Warrior Mindset Quotes

“Being a warrior is not about the act of fighting. It’s about being so prepared to face a challenge and believing so strongly in the cause you are fighting for that you refuse to quit.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“Rudyard Kipling, in his famous poetic description of what makes for mature and effective adulthood, wrote in part: If you can keep your head When all about you Are losing theirs And blaming it on you... If you can trust yourself When all men doubt you... This famous 1909 poem “If” was inspired in Kipling after observing one military leader’s actions during the Boer Wars (Lt. Colonel Eduardo Jany, personal communication, October, 2007).”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“115 BPM Fine motor skills deteriorate 145+ BPM Complex motor skills deteriorate 175+ BPM “A warrior can expect to experience auditory exclusion or loss of peripheral vision and depth perception. This initiates a catastrophic failure of cognitive processing capabilities, leading to fatal increases in reaction time or hypervigilance (freezing in place or irrational acts).” p.7-8”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“There is no darkness but ignorance. – Shakespeare”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“A core attribute of the effective leader is the act of inspiring and developing others. Leaders model by their actions.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“From On Combat (2004) Do not expect the combat fairy to come bonk you with the combat wand and suddenly make you capable of doing things that you never rehearsed before. It will not happen.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“Beckett (2008) citing the work of Marcus Wynne gives advice to: Train with the understanding that firearms practice is 75% physical and 25% mental; however a gunfight is 25% physical and 75% mental. On a closer look, perhaps these estimations are not so surprising.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“Proper experience and training engrains a skill so that it’s much harder to disrupt under any condition, including one of stress and arousal.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“Skills that have been well-practiced allow higher levels of arousal without becoming impaired than do newly learned skills.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“Complexity of the task is another important factor as to how levels of arousal affect the quality of performance. Simple tasks use and tolerate more arousal than complex ones.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“While this momentary reduction of blood flow may not be a problem for healthy conditioned individuals, it can be dangerous for those with underlying heart disease, especially so for people with undiagnosed heart disease.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“Barnardand his colleagues (1973) demonstrated that without a physical warm-up period, 60 percent of the healthy males in his sample (including some firefighters) showed ischemia or restricted blood flow when engaged in sudden strenuous exertion. This occurred under conditions (sudden intense treadmill) that simulated the kind of bursts of energy that might be needed in an emergency.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“Positive self-talk, and visualization or mental rehearsal, trained to a level of confidence and competence, may be critical to both improved performance under stress and increased resilience after a traumatic incident.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“Solid preparation can reduce the stress of any situation. Therefore, the integration of a mental toughness psychological skills component with military and police skills training in all areas can enhance missions and reduce response stress. With this comes the possibility of reducing post-traumatic stress. Evidence for this has been found in parallel critical incident stress reactions among police officers.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“Mental toughness is possessing, understanding, and being able to utilize a set of psychological skills that allow the effective, and even maximal execution or adaptation, and persistence of decision-making and physical and tactical skills learned in training and by experience.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“High Velocity Human Factors is defined through its mission statement as “a focus on those instances when the human agent has to perform in an environment where the stakes are high, physical danger is imminent, and the future is unpredictable and the information is incomplete.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“The Department of the Army’s Field Manual 3-05.70 states about survival: A key ingredient in any survival situation is the mental attitude of the individual involved.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“When asked about the relative importance of factors in front-line policing excellence, the officers indicated that physical readiness contributed 28 percent, technical readiness contributed 32 percent and mental readiness contributed 40 percent.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“While, perhaps somewhat surprising, experience shows that up to 90 percent of successful performance is attributed to psychological skills. Rarely is that number reported to be less than 40 percent. This comes from talking with military personnel, police officers, including SWAT Tactical Team members, and other emergency responders who engage in life and death situations.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“There are probably as many different definitions of leadership as there are roles for leaders. There are civic leaders, political, religious and academic leaders. There are “captains” of industry and “skippers” of sports teams. There are leaders by achievement, assignment or necessity. Some leaders are official, others just emerge. Some lead by insignia, some by action, some by both. Some lead in public and some, like the head of a family, lead in private. There are at least ten different theories of leadership and ten times ten books on how to lead. Despite this complexity of characterizing leadership, or more precisely effective leadership, there is one indisputable reality, a requirement common to all those who would effect successful action. They have the ability to handle crisis because they possess the necessary skills to remain calm and functional when others are rendered confused or overwhelmed by difficult circumstances.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“The mental and physical — psyche and soma — are two faces of the same coin and cannot be separated. To train the world’s greatest military and law enforcement warriors, we must realign our focus and esteem their minds every bit as much as we esteem their physical capabilities and skill sets. No longer can we simply train the way we fight and fight the way we train. We need to rethink the way we train and retrain the way we fight.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“High-level, professional athletes receive training on how to deal with pressure, get it under control, and focus on doing what they need to do to win. It’s now time we start doing the same thing for our men and women in law enforcement and the military.”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers

“I quickly learned that success in any area of life, be it in the boardroom or on the battlefield, is overwhelmingly dependant upon a person’s mastery of their own mind. General Patton once said: “If you are going to win any battle, you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do...”
― Michael J. Asken, Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers