FOREWORD

by ROBERT BROOKS BROWN,
LIEUTENANT GENERAL, U.S. ARMY

DESERT STORM HAD JUST been won in a resounding victory, and fresh from the ticker tape parade in New York City was the man who led the United States to victory, General Norman Schwarzkopf. In 1992, he visited his alma mater, the United States Military Academy at West Point. One of his key stops was a new and innovative center that was working on improving human performance. In a scene I will never forget, General Schwarzkopf sat in an egg-shaped chair hooked up to biofeedback equipment. He was asked to think about a situation that made him mad—the biofeedback readings were nearly off the computer screen. Then he was asked to think about a situation that would relax him and the readings dropped to a very low level. General Schwarzkopf clearly understood how critical it is to maintain control in life or death situations; he referred to an example of combat in Vietnam when he was a younger officer and his unit was caught in an ambush. He remembered experiencing a calm, almost like things were moving in slow motion in the middle of the chaos as he gave directions to soldiers and they gained the upper hand on the enemy. He was clearly in “the zone” during this life-or-death situation. He had not experienced that type of slow motion control since he was on the football field years earlier at West Point.

Coaches, surgeons, military leaders, business leaders, and numerous successful leaders from all different fields have visited the Center for Enhanced Performance at West Point and all completely understood the efforts to develop leaders with effective mental tools to deal with the challenges ahead. I was a young captain with about ten years in the Army when I had the privilege of working alongside the brainchild of this innovative center, Colonel (Dr.) Louis Csoka. A West Point graduate who led troops in combat in Vietnam and a brilliant professor in the Behavioral Sciences and Leadership Department at West Point for many years, Dr. Csoka would go on to develop revolutionary techniques for leaders to excel in any given field. His efforts would lead to critical changes in leadership development with an emphasis not only on physical development, but on gaining the mental skills needed for success.

One of his key strategies was to properly develop effective goal-setting skills. Tough, demanding, yet realistic and measurable goals are key to enhancing performance in any field. Teaching West Point cadets these goal-setting skills led to increased performance in the classroom, on the athletic fields, and in their leadership abilities as future Army lieutenants. I continued to use these goal-setting skills successfully throughout the next twenty-six years in the Army, working with formations as small as thirty soldiers to as large as 100,000 soldiers. Initially, we relied on instinct to know these skills would work; experts can now prove that goal setting focuses the brain to achieve a task. Dr. Csoka’s innovative methods were well ahead of their time and he has truly been an innovator in enhancing mental performance.

Nearly every Army manual on leadership asks leaders to visualize the battlefield and provide clear guidance to their subordinates on how to defeat an enemy force. Dr. Csoka clearly understood that the skill of visualization was critical to success—and that it could be taught. I watched him teach a room full of tough, gritty West Point football players to visualize a situation and mentally practice using scenes from popular Walt Disney movies. He was also among the first in this field to tape a camera to the helmet of a football player so they could see the scout team replicating the opposing team’s offense numerous times and learn to visualize more effectively.

Using Csoka’s techniques, I worked with a West Point swimmer who was incredibly talented but let his nerves get the best of him prior to competitions. After he learned to visualize his race effectively, he could essentially swim the event mutiple times before it actually took place. He went on to the national championships in swimming and was able to take advantage of his potential. Dr. Csoka’s techniques have proven effective throughout the Army as we worked with various Army units, the Army’s National Training Center, and elite organizations like the Special Operations forces and the Army’s Golden Knights parachute team.

Soldiers are consistently preparing for the demanding physical challenges of combat operations. Dr. Csoka used research, studies, and his years of experience in this field to determine the mental skills needed for the stress and challenges of life or death situations in combat. He proved that focus and concentration skills could be measured, honed, and improved, and developed the techniques to cultivate the energy management abilities that enable an individual to get calmer in stressful situations. I learned to improve my own skills through Dr. Csoka’s effective teaching methods, which clearly show leaders can improve their mental skills and should consistently work as hard on their mental condition as they do the physical. When faced with life or death situations in combat operations, I found that I would get calmer as the situation became more intense. For a leader to be calm in the middle of the storm is certainly an effective tool.

As a pioneer in the field of mental skills and human performance, Dr. Csoka faced numerous challenges throughout his journey to develop effective techniques for leaders in all fields. Naysayers considered the techniques in mental skills training to be guesswork and argued that people either had the skills or they did not. This is where Dr. Csoka revealed his true genius as he would not be deterred by those who just did not understand. He had seen these mental techniques work in the toughest conditions and he revealed an incredible passion to learn more about the brain and prove that leaders can build the mental skills required to excel. Early on in his work the mental skills were referred to as “enhanced performance.” Today these skills are considered essential for leaders in all fields who face complexity unlike that in any time in our history. The challenges today are the immense amounts of information available and the incredible speed at which that information rapidly diffuses. Leaders today require Dr. Csoka’s mental skills to make effective decisions in a timely manner more than ever before.

In this book you will not only learn techniques to improve your effectiveness as a leader, but you will also be inspired by the vision, persistence, and courage of a true leader in his field—a man who helped set the foundation for effective development of those mental skills required to thrive in a complex world.