This is a post intended for the NSOCM students I presented to last week at the ISTC

The title of my session was: ‘Practice, Perform, Process’: Strategies for Building Mental Toughness.

Here are some of the resources I used to design the session, which I believe will be useful for you guys.

Books

On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (2008).

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Anders Ericsson (2016).

Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success. Matthew Syed (2015).

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin (2015)

Blog Posts

Lessons From South Africa – My initial blog post on my time working in South Africa. This has a few of the videos I used for ‘deliberate practice’ embedded (surgical hand ties, tying in chest drains).

An Englishman in South Africa – My St. Emlyn’s blog post on the experience where I focus on my initial extreme acute stress reaction working in Khayelitsha.

Stress Inoculation Training by Mike Lauria (NB for some reason this post isn’t available on the site currently. I’m sure it’ll be back up soon)

Imperturbability: William Osler, Resilience, and Redefining Mental Toughness by Mike Lauria

The ‘Deliberate Practice Mindset’

Podcasts

St. Emlyn’s podcast: An Englishman in South Africa – I describe my experience in Khayelitsha with Professor Simon Carley

Emcrit podcasts:

• Podcast 118 – EMCrit Book Club – On Combat by Dave Grossman
• Podcast 132 – MoTR – Toughness Part I with Michael Lauria (this is also not available on the site currently, but when it’s back is well worth a listen. The accompanying blog post is available)
• Podcast 177 – Chris Hicks on the Fog of War: Training the Resuscitationist Mindset

Rollcage Medic Podcast: Podcast 8 – Decision making in high stakes environments with Mike Lauria

Core EM podcast: Podcast 81.0 – Visualization

SMACC podcast – Shoes, Sex and Secrets: Stress in EMS by Ashley Liebig

Videos

FOAMed resources – for the ‘immersion’ process

Here is an excellent explanation of FOAMed.

These are my preferred FOAMed websites:

• St. Emlyn’s blog and podcast
• Life in the Fast Lane blog
• ER Cast podcast
• EM Basic podcast
• Emcrit blog and podcast
• Resus.me blog
• Pondering EM blog (I had to list my own site!)

Some of the above will have a lot of material not relevant to being a combat medic, so be sure to carefully select what is appropriate for you.

Also, this list is not exhaustive. There are many more resources out there which you’ll easily find once you start navigating the FOAMed universe. I know that there are several paramedic-led websites which may be particularly useful for combat medics.

If looking for a specific topic, you can utilise GoogleFOAM, where you can search all FOAMed outlets.

Email me with questions

Please feel free to email me at ponderingem@gmail.com with any questions.

I am close to completing a blog post which summarises my 4 presentations, so please look out for that.

Many thanks,
Robert Lloyd
@PonderingEM