Reflection:
Presenting at the Navy SEAL Foundation Impact Forum
Last week was a doozy. I had the honor of presenting at the 7th Navy SEAL Foundation Impact Forum in Washington, D.C. In a departure from standard Check Engine Light articles I’m going to do my best to reflect on my experience as a way to consolidate all that I learned and hopefully offer some insight behind what drives the way I share information both here on Substack as well as on social media.
The Navy SEAL Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports active duty and veteran operators and their families with community, family, and health resources. My primary job for nearly the last two years has been as an educator working with the Warrior Fitness Program and the Naval Special Warfare Gold Star Program. I have worked with NSW personnel for almost the entirety of my career in return to play/duty or strength and conditioning. The last two years however, I’ve found myself in regular close proximity to this community through my work with Virginia High Performance and the Navy SEAL Foundation.
The Navy SEAL Foundation Impact Forum - What It’s All About
As part of the aforementioned Warrior Fitness Program I currently teach four times weekly Check Engine Light classes. Check Engine Light classes cover many of the same topics that I write about on this very platform. The goal of Check Engine Light is to provide context to the vast amount of health and performance information provided to these warriors and present a schematic for pursuing novel and relevant information that will actually be useful in their pursuit of performance longevity. In fact, the articles I write here are often direct reflections of discussions we’ve had in class that week. Since its inception my class has had around 150 special operations personnel go through the class. Additionally, I’ve had the opportunity on several occasions to work with families of fallen special operations personnel on the topic of using breathing for stress management. All of this lead to the invitation to speak at this year’s Impact Forum.
The Navy SEAL Foundation does not play. They are serious business in everything they do and this event was no different. The Impact Forum is an event that brings together thought leaders, researchers, medical and performance practitioners, and military leadership to discuss best practices for holistic warrior health in the twenty first century. The event was held in the prestigious Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in downtown Washington, D.C. Some of the esteemed presenters were people like Dr. Brian Edlow from Massachusetts General Hospital as well as Dr. Ross Zafonte, President of Spaulding Rehabilitation, and Dr. Greg Stewart of Tulane University. All three top of class in traumatic brain injury research. These three were a few among many high achievers among both the presenters and attendees at this event who included rooms full of active duty and former operators, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, researchers, partner nation representatives, and…me. A college drop out massage therapist turned CrossFit coach turned breathing seminar creator turned health educator. What kind of value was I going to add to this event and more importantly to this community of highly educated and experience people?
This event was one of the biggest opportunities to present in my career to date with hundreds of people in the live audience at the event as well as hundreds more attending virtually. I’ll admit the nights leading up to my talk were some of the worst nights of sleep I’ve had in a long time. This community in particular means a lot to me both personally and professionally so I wanted to get this representation really right. The last thing in the world I would want is to get up there, talk for forty five minutes, and have no tangible impact on the audience. If was going to get up there, I want to move the needle.
When it comes to education and public speaking in general one of my golden rules is: Don’t talk about things you don’t know about. Seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this rule is broken. So I decided to talk about an aspect of performance and health that is spoken about very little but is essential which is, how do you get operators to participate in their own self-care? How do you get a group of the highest performing, mission focused, team before all else human beings to focus on holistic healing? The answer is - you can’t. Well, not exactly. But you can get them to focus on maintaining their ability to perform or as I have come to call it, performance longevity.
Left of the Blast
Getting “Left of the blast,” is a term that refers to getting ahead of the problem before it starts, kind of like not ignoring the check engine light until your engine shuts down. Rigorous scientific research is necessary. It brings clarity, specificity, and precision to both the ability to measure problems as well as the effect of our interventions. Good research should propel us into more informed practices.
While scientific research is necessary it can be slow with a lag on consensus which can generate confusion on the part of the end users, in this case practitioners and operators. My talk in particular brought focus back to getting individuals actively involved in the experiential process of taking ownership over their own health. Rather than the deciphering of symptomologies, my talk was focused on proactive ways that operators could manage their own health by building a continuous and experiential relationship with their own bodies and minds or “Tuning”.
