Your voice shakes. The words don’t come. You lose track of the room.
None of that means something is wrong with you. It means your nervous system can’t predict what’s coming, so it prepares you for everything at once. Which points at the fix: if the problem is that the situation is unfamiliar, make it familiar before you get there.
In this episode, Goran walks through the visualization method a Special Operations captain taught him after Basic Training — the one he carried into combat and counterterrorism operations and has used in competition and coaching ever since. He also covers the mistake that makes most visualizations worthless: picturing the victory and skipping everything in between.
Your work this week: Pick one situation you’re dreading in the next thirty days. Ten minutes, three times before Monday. Move through it step by step and give yourself the hard version — the hostile question, the slide that won’t load, the moment your voice catches. Arrive at the outcome you want by going through the difficulty, not around it.
This is the Huddle. Every Monday: a few minutes, one idea, and one piece of work to do before we talk again. We meet, we get the assignment, we go.
Pressure can disrupt not only your train of thought, but also the delicate connection between your brain and body. You want to say what you planned to say, but your voice is shaking, your speech slurs, or the words won’t come out at all. You feel butterflies in your stomach. You lose awareness of your surroundings.
Those reactions are natural. It is human nature to be afraid of the unknown.
And your nervous system is not malfunctioning when it does this. It is doing exactly what it was built to do. When it cannot predict what is coming, it prepares you for everything at once. Not knowing whether you can deliver while everyone is watching and expecting flawless execution is precisely that kind of unknown.
Which tells you where the solution has to come from. If the problem is that the situation is unfamiliar, make it familiar before you get there.
I received this advice after completing my Basic Army training. A Captain of the Special Operations unit, who was a fellow martial artist, taught me visualization.
The technique only works if the mental imagery is vivid. A vague picture does nothing. But with sufficient detail, your brain activates the same neural pathways it would use in the real situation. You are not daydreaming. You are rehearsing.
Later — in combat and counterterrorism operations, and after that in my athletic, consulting, and coaching careers — I kept walking into situations feeling like I had been there before. Everything from emotion to physical response, from the opening moment to the outcome, felt familiar. My stress level was minimal. Often it was absent altogether.
That is not because I am braver than anyone else. I am human like everyone else. I attribute it to making visualization an integral part of my preparation for any situation I believed I could find myself in.
Here is the part most people get wrong. They picture the victory — the applause, the signed deal, the handshake at the end — and skip everything in between. That is the weak version of the exercise, and it can cost you, because your brain collects some of the satisfaction without doing any of the work.
The rehearsal is in the difficulty.
Your work this week. Pick one situation you are dreading in the next thirty days. Find a quiet place where you will not be interrupted. Ten minutes, three times, before we talk again.
Close your eyes and parachute yourself in. Move through it step by step, and give yourself the hard version: the hostile question, the slide that will not load, the moment your voice catches. Watch yourself handle each one. Arrive at the outcome you want by going through the difficulty, not around it.
Then run it again with your eyes open. Holding the image while the real world is in front of you is harder, and it is closer to the conditions you will actually be working in.
You will not walk in fearless. You will walk in having been there before, and that changes what your body does next.
Next Monday: advanced visualization.
That was Huddle number two. Take your position and get to work.