>If, from the sort of workouts I practise (and advocate), I am thoroughly
familiar with how anxiety affects me, then I'll have more credible grounds
for confidence in my performance<
I am convinced that the essence of expertise is the art of building ready
responses (whether through formal training or individual preparation) for
as many difficult conditions as possible. I am reminded of a timeless
quote from a legendary general.
"Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be
in peril.
When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of
winning or losing are equal.
If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every
battle to be in peril."
Sun Tzu 500 B.C.
While the general uses the word "battle", we could easily replace it with
any high risk activity such as "flights", "surgeries", "fires", etc.
Despite all the self-evident wisdom of this quote, the self-evident wisdom
of preparing mentally for difficult circumstances, and wisdom of being
"thoroughly familiar with how anxiety affects me", I believe that there is
a fundamental reponse that people have to being "scared out of their wits"
that cannot be replicated regardless of how much they have thought about
it.
My one datapoint for this is my first flight over Downtown Baghdad hunting
Surface to Air Missiles on the first strike of Desert Storm. Even though I
had 6 years of practicing for war on the best electronic warfare ranges in
the world, 1200 hours in the jet, 6 Red Flag/Green Flag deployments, and 5
months of intense preparation during Desert Shield, nothing fully prepared
me for the pesky distraction of being shot at by large Triple A and
Surface to Air Missiles. The Red Flag exercises were great training to
prepare for handling the pace and the fog of war but not for the feeling of
really having my lilly-white butt shot off. The butterflies never went
away on subsequent missions but it became a lot easier to deal with my
personal reaction to the real thing from day 2 on. One of the pilots in
our 4 ship flight had such an intense physiological response to the spectre
of flying on night #2 that he became physically ill while we walked out to
the jets (He didn't fly that night or for the next few weeks). He quit
flying all together a few months after we returned from the war.
A few logs for the fire,
Vince Mancuso