This is the second half of a two-part episode with Sebastien Lavoie. Please check out the first episode if you haven't listened already. In that episode, we discussed Seb’s early career, his time on the Emergency Response Team and how that shaped his perspective as he grew into a leadership role as an operator, his work in designing his unit’s combatives program, and his perspective as a member of the selection cadre for the Emergency Response Team. 

In this episode, we’ll discuss Seb’s training advice for people going into challenging selection courses and his work at Raven Strategic, where he teaches leadership and mindset principles. 

You can learn more about Seb and get in touch with him on his personal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slavccmdr/

Timestamps:

• 00:00:23 Intro
• 00:01:08 Tips Going Into Teams
• 00:06:45 Predictability and Control
• 00:09:48 Mental Obstacles
• 00:15:21 ERT Trait Selection
• 00:18:38 Raven Strategic
• 00:22:49 Getting More Involved
• 00:28:08 Need For Raven Strategic Consulting
• 00:35:29 What’s Next
• 00:37:09 Collective Podcast
• 00:41:00 Learn More About Lavoie
• 00:42:58 Outro

Sebastien Lavoie, a veteran of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Armed Forces with over two decades of dedicated service, is now the CEO of Raven Strategic Inc. after retiring as BC Divisional Sergeant Major from the RCMP in 2021. 

His professional journey spans from being an Air Marshall to a Chief Warrant Officer, roles in which he has honed skills in crisis management, emergency response, risk assessment, and wellness strategies. Sebastien is also recognized as an accomplished martial artist, public speaker, and a passionate advocate for wellness and fitness, as seen through his Black Belt in Brazilian Jiujitsu, the founding of Sheepdog and Dogs Den Crossfit gyms, and his roles as co-owner and instructor at Ascension Martial Arts in Poco, Canada.

Sebastien continues pushing boundaries and is finishing a master's degree in international security focusing on Global Counter-Terrorism. 

In this episode, we dive into Sebastien's illustrious career, discussing his martial arts training, particularly in Brazilian Jiujitsu, and its application in the combatives program he oversaw. 

We also explore his unique perspectives on the selection process for the Emergency Response Team, his advice for those aspiring to join elite tactical communities and his dedication to fostering leadership and mindset through his work at Raven Strategic.

You can learn more about Seb and get in touch with him on his personal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slavccmdr/

This is the first of a two-part episode, so stay tuned for the second half coming in a few days. 

Timestamps:

• 00:00:23 Intro
• 00:02:30 Overview
• 00:11:04 Purpose and Training
• 00:17:41 Operational Time
• 00:22:57 Career 
• 00:25:07 Jiu Jitsu
• 00:29:19 Black Belt
• 00:34:36 Gi or No Gi Jiu Jitsu
• 00:39:13 Skill Acquisition and Flow State
• 00:41:10 How To Prepare For Selection
• 00:43:46 Outro

SOF selection is an equalizer. It's an egalitarian machine designed to reveal what's inside each candidate when suffering. It's in this suffering that your character - the raw material that determines whether you have the potential to become an effective special operator, is revealed. The suffering is the point. 

It doesn’t matter how good you are. You can't out-exercise the machine. You must know and expect that you will, at some point, hit rock bottom. You must train for this and plan to move forward through that moment. The skills you have at that moment will be those you practiced in the years leading up to it. 

Don’t be so arrogant to think that you can prepare well enough to avoid this reckoning, or it will catch you unprepared and you will become another statistic. 

When we fail to examine our expectations, and they don’t become a reality, we can have strong feelings of disappointment, resentment, anger, frustration, discouragement, or resignation.

Expectations are another word for predictions. Our senses of predictability and control are the primary variables determining how strong our stress response is within any situation. A higher degree of both equals a smaller stress response.

Conversely, our stress levels increase when our predictions don’t come true. Negative emotions stemming from faulty predictions often lead to decreased motivation.

So, we can shape our stress response and performance in challenging situations by understanding and analyzing our expectations.

In this episode, we talk about expectations: why examining them is so important, and how to manage them when they arise. 

In this episode, we talk about stress, training, and adaptation. This is a big topic, so we’ve broken this into a two-part podcast.

This is part two of that series, so you might want to check out the previous podcast if you haven’t listened to it yet. 

We wrapped up part one by discussing why and how you manage stress to ensure you adapt to your training. In this episode, we discuss what specific capabilities you should target to get the best results over time. 

In this episode, we talk about stress, training, and adaptation. This is a big topic, so we’ve broken this into a two-part podcast.

