Podcast Transcript

Paul Kelway  0:01  

Hello, and welcome to the Response Force Multiplier, a podcast that explores emergency planning and response. On the Response Force Multiplier, we bring together compelling experts and thought leaders to provide a fresh take on key issues and cutting edge techniques. In each episode, we'll dive into one aspect of emergency planning and response. And we'll use OSRL's unique pool of experts and collaborators to gain new insights. And distill these down into actionable tools and techniques for better preparedness and response to crisis incidents and emergencies. 

My name is Paul Kelway. We are OSRL. And this is The Response Force Multiplier. 

In today's episode, we explore how the emergency response industry trains for performing under pressure and real world situations. In particular, we look at how immense pressure on both individuals and organisations can expose gaps in training, and how that pressure can lead to less effective or reactive decision making in emergency situations. But we also explore the idea of using those stressful situations as teachable moments. And in particular, we talk about how techniques developed in professional sports can be applied in emergency response situations. And we look at how these techniques can be used, developed and implemented by both individuals and organisations. 

To do that, we speak with my colleague, Andy Couch, a performance coach here at OSRL. And he is a former British Army officer who now works with incident and crisis management professionals to help them develop and manage their own stress responses to more effectively perform under pressure. 

Hi, Andy, welcome to the show. So to begin with, could you tell us a bit about your journey, and also what in particular you focus on when you teach your techniques to develop this more effective performance in high pressure environments?

 

Andy Couch  1:59  

Sure, yeah. So my first decade was spent as a British Army officer, I worked with soldiers and officers through to Special Forces. And ultimately, my job was to help people to be able to think clearly and make effective decisions when under pressure. So primarily a leadership and performance coach and a real privilege to work with the men and women in the British Army. So my second role, the last nine years, I've been at OSRL. So oil spill response, working with all our leaders and teams, specifically with the responsibility to bring in the performance under pressure programs, helping our incident managers to perform under pressure. And equally I also work with our members and external clients, be that regulators or the government, and help their crisis management teams develop the mental skills and perform when they really need to.

 

Paul Kelway  2:52  

So in episode one, we spoke to our colleague, Dave Rouse, and also Dr. El. Parker from Coventry University about the importance of meaningfully exercising in the context of crisis management, preparedness and emergency response. And that was really about building resilience in individuals who need to perform in these high pressure situations. So in this discussion, I wanted to go a bit deeper with that as far as how we as individuals cope with pressure, and how we can cultivate the right mindset. So we can ideally swim rather than sink in those critical moments. But before we get into some of the techniques and science behind that, can you first take us into the mind and body under pressure? What's going on physiologically when people are in pressure situations? And how can that affect our performance?

 

Andy Couch  3:40  

Yeah, sure. And I think it's really important to equip people with the understanding of what's happening in their mind and body. So as well as helping them develop the skillfulness, to be able to work with their own stress response, to understand what's going on is key. So if stress and pressure exists for us, we have a very reasonable response in our body to an unreasonable situation. Many people will be familiar with the term the fight flight freeze response is hardwired into all of us. And what that ultimately means is when there is either expectation or judgment, or real consequence in your environment, is likely that that acts on you as an individual and creates pressure, which triggers your stress response. And in this point, when we're feeling pressure, our sympathetic nervous system fires so that's our fight flight freeze response. We become full of adrenaline and cortisol, our heart rate can increase, blood flow starts to move around the body. And all of that can be really helpful in order to get high performance, but too much pressure that starts to affect how we breathe, the quality of our breath is really important. What that does to blood flow in the brain, and our limbic brain becomes ultimately dominant. It hugs the blood flow, it hugs the oxygen. It means we have less ability to think clearly under pressure, and all sorts of unpleasant feelings that you might have. And it affects the quality of our thinking ultimately. 

 

Paul Kelway  5:11  

So that's really helpful in terms of understanding what's happening naturally in our bodies, which may cause us to sink or swim in high pressure situations. And I know that the science of understanding how to work with pressure has come a long way. And I think it's fair to say a lot of this has come from the professional sports industry. So are there any real world examples of how this has been applied in that context and made a difference?

 

Andy Couch  5:37  

To give an easily relatable example, to talk about the New Zealand All Blacks? Really successful rugby team, they hadn't won a World Cup for 20 years. And in 2007, they were the number one team in the world, they were favourites to go there and win it. They choked frozen to the pressure, and crashed out of the World Cup. And when you listen to the All Blacks and their after action review of why they failed, they spent all the time in the gym working on the strength, they spent all the time out on the train and field working on the game management, and actually didn't pay much attention to their mental skills, and realise that they didn't like pressure and that they didn't perform under pressure. So they went away. And they worked with a chap called Ceri Evans. And they also had Gilbert Enoka, who was their mental skills coach. And he is actually very recently started at Chelsea Football Club, so fascinated to see his impact there. And they ultimately built a capability around mindset. So the ability to move towards pressure and perform both as individuals and as a collective team. And what's fascinating is over the next two World Cups, they won back to back World Cups, they had the highest success rate of any international rugby team. So mindset, and the ability to perform under pressure certainly played a key role within that. Now, what I think is also relevant is the toolkit that enabled that is something called red to blue. Amongst other things, it played a key role in their success. And that is also the mental skills toolkit that we use here at OSRL, but also with crisis management teams around the world.

 

Paul Kelway  7:29  

That's a really great example. And it's interesting how the narrative shifted from focusing primarily on the physical training to developing that deeper understanding, and ability to have that mindset that you're needing to cope with those high pressure situations. And I know you mentioned the red to blue technique there. But before we get into that, can we speak a little bit more about the deeper underpinnings of what you're trying to access with these techniques? What are those states of mind that we're trying to develop that lead to better outcomes in these stressful situations.

 

Andy Couch  7:59  

So everyone's got the fight, flight freeze. And again, it's really useful, it activates us and it gets us ready to perform. But when we need to think clearly, we need to access other parts of our brain, which is really what we're talking about is our prefrontal cortex is where our executive functions lie, you know, a logical reason. And I'll call that our Blue Brain later on as we go through this conversation. So we need ways to be able to access higher quality thinking. And in order to do that, there's all sorts of mental skills, tools and techniques, that allows us to first have that survival response. And to recognise when our red head or the fight flight freeze is in play, it's normal. It's to accept that that's happening. And then with increased skillfulness, we develop other ways of operating under pressure. We can walk towards a pressure, and we have the techniques and tools that we've practiced, we know they work for us as an individual. And they help us to lean in towards that pressure. And ultimately think more clearly make better decisions. Really key as a leader, the messaging you give off when under pressure. So ultimately, you cannot not communicate the words you use the tone of language that you use your body language. When you have a real pressure response, people feel that. And equally, what's fascinating is we have something in our brain called mirror neuron. And mirror neurons pick up and catch the emotions of those around us. So as a leader, it's critical that we can manage this stress response and ultimately put yourself in what I will call a resourceful state. A state that you can perform in versus a performance state that derails you that takes you off task, and if you are a leader can almost spread that kind of contagion within your group as well. So you need a set of tools or practices that allow you to control that attention, ultimately, so that we're focused on what needs to be done, we're able to maintain our situational awareness and take action. We have a whole suite of tools, very individual. So different people find different tools that work for them. And our job is to enable people to find the ones that work for them. Practice them, experience when they work, experience when they don't work, reflect on that experience of real pressure. And then keep embedding the tools like a daily practice a habit, and they know that they can trust and the tried and tested tools will work for them when they need the most.

 

Paul Kelway  10:52  

That's really interesting. So since this is at the core of the trainings, we're talking about, did you break down the steps that you train people in when you're using these techniques? What is it that you encourage people to do or pay attention to? And what are the steps you lay out for how to access these states of mind? 

 

Andy Couch  11:09  

Well, what we encourage people to do is, firstly, understand that the ability to perform the pressure is a skill. And you can learn that skill, and you can get better at it. So it's not mystical, it's not mythical, we know that if you can control your attention and put it in the right place, which is on the task, we know that that is helpful for performance. How we do that, we explain that we need to look at this as a bigger picture. So there are things you need to do before the pressure arise for you. There are tools and techniques that you can use in the middle of pressure when things are really crashing in on you. And there are tools and techniques to use after pressure to either learn from the experience, or to offload stress in between operational periods or in between pressure moments, such that we can rest and recover.

