possess the relevant expertise in more than one or two domains, so they don't even try.

If it matters, you need a skilled and objective perspective to keep you from falling into the cognitive traps that are ever-present and inescapable. People who seem to be thriving at everything aren't necessarily more intelligent; they just utilize effective systems designed by actual experts that compound results over time.

So whenever possible, avoid trying to figure it out yourself. It's a waste of your own time and energy to do the task poorly.

Save your energy for the domains you're truly good at and generate income, or spend it on experiences that you pursue for their own sake, where your level of competence is irrelevant. Anything in the middle is a waste of time.

'I can't' is a lie that hides 'I don't want to'

"I can't is" a lie that covers for "I don't want to."

We sometimes have our more advanced SOF candidates do open-ended workouts where they train to their limits rather than for a fixed metric.

For instance, they might hold 500 calories on the Echo bike, not for 30 seconds or a minute, but for as long as they can. Then, they'll recover back to a low heart rate, and do it again, for as many reps as possible within a block of time.

The point is for them to gain familiarity with physiological failure. They're deliberately doing something that, at some point, they won't be able to sustain. They'll have to accept that they're trying to do something, and they can't.

This is a situation you'll repeatedly face in selection, and it's a good idea to be familiar with it - what it feels like and how to manage it - before you go.

A critical lesson here is in what "can't keep going" really means. It involves surfing a line. There is a point at which the urge to stop begins shouting over your drive to continue. In that moment, you face a choice: You know that you *can* keep going, but you're not sure that you're still willing to pay the price to do so.

Reaching true physiological failure is surprisingly hard. If you're honest with yourself, from millisecond to millisecond, you almost always have a little bit more to give. You have it within yourself to keep going, even if just for a moment longer, if your mind remains willing.

You learn that "I can't" really means "I don't want to" and that nearly all failure is volitional. Instead, it becomes a matter of strategy. "How much can I give and still have something left for the next round?"

So, the moment of physiological failure is surprisingly hard to pinpoint, because the body rarely breaks first. SOF selection will teach you this. But, there's another aspect here that selection won't so much teach as test: Your ability to handle those moments of failure.

No matter how good you are, selection will find your breaking point. That's when the evaluation starts. This is not an accident, and it's not avoidable. You must face these moments, and you must be able to face yourself within them.