To understand programming, you must first understand how and why your body responds to training. When you understand that framework, things like how much running to do, how fast, and how often become much easier to program and adjust.

Like programming, adaptation is a complex subject that people study their entire careers. This episode will discuss the principles you must understand when coaching yourself or others.

If you're interested in why certain programs work well while others don't, or you're looking to develop a deeper understanding of adaptation and training, this podcast is for you. 

SOF selection requires that you develop a close relationship with pain.

This doesn’t just mean lots of dramatic grimacing for the camera. Eventually, successful experiences teach us that pain can be just a signpost along a familiar path. It tells you something about where you are, but it’s not a stop sign or even a warning sign. It’s just a signal to be calibrated.

If the painful sensations of fatigue make you feel stressed and reactive and increase your desire to quit, then that stress response will worsen the feelings of fatigue. Pain triggers negative self-talk and shines the spotlight of your attention on your discomfort, which heightens your perception of pain, which turns up the volume on the self-talk, and on it goes.

Paradoxical intention is meant to break this cycle by having people try to do what holds them in fear. 

In this podcast, we explore this concept and how to apply it in your own life. 

People in the special operations community often find themselves learning to be human swiss army knives. They do intensive courses in anything from second languages to advanced trauma medicine, where their ability to succeed depends on their ability to manage their time, attention, and energy and study and learn effectively. 

For instance, we did an episode recently on how to be successful in the Special Forces medic course, known as 18D, and a consistent theme was the importance of good study habits. But nobody teaches that. People either figure it out or fail. And lots of them fail. We want to give people a framework that they can use to understand how to establish strong time management and study habits so that they can learn better and faster during challenging courses.

To do that, we talked to Dr. Karin Nordin, a Ph.D. in health behavior change, a published researcher on mindset theory, and a curriculum writer for Precision Nutrition.

Dr. Nordin is the founder and CEO of her own business, Body Brain Alliance, which provides behavior change coaching for individuals and curriculum design education for business owners. After teaching at the college level for years and then transitioning into the online coaching industry, she quickly realized that the evidence-based practices for both course design and behavior change were not being taught in an industry that desperately needed them. Now, she’s on a mission to create courses that help people change and to teach other coaches how to do the same thing.

You can go to www.bodybrainalliance.com to learn about some of Dr. Nordin's work we discussed on this call, like her Change Academy course or her coaching programs. 

Everyone wants to know the ‘secret’ to motivation. Like most topics, this isn’t as simple as repeating cliches like ‘just don’t quit’ or ‘stay hard’. These sayings can be useful as simple reminders of more complex concepts, but only if you understand the underlying process and skills that lead to that outcome.

Without those underlying processes and skills, phrases like “just don’t quit” are no more useful than a track coach yelling at his athletes to “just run faster.”

Everybody at a track meet wants to be a fast runner just like everyone who shows up at SOF selection wants to not quit. But, there is only one winner in the race, and only a select few make it through selection. The distinction lies in who can produce these outcomes when they matter – not in the ability to describe them.

Our personal experiences create the meaning that we attribute to words and concepts. Everyone can say the same words, but the meaning that those words have is unique to each person. All knowledge is local knowledge.

When a SOF operator says ‘quitting isn’t an option’ that means something to them because it’s based on real-life experience. They can distill a complex set of capabilities into a simple statement without losing its meaning. It’s that simple for them because they know how to not quit. They’ve earned the right to make that statement and mean it.

But, to the person hearing that statement without the same type of experiences and underlying skills, the words are meaningless.

In this podcast, we discuss the concept of motivation and how it relates to a reliable and adaptable set of skills that anyone can learn and apply. Our goal here is to provide the tools you need to give phrases like “motivation” and “just don’t quit” a useful sense of personal meaning.

Darkhorse Benefits is a special operations veteran-owned charitable organization. Many of their members are former medics who are actively involved in the tactical medicine community as instructors.

Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine, Darkhorse medics traveled there to train, advise, and assist people ranging from soldiers to schoolteachers in tactical medicine. They’re helping to bring in life-saving equipment like tourniquets and first-aid kits, and they’re training people to use them. 

In this episode, we talk with one of those medics, a former US Navy SEAL and SOCM medic named Kevin.

In our conversation, Kevin discusses things like the work Darkhorse is doing in Ukraine, what the conditions are like, and some of the most common injuries that they're seeing with both soldiers and civilians.

You can learn more about Darkhorse and help them bring much-needed medical equipment and training to Ukrainians by going to darkhorsebenefits.com

You can also follow them on Instagram at @darkhorsevets to see updates on their work in Ukraine.