 

Paul Kelway  12:00  

Okay, great. So let's start with before these high pressure moments, I guess, some of the ways that we can actually train and practice to be ready for that pressure.

 

Andy Couch  12:11  

So before pressure, it's all about anticipating the pressure, preparing for the pressure. So what we'd invite people to do is firstly understand what creates pressure for you as an individual. So is it when expectations are placed on you from others, or maybe you place too much pressure and expectation on yourself? Is pressure created for you when you feel you're being judged by others, or we're often our own worst critic, is the pressure where the inner critic is in charge and ultimately creating too much stress for you. Or is pressure created for you when you are worried about the consequences of your actions, you know, when there are real world consequences for what you do. So we'll work with people to firstly understand what are the levers that act on them and create pressure in terms of expectation, scrutiny or consequence. And we will coach the individuals at that point, help them to see it differently to maybe reframe some of their thinking around expectation, scrutiny and consequence. And what that enables people to do is to not have their attention on what we call ESC, which is ultimately unhelpful. We allow them to notice that that's maybe affecting them, but to deliberately shift their attention back to the task back to the external world and what needs to be done. So I guess the prime example is the way we breathe will equip the people with different activities for breathing, ultimately, so that we can get them to a place where they breathe light, they breathe slow, they breathe deep, because we know how that affects our brains and our bodies. And so if we can help someone to develop that skill, and move from chest breathing, to belly breathing through the nose, we know what that can do for them. And you build that muscle in peacetime.

 

Paul Kelway  13:59  

Okay, so we're practising these various techniques and becoming more aware of the ways that we can come our minds and bodies and to shift the place from where we're operating in any given moment. So what about then how we act and actually respond during those moments of high pressure, when that intensity really hits us?

 

Andy Couch  14:19  

One of the very helpful tools we use is called the circles of control. So when we are under pressure, very helpful to control the controllables. And when you strip that right back, all you can ever control 100% is ultimately how you use your mind and what you do. So your thoughts and your actions. So we'll help people to understand it in various scenarios that they may face. What could be some of those factors that are outside your control that you could very easily get hooked on and be triggered by and get stuck there mentally focused on those factors that are out of your control and helping people to see that train before it hits them is very useful. Because next time they might find themselves in that situation, instead of the train coming along and hitting them, they're able to see it, take a step back, the train goes past. And ultimately we focus on what we can control. And when we're under real pressure that might simply be in that moment, my breath, all I can do now is just take a few breaths, I might look around me to my left and my right, that maybe a colleague, I can see they're under pressure, I could give them a word of reassurance. But it's training people to think what can I control now. So I might not know what's going on. But I can go find some information out, I can control that, and really keeping people in that space. So there's a couple of tools there for preparation and anticipation, the breath being a great one, and equally, helping people to control their attention through a tool like the circles of control. But when the pressure is really crushing in, you need a tool that is so simple, you don't need more to do when you're under pressure. So any tool that we use, that has to work has got to be really simple. So in this moment, the pressure is crashing on, we will invite people to have a tool that helps them to make what we call the red to blue shift. And this is where under pressure, instead of our stress response taken over, we have something that allows us to snap our attention back onto the task. So here's really simple stuff. And it takes literally a couple of seconds in the moment, we're talking about trigger words that we use with ourself. So how we talk to ourselves, so we almost command ourselves to focus back on task or the trigger word might be take a breath, or we might in that moment feel ourselves wanting to escape the pressure. So people might have practiced their red to blue shift, which would be to almost grow a bit taller, you know, maybe expand the shoulders, take a breath, try and center themselves in the moment. It might be ultimately the red to blue shift is commanding yourself to focus, again on what you can control because you realise you're getting hooked on all these factors that are outside your control. But what we encourage people to do is find a technique that is really simple. It can be really strange as long as it works for you. Because ultimately, all we need to have happen is that we get our attention back on to the task, focus in what you can control. And we find that handhold is just enough to help people to claw their way back and to cope with that intense pressure as it happens. And then as soon as they've got the focus on the task, we're back onto our checklists, we're following our processes. And that's really important when we're under pressure, that you have a way of commanding your attention back onto the task.

 

Paul Kelway  17:58  

So that's the stressful part. Can you speak now a bit more about the importance of recovery, because it's something that you give quite a lot of importance to as part of this more holistic approach to training around this, right?