This framework built from Human Computer Interface health technology and heutagogy (the topic for this week’s article) is essential for managing the ever changing complexity of individual health regardless of the environmental conditions we may find ourselves in. To include the insanely demanding environment in which this particular group of individuals frequently finds themselves in.
The idea of tuning which I’ve written about on before and which I write about more extensively in my forthcoming book is an idea that gains more and more validity the more I put it into practice. Why? It empowers the human being to explore what makes them feel and perform better. In this context experts and providers don’t dole out protocols and research that is to be followed but instead offer guidance, constraints, and direction to assist in exploration. That’s not to say that no external metrics are required. We have to tune to something. But these metrics are for the purpose of calibration. Tuning offers us the possibility to shift, move, and change rather than get fixed in our ability to respond to the demands of life.
This is necessary for everybody in terms of maintaining robust health but it is most evident in communities of people that are subjected to dense exposures to stress in their work environment. That’s a mild description of the career of an special operator to say the least. The point is that means of measuring and describing phenomena through valid research is necessary but it does not ultimately help us get left of the blast. That much has proven to be true in my career as a health and performance professional and applies across all populations. Again it’s the magnitude of effect that tends to be different in tactical professions in general and special operations communities in particular.
Sacred Certainty
The undercurrent of this year’s Impact Forum is the idea of the “Sacred Certainty” as expressed by wounded British SBS operator Toby Gutteridge, was No Man Left Behind. Ever. This is a truism in the theater of war but it should be equally as true when our service members are home. No Man Left Behind is a pact that nobody will be forgotten. It’s easy for our warriors to fall out of public consciousness when no immediate and obvious threat looms over the masses. But many of those who fought during that two decades long Global War on Terror are still paying the price as are the families that sacrificed with them.
No Man Left Behind is not just a clever through line. It’s an ethos that acutely reminded me of the seriousness of the challenges that this community faces both on and off the battlefield and further energized my commitment to seeing the necessary upgrades in health and performance delivered to those who fight on our behalf. The Impact Forum was an amazing reminder of the sacred responsibility I’m part of as a provider to this community. If I’m totally honest, as a professional I love what the seriousness of that challenge calls forth from me. This event further invigorated my love for working with these warriors and their families. I’m not just interested in passing through either. I want to make an impact that has positive effect for generations to come.
Moving Forward
Performance longevity as presented through the idea of the Check Engine Light is the acorn from which much of my current philosophy has grown. It started with and continues to be primarily applied with this community. But when you pull aside the seriousness and magnitude of the consequences that come with a career in special operations or as a first responder for that matter what you have left is people. People who need help. If we’re going to move the needle successfully for people then we have to restructure the way we think about managing health altogether. We must move from a state of reactivity to one of proactivity. Not just prevention of illness or insult but a continuous and conscious approach to building robustness.
The Impact Forum was an incredible experience. It was an opportunity hear from leaders in health and performance research and to be surrounded by a community committed to progressing the way we upgrade the care of those who serve. To be in those meeting rooms, banquet halls, and theatre presentations was a humbling and enlightening experience to say the least. I hope that what I shared was enough to spark thought and engagement that will have a continuous and palpable effect on the special warfare community.
In addition to that, as is true with the health and performance communities in general there are some glaring shortcomings not in the precision of our measurements or our descriptive capacities but in the ability to deliver them to the end user in a maximally meaningful way. The individual is the functional unit of change and so our approach from all levels must reflect that reality. Whether it’s operators, police officers, fire and rescue, or just a guy who makes hula hoops for a living health cannot be mandated via a policy from on high. It’s a set of skills and behaviors that are constantly crafted and yes, tuned over a lifetime. These skills keep us adaptable whether you are going into the breech or just going to brunch.
Thanks for reading,
Rob