Ranjay Gulati

I'll figure it out.

What I was trying to do was understand how these people resource themselves in different ways to really take on fear.

I'll give you one last one and then I'll promise to shut up.

It's calm.

And this one you've dealt with in some of your episodes.

Because one way to think about calm is meditation.

The modern day psychology version of this is what is called emotional self-regulation.

So sports psychologists are all over this because what is their number one job?

To keep their player calm in the face of a very stressful situation.

And there's a whole bunch of strategies inside the calm chapter where I talk about how do these people, and meditation is a very important part of that story too, by the way.

But there are other tactical things they do as well.

So one of them is rituals.

I interviewed a Ukrainian commando at the frontline who used to be a lawyer till four years ago.

And he said that on the frontline, he has a whole set of morning safety rituals he does that he believes invoke a higher power

that he believes are going to protect him in this moment.

So rituals serve several purposes.

One is it invokes a higher power that we believe is going to protect us.

It also is a very useful distraction technique.

It normalizes things.

You stop thinking about the situation.