 

Andy Couch  18:13  

Yeah, and this recovery is often undervalued and sometimes missed, the amount of rest and recovery that we need. As humans, you know, we live in a really busy stimulating modern world. And particularly through any periods of pressure, we know our body and mind is activated and heightened. It's absolutely critical that we can move from our sympathetic nervous system, the fight, flight, freeze, and transition into our rest and digest our parasympathetic nervous system. That's really important that we do that. So how we offload stress, we help people to think about different practices that work for them, whether that's a form of meditation are a breathing exercise to offload stress from the body, whether it's a movement, for example, simple things like going for a walk or offloading with a colleague, so having conversations with each other as we finished the operational period to offload the stress. But ultimately, it's enabling someone to be able to calm that nervous system, because what's really important with rest and recovery is how we sleep which is obviously critical for high performance. So that's on an individual level. And then in terms of offloading stress for crisis management team. It's really important that we think about learning from pressure as a group. So we help people with our after action reviews to focus on how did the group create an environment that's conducive to high performance? How did they maybe get in their own way and create pressure where it wasn't needed? And then as a group, help them to make small steps to improve the skillfulness and focus on performing under pressure as a group. And we typically use the after action review process to achieve that.

 

Paul Kelway  19:59  

So we've been talking here about preparing for performing in and recovering from these critical acute moments of pressure, which are pretty finite 90 minute football or rugby game and emergency response. But what is the link between working with these acute pressure moments and then managing that pressure and stress in a more ongoing day to day way? Because a lot of this seems to be about being able to develop more awareness of when our mind is it's actually getting in the way and being able to use those moments to recenter. And that's obviously a very valuable tool for any moment in life. And I guess, finally, what we're not saying, and please correct me. But we're not saying emotions are bad and mind is good. Because a lot of good decisions. Actions can also, of course, come from our instinct and gut feeling, is that right?

 

Andy Couch  20:49  

Absolutely. As well as helping people to perform under the acute stress. We also focus on long term habits of excellence. We discuss things like four pillars of how do people eat, how do you sleep? How do you relax? What stress management do you use? And how do you move. And these are for activities in day to day life. Because that very much builds resilience, it manages and promotes wellbeing, and both learning how to perform under pressure for acute stress, and with some of the skills we teach. But looking at the longer term view, for long term resilience and wellbeing, they mutually support each other. And there are two activities that we help crisis management incident management teams to think about and improve. The first step but as you alluded to, is awareness, to be aware of our mind and body and where we're at in terms of our performance states. So we'll talk about a red head and a blue head. And we help people to develop the awareness of talk to me what your red head is like? What's your stress response? Like? How do you feel when you're under stress? What are some of the behaviors you might have when you're under stress? Teach me how you go red is one of the common questions I'll ask people. And what that helps people to do is to understand, here's my stress response, get to know it. Because in order to be blue, we have to first know when we're not. So get to know your red head, get to know your stress response, get to know what sends you red. Whilst that's a normal response to pressure, it's not very helpful in terms of performance. So we need people to be able to recognise and be aware of their red head response. But then, as you rightly say, be able to shift into a more resourceful state. So that's where we have higher access to better quality thinking better decision, we have more calmness and composure, which you can project into the room and help others to also find their blue head. And all that is about is where we place our attention and focus. It's really simple. But again, it is a skill that you have to practice and embed into your way of being so that you can rely on it when real pressure is at play. And sometimes there's a misconception that the red head is bad, and that the blue head is good. That's certainly not what I'm saying. Too much red can absolutely derail performance, too much blue and you can be far too pathetic and not connected into the task. So it's certainly not about removing emotion. And when we are blue, we absolutely have emotions present. The difference when we are blue though is we are connected to the task at hand. We're connected, we feel in tune with the task. We trust that we've got this, we trust ourself. We trust the people around us to follow the processes, and the emotion and the energy is absolutely there. But it's through this connectedness. Now, when we are red, we have all sorts of different emotions. But there is a disconnectedness you feel maybe edgy or anxious or there's anger. And you don't feel connected to the task. So the simplest way I can put this, and there's nothing mythical about any of this. When we are blue, we are connected to the task, and it is a doing. We're taking action that there is movement there. But that is supported through clarity and accuracy in our thinking. So yes, certainly not trying to get rid of emotions. And interestingly, when we take our attention and place it externally to our mind, so instead of being up in our own head or focused on how uncomfortable we might feel about this situation, we train ourselves to place Our attention on the task is external. And we ask better questions of ourselves, like what needs to be done, what would be a useful next step. And ultimately, we take action there. So there's still emotions there, we're just using them in a more resourceful way

