My career as a mental trainer officially started a decade ago, but the seed was planted much earlier, when I was a nineteen-year-old student in the Norwegian Officer Candidate School for the Cavalry. The fact that I’d been admitted to the school at all was somewhat of a miracle, since growing up I wasn’t exactly what you’d call army material. Just the opposite: I was the scrawny kid who got pushed around a lot on the playground and had trouble connecting with his peers.
Fortunately, I had a family who loved and supported me, which meant that I still developed a sense of self-esteem even though I was scrawny. Eventually I also developed physically, but what impressed Norway’s military recruiters was my internal qualities—my attitude. I was even being considered for the Recon unit, the most sought after at the school (and a precursor to my becoming a paratrooper two years later with the Norwegian special forces, trained to operate deep behind enemy lines, much like the United States Special Forces Airborne units).
So there I was, seated in a classroom for my first lecture on wilderness survival. This is an essential skill for any military personnel, but especially for Recons, given the risky nature of their missions. They often find themselves in situations where they’re forced to fend for themselves—say, if an operation goes awry or if they escape enemy capture and need to find their way back to the unit without the benefit of navigation aids.
I looked around at the other students in the class, all of whom seemed even stronger and more confident than I had become as a young man, and I wondered if I’d bitten off more than I could chew.
That’s when the officer at the head of the class took a piece of chalk and drew a vertical line on an empty blackboard. He then plotted the numbers zero through ten along the line in ascending order, zero at the bottom and ten on top.
He pointed to the number four and said, “This is how much you think you can take.” Then he pointed to the number two and said, “Your mother probably thinks you can take only this much.” He moved his index finger gradually up to seven. “The officers in this room know you can take a lot more.” He looked at us sternly.
“But here’s the reality. You can take even more than they think.” His index finger stopped at ten. “Most importantly, you can take a lot more than you think.”
You can take a lot more than you think.
Those words stuck with me that day, as my fellow soldiers and I moved from the classroom to the mess hall to the barracks. Lying in bed that night, I pondered the simplicity of the officer’s statement, but also its enormity. It seemed to contain one of the great secrets of life.
The next morning, I was up before dawn with the rest of my unit, eager to swiftly move up the vertical axis. I pushed myself to the furthest edge of my limits during that survival training. Never before had I walked such long distances without food in my stomach, or swam so much in freezing cold waters. Never before had I navigated solely by the position of the stars or built a fire using only sticks and the hemp from a section of rope.
With each new accomplishment, more of my best was revealed. I realized that just as the officer had predicted, I could take on much more than I ever thought possible. That revelation, which started with the officer’s words and played out over the course of my survival training, changed my life forever—and it would ultimately lead to my career as a mental trainer.
First, though, I had to fulfill my military duty, serving as a leader in the long-range reconnaissance and paratrooper units. That is, until my career and nearly my life were cut short by an automobile accident (but we’ll get to that later). I came back, though, and my military experience took me to Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia, and many other missions for the military in between. I trained and fought alongside the British Special Air Service. These formative years opened my eyes to the values—hard work, decisiveness, character—that I hold dear, both as an individual and as a mental trainer.
After retiring from the military, I needed a different kind of challenge, so I decided to enter the world of business—which of course has its own kind of battlefields and war zones. Armed with a master’s degree from the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, I worked in finance and for a company that specialized in recruitment and management development.
It was during that stage of my career that I witnessed firsthand the career frustrations that so many people experience on a daily basis. More often than not, it was obvious that they were holding themselves back, not anyone else. What’s more, they seemed to understand this. There was the corporate manager who knew that he needed to be more structured with his job. He knew he had to plan more efficiently for meetings with his staff, to articulate ideas more clearly to clients, and to impress his own superiors with a more convincing semblance of order or control. With all those shortcomings, it’s a wonder he managed to hold on to his job—though corporations often tolerate mediocrity, at least until it catches up with them and the whole operation comes crashing down.
I met many people in similar situations during those early years in the business world. I’ve always hung around athletes, and I started to become aware of the same thing there, even at the highest levels, where you’d expect more discipline and commitment. Instead of sticking to a healthy diet, these guys would cheat with pizza or burgers and fries. Instead of getting that much-needed nap in the afternoon, they’d spend the time surfing the Internet. Just like the middling corporate manager, the underachieving athletes I mixed with recognized the error of their ways. They just couldn’t break away from the bad habits. Even when they had the know-how and the resources to do better, they chose the path of least resistance.
Then there were the exceptions, the winners and the overachievers and the leaders of their fields. Perhaps owing to the fact that I was a pretty late bloomer in life, I’ve always been curious about these people. How do they differ from the rest of us? Where do they find the resolve to plan for every meeting or competition and resist every temptation? Why do they win, exactly?
I began to work on these questions more systematically. I found that the distinctions between the winners and the rest of us are surprisingly small. Those who perform at the highest level have one thing in common: they pay attention to detail. They develop exceptional habits, where others settle for the norm. They are better at making more of the small, positive decisions in their everyday life. The sum of all of these choices may not make a difference on a daily basis, but over time—weeks, months, years—the effect is enormous. Since this practice has nothing to do with being born with the right skills, everybody has this opportunity dormant within them. It isn’t a question of talent. It’s a question of choice.
With that revelation, I knew that I had found my calling. This is what mental training is all about: adjusting your habits today in order to achieve great changes in your future performance over time, and being prepared for situations where you need to perform at the highest level. I have enormous faith in our ability to lead ever better and even perfect lives. At the very least, we’re able to constantly strive for that level of perfection, or self-actualization, as it’s sometimes called.
