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Over the past three years, I've worked with dozens of military units and learned a lot of lessons from that work.
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Here are the top five lessons learned, which now form the pillars of my human performance approach, and these are non-negotiable.
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I'm Zoran Stoikovic, and welcome to Built for Pressure.
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So these lessons, I'm just gonna speak them out to you here.
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Okay, so lesson one is build relationships early.
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So the first commanding officer I worked with uh taught me this lesson during my first meeting with him.
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It was week one of working with this military unit, and he said, grab a coffee from the pilot units every morning and just talk to them like a person.
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I didn't even drink coffee at the time.
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From that day, I did.
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And so these coffee chats led to many doors opening, including this mental minute initiative that I'm gonna talk about next.
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And so it's it's easy to get sucked up by administration and emails in a closed office, but that's we're relationships with her.
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So build relationships early.
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Number two is work within the cracks.
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Everyone is busy instead of adding separate classroom and gym sessions to teach people about human performance, integrate value ads into the operational tempo where people work.
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So, for example, I started these one to two minute long mental minute segments during during uh these morning weather briefs the pilots were leading.
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And I would in that brief, I would pass on these performance strategies that I knew they needed to apply that day or that week in an organic way.
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So if they were having challenges with sleep, um, I would do, I would do a little nugget on sleep.
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If they were having challenges, there was it was a high stress period or they were doing night flying, I would um give them strategies to handle that.
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So number two is work within the cracks.
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Number three is solve real problems that matter.
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Applying frameworks from um a course that I learned is out of IDOU and it's called Human Center Service Design.
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It's basically a design thinking course.
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Thank you, Angus Mugford, uh, for for the recommendation.
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Uh so from that course, I I mapped out um it basically teaches you how to map out client journeys, remove frustrations, and then um optimize the moments that matter.
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And so my role was often clarifying what the problem was, right?
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Because a lot of different people are working on things in a siloed way.
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This just creates a roadmap where a visual roadmap where everybody can see the work being done.
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So it's a really great project management tool.
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So my role in the environment wasn't often having all the answers, but it was mapping out the the experience for for for let's say for the pilots, for example, um, in a way that shows key stakeholders uh what's going on.
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And so it maps out emotions and and activation levels and all sorts of stuff.
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And so um I almost had to be like an investigative journalist and figure out why uh why a problem was happening, right?
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And and then it was about bringing the right stakeholders in to co-create solutions.
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So number three is solving real problems that matter.
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Number four is uh being a curious rebel.
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I've run into rules and policies that just don't make sense, and through a curious lens, change those myself or advocated for changing them.
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But you first have to learn about the history behind why something's there and see whether it's still serving the group or not.
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Because maybe it was instituted at a time that doesn't, uh now it doesn't make sense.
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And so just because something is status quo doesn't mean that it always needs to be.
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And so behind every rule or policy is what I've learned is there's a human being that sits on the other side of it who can change it.
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And just finding out who that person is that instituted the policy or the person that now controls the policy, if it's an important enough of an issue, being a curious rebel and changing that.
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And number five is trusting your feet.
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This one I learned from Improv Master Dave Morris.
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Shout out, Dave, um, when I was preparing for performing improv shows, and which is a super, it's a super scary thing being in front of an audience and um having to not having a script.
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And it's such a great exercise.
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But what I the the lesson there of trusting your feet uh really applied to the military context.
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So we we process a lot of our environment subconsciously, spiritually, intuitively, without actual conscious awareness.
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And so sometimes what I would notice is uh if I really trusted my feet, I would an idea would come out of somewhere.
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Uh, but then maybe I'd stifle it so I can focus on the current task and stay stay locked in.
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I've really realized that our feet know where we need to be at what time.
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And so it takes courage to trust your instincts, and as we often use the rational part of our brain to make decisions.
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So the final lesson here, lesson five, is trust your feet.
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Now, if your this episode or this content is resonating, share it with somebody.
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Share it with a person who could use these lessons learned.
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Um, and if you have questions, feel free to comment on the episode, shoot me an email or or DM.
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So at K I Z Operformance.
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Uh and email is Z-O-R-A-N at K I Z O.ca.
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I'll put that in the show notes.
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Um, so yeah, that's uh that's the episode for today.
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I hope uh you have a fantastic rest of your day.