 

Paul Kelway  25:17  

You shared for an example, from the environment of professional sports. And just to expand a bit beyond that, because even though they are, of course, high pressure environment, they are not a matter of life and death. So are there also examples that you could point to where the stakes are really that high, and someone has been able to work effectively with these techniques?

 

Andy Couch  25:41  

Probably the best example that comes to mind is Captain Sully and the Miracle on the Hudson. And I think this is a really good opportunity to just to zoom out a little bit. Obviously, my world is mindset and helping people to perform under pressure. But mindset is one component of the performance. At OSRL we also help all our teams to think about three areas, structure, skill, set, and mindset. So structure is really important. It's what allows, for example, crisis management teams to make decisions under pressure. But for Sully the structures that himself and his copilot were following, you know, they've got clearly defined roles, they've got checklists to follow. And without that structure, you can have as blue a head as you like, but you ain't gonna perform. They also have the right skill set. In aviation, they talk about something called ANC. So aviate, navigate, communicate. So what that ultimately means is fly the plane first aviate, get it to where it needs to be navigate, and then communicate with each other and external stakeholders. Again, when you look at the Miracle on the Hudson skill set was evident. But what's fascinating when you listen to Sully and you think about the mindset piece, when you listen to Sully talk about when the bird strike hit the plane, he had an immediate survival response, all the things we talk about a real sharp increase in heart rate, his feeling of cognitive tunneling, where he felt his attention field was really narrowing. And that kind of overwhelm was setting him remembers feeling, this doesn't happen to me. So denial kicked in straightaway. And that is the red brain at play. And again, he recognised through his training that that was a normal response. But then the blue had started to kick in. And he started to say things and ask questions of himself, like as long as he can solve this problem. And he can find a way to land this plane, probably not going to be at an airport. So long as you can solve where that plane intersects with the ground, then he believed he could land that plane. And then he started to have that clarity of thinking. And then all the structure, skillset and mindset all came together, and quite an incredible piece of piloting.

 

Paul Kelway  28:11  

That is such a brilliant example of how these mindset techniques can actually change an outcome in the real world. So I'm curious in your work in the emergency preparedness field, what have you found in terms of individual and organisational resilience? Have you found that particularly in relation to those who don't perhaps yet have these mindset tools?

 

Andy Couch  28:33  

Good question, because ultimately, they had the privilege of working with oil majors all over the world. And if you use the structure, skillset mindset, you got fantastic professionals highly credible. So their structures are very well embedded. So we talk about the incident management system or incident command system here, the technology in it, fantastic setup. So the structures are very tight and very well drilled. The skill set, again, highly credible people, 20 to 30 years experience in emergency or incident response, both technically incredibly savvy and experienced, but also behaviorally as leaders and the ability to communicate. So what we found is that the mindset has been the missing piece, ultimately. And I think it's been really heartening when I've worked with these groups, because they instantly recognise their performance gap, both on the acute side, having the ability to have the mental skills to perform under pressure, but equally how they are helping themselves and their teams develop resilience. And this is where we look at the wellbeing habits and helping teams to also develop that.

 

Paul Kelway  29:46  

Well, that's very heartening to hear. I guess it speaks to the excellent training and resiliency structures that are already in place. But of course, our whole approach here or your whole approach is it's really to develop even stronger resilience under these intense situations, right? So can you talk a bit more about the training that you do and how you apply in particular hyper realism, to really give people this true experience of pressure?