As I made the move into mental training, this became my mission: to help others get really good at living their lives. Of course this looks different depending on the individual. For some, the goal is to perform at the highest possible level in a variety of arenas, including the work and family spheres. For others, including top athletes, it means achieving excellence at just one thing. Either way, the process for getting there is the same. It’s all about making the key changes.
But how? That was the next question I considered. How do I convince people of their capacity to change? How do I get them to discover their best selves? That’s when I came back to Hell Week. Anytime I get together with ex-military people, whether guys I served with or total strangers, at some point the conversation turns to Hell Week. Everyone who goes through the experience carries it with them for the rest of their lives. They talk about specific instances from the week with exacting detail. Often it has to do with the breaking point that they went right up to, but somehow managed to resist. Decades later, the resilience they discovered during that moment of extreme adversity is still core to their being. In short, the lessons of Hell Week last a lifetime.
That’s certainly true for me. As I thought more deeply about the structure of Hell Week, I realized it could be easily applied to civilian life. Of course, you see versions of it in the real world—think of college fraternities with their week of hazing for incoming pledges. From what I hear, that Hell Week can be a little sadistic, even by military standards, and it’s probably not the most positive influence.
The civilian Hell Week that I began to envision would have at its core the principle I learned all those years ago: You can take a lot more than you think. The challenge is stepping outside your normal routine in a way that allows you to unlock your deep reserves of untapped potential. This is what my Hell Week is all about.
I often cite the number 4,160. That’s the total number of weeks you’ll live if you reach the age of eighty. Most of them zip by in a blur. There are the demands of everyday life—from preparing meals to paying bills to social, familial, and parental responsibilities. In our professional lives, weeks are jammed with emails, phone calls, and meeting after meeting. Sure, there are the vacations to break up the routine, but they’re all about escaping real life, rather than examining it up close.
Hell Week is an opportunity to apply the principles of mental training in a fixed time frame. For seven days, starting at five o’clock Monday morning and ending at ten o’clock Sunday night, you will live your life to the highest possible caliber. You will push yourself in ways you never thought possible. You will replace your old self with a new and improved version.
Can people really change their lives in a single week? I often meet with skeptics, who point to studies suggesting it can take several months for new habits to form. I don’t dispute that, and in fact, I make the point clearly to clients that Hell Week is the beginning of a process, not the end. But I do strongly believe that if you apply yourself seriously to the project, your life will be changed for the better.
Hell Week is not about torturing yourself to achieve a goal. It’s being fully present, whether you’re leading a meeting at the office or studying hard for an exam. It’s finding balance between the various spheres in which you operate. It’s giving to others and being a good person. It’s about coping with life, understanding life, and living life to the maximum potential.
This book will walk you step by step through the regimen my clients follow so that you can achieve not only what you already know you should be doing, but more than you ever dreamed of. Each day has a different theme and area of focus, which I will dive into more deeply later in the book. But to give you an idea of the challenges you’ll face as you proceed from Monday morning to Sunday night, what follows is a brief overview of the week. I should stress that Hell Week should be done during a routine week in your life. You should go to work as normal and tend to all the demands of your home and family life. The only difference is you will be executing those tasks to the highest level, while taking on the added challenges of Hell Week. It will not be easy. But I promise you it will be exciting and rewarding.
This day will be devoted to figuring out which habits are helping you and which are holding you back. There’s an old saying, “Habits are cobwebs at first, cables at last.” You’ll start creating good habits today that will be with you years from now. Remember: you determine your habits, they don’t determine you.
How many moods do you have in a given day? Are you bringing the right moods to the right situations? Tuesday of Hell Week answers these questions by being hyperfocused on your state of mind. You’ll learn how to take charge of your moods and bring the right energy to the day’s various events and interactions.
The modern world seems to conspire against time management at every turn. On Wednesday, you’ll learn how to fight back with thorough planning and preparation. Creating clear goals, maintaining to-do lists, and dividing your life into days, weeks, months, and years are among the tasks you’ll tackle.
If it was supposed to be easy, it wouldn’t be called Hell Week. That fact will be apparent on Thursday, the week’s toughest day, which gets you outside your comfort zone to discover new limits. For starters, you will not sleep for a full forty-one hours. You will impose a complete social media blackout. You will confront at least one of your deepest fears. It’s going to be hell, but I promise you won’t regret it.
A day devoted to the pursuit of real restorative rest will follow Hell Week’s hardest day. Rest is not a luxury. It is an essential human need that enables us to function at our highest level. You are probably not doing enough in your regular life to recharge the mind and body. Today you will focus on ways to change that.
Thoughts determine character. By changing your thought patterns, you can effectively change your life. As Hell Week winds down, on Saturday you will channel your thoughts toward the positive. We all have the potential to be our own worst enemy or best ally. On this day, you will learn how to win over your inner dialogue.
The final day of Hell Week is an opportunity to look back on everything that you accomplished. You’ll need time to sort through the experiences and put your life into perspective, through targeted self-reflection and interactions with key people. You have made a major investment in yourself. On Sunday, make sure it pays off.
• • •
Nothing to it, right? Seriously, Hell Week is a major challenge. But having guided hundreds of clients through the program, I can tell you that if you make the commitment and go through the process, you’ll come to see that becoming your best possible self isn’t as hard as you feared. Small actions have major effects: You will eat healthily, exercise every day, and rest effectively. You will listen to the people around you, work with concentration, get up early, and go to bed early. You will be thorough in everything you undertake, cut out inessentials, and prioritize appropriately. You will be a good fellow human being. You will give. You will be positive and happy. You will be energetic, assertive, proactive, and dynamic. You will be the best version of yourself for one whole week. It’s one week that will change your life forever.
Remember: you can take a lot more than you think. Now let’s get started.