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Everything I Know I Learned in Kindergarten (and SEAL Training) | Kevin Williams | TEDxSaintThomas

May 01, 2020
lady. Packard was my

kindergarten

teacher's name and I adored this woman as I hope most

kindergarten

ers do. She had short blonde hair, was tall, and wore round-framed glasses. To be honest, I only remember one other thing about Mrs. Packard and it was during recess one day it was winter there was snow on the ground and I spied the girl I was in love with her name was Laura block now I don't

know

how the little ones do it kindergarten Antilles but in my That day, the way to boost that relationship was to hit her in the back of the head with a snowball, so I proceeded to make said snowball and went back to her blind spot and closed the distance and the I blurted out now that I'd like to think I was competent at a lot of things when I was in kindergarten, but throwing snowballs wasn't one of them, so it went over my head.
everything i know i learned in kindergarten and seal training kevin williams tedxsaintthomas
Fortunately for Laura, unfortunately for the girl beyond Lourdes, she got into her ear, so there was ice water running. at her eardrum she runs out to tell the lady. Packard and I find ourselves in whatever kindergarten attention is, no more recess for keV and I'm sitting there waiting for the lady. Packard gave me a lecture to punish me, and to my surprise, she just asked me a question. She says: who do you want to be when you grow up? So it's an easy question to answer. This is around 1977 and the answers rhyme with I want to be a Jedi Knight and I want to be a firefighter and she said no, no, that's not what I asked you.
everything i know i learned in kindergarten and seal training kevin williams tedxsaintthomas

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everything i know i learned in kindergarten and seal training kevin williams tedxsaintthomas...

I didn't ask you what you wanted to do. I asked you who you wanted to be, never confuse those two questions. because who you are is the bad boy who just hurt that girl, the snowball, that's pretty nervous, so I sat there embarrassed, sad and confused because the seriousness of what she pointed out to me was not clear at that moment , I would not do it. be clear for years, but mrs. Packard saw that she did well, she knew it, she knew that character is important and she knew that it is formed at a young age and she knew that she probably cost us a lot more than we were willing to pay.
everything i know i learned in kindergarten and seal training kevin williams tedxsaintthomas
She knew that it is much more difficult to recover. 28 years I'm in the military and I take on this role as a Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL School Basic Training Officer and that's a lot of words that just describe the guy that runs the 25 week SEAL

training

program so when a kid he raises his hand and says, I want to join the SEAL teams, whether you're actually in the military or not in the military, you're going to boot camp and then you're going straight to school. This 25 week school and it didn't take me long in that position to realize that SEAL

training

was the proving ground for mrs.
everything i know i learned in kindergarten and seal training kevin williams tedxsaintthomas
Packard's lesson on character, so the Secretary of Defense, P, has a series of lists for all the teams and units under his command and the

seal

s have their own list and on that list he could say: I need the

seal

s to do these things good. I need them to kill bad guys in dark places in the world and rescue hostages and dark places in the world. I need them to capture bad guys, shoot down ships, etc., etc., and for each of those missions, the seals have individual abilities. they need to be able to do it, they need to be able to handle weapons and explosives and they need to jump out of planes