 

Andy Couch  30:12  

I guess one of the philosophical points is when under real pressure on our crisis, we don't rise to the occasion, you fall to your lowest level of training. So the ability to prepare for and to practice being under pressure, so that you build that muscle memory, your automatic, and you already have the embedded skills. And that's really key to create hyper realistic situations, experiential learning that really gave people that visceral feeling of pressure. And I think one of the things you try and do with helping people to develop their mental skills and pressure is get them used to uncertainty. And if you can dislocate someone's expectations of what's about to happen, then you can create a real feeling of pressure in pretty much any scenario, it has to feel real. We run simulations, we create a learning environment, which is immersive, experiential, people have roles to play, they're thrown into a scenario, which can feel very real to them. And it can be challenging. And through those scenarios, we sprinkle in one or two mindset tools. Here's a breathing technique, let's practice this, here's the circles of control, let's practice this, we then immerse them in a scenario, allow them to practice the tool or technique. And as well as then debriefing the quality of decision making and how the group functioned. We also give space to debrief the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of that mental tool for the individual. So we take it, and over a period of a day or two or three, we will sprinkle the whole toolkit into this training, giving people the chance of finding things that really worked for them, and then practicing them. To kind of bring this to life. One of the exercises we do, which is always insightful, is we will wire a volunteer up through a little clip that clips onto the ear. And in the nicest way possible, just put them under a little bit of pressure, so you can see their stress response. So they're wired up. And on the big screen behind them, you can see their heart rate, but also what's called your heart rate variability, which is really kind of the industry standard for how you measure stress response. So we might put them through a little bit of a challenge, and you get to see their stress response on the screen. And then we just teach them what we call a coherent breathing technique. This is where the breathing is like slow and deep. For example, you inhale for four seconds, and you exhale for four seconds. And even after a small series of breaths, you notice a shift in the heart rate variability, we switch out of our fight flight freeze response, and we switch into the rest and digest response. And so the individual but equally, the whole group can see this playing out on the screen. And we invite everyone to join in that technique. There's an incident commander that springs to mind that was wearing the technology. They are one of the most composed and calm commanders I've ever seen. And that created a really wonderful environment in the room, what I call a blue environment, projecting that calm credibility, and the group followed that person, and mirrored that. And what was interesting is when you look, the physiology was very calm. So the heart rate was 60 beats per minute. And actually, instead of being in the fight, flight freeze, this person was in rest and digest, you could see it through the rhythms, which meant that this person was actually in flow, you know, they were enjoying it. And they were performing. And that really landed for the group because we talk about, you know, our inner game runs our outer game, and what happens on the inside, and our mind and body shows up on the outside and our behaviors and actions. So this stuff really matters. And if you can get insight into your physiology, and you can find ways to keep that physiology working for you and not against you. It has great effect both for you, but for the people that you're working with as well.

 

Paul Kelway 34:22  

That's great. And it reminds me of how we continually talk about the growth mindset and how we're always learning preparing and developing as individuals but also as organisations. And also it helps reframe the mindset that what we might sometimes see as challenges or difficult moments are actually opportunities to learn, to grow and to develop even stronger resiliency in the future. 

 

Andy Couch  34:50  

Absolutely. So how you think about pressure and this is to your point, Paul, to start thinking that when pressure is in the room, actually, it's an opportunity for me to perform. It's a challenge for me to lead into and see what I can get. Rather than going, this is threat for my fear response kicks in. I actually want to get out of here or we overcompensate and we combust. Rather than that we get to think of pressures and opportunity, and it's not a threat. And so helping people reframe how they think about pressure is something that's really important. And that is then followed up guess with the tools and techniques. So it's all about learning. And it's all about helping people to find just the small ways that work for them. We can be very experienced at following our decision making cycles and have lots of knowledge and skill. But if you succumb to pressure, and if you don't have the mindset skills, and we can't guarantee the structure and skill set will be enough. So bring that broad crisis management capability together structure skill set mindset, and we can build that broader capability.

 

Paul Kelway  36:14  

Thank you for listening to The Response Force Multiplier from OSRL. Please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Stay tuned for more episodes as we continue to explore key issues in emergency response and crisis management. Next time on The Response Force Multiplier,

 

Liam Harrington-Missin  36:30  

AI could very much replace a large majority of the tasks that humans do when it has the capability to do that. The big question is whether humans are going to trust it enough to allow it to do that. You could have a far more effective response if you just handed over the reins to an AI and said you solve this spill. And within seconds, you'd have all the paperwork completed and it will be fired off and vessels will be heading out to the right location and it will be optimised based on trillions of scenarios that it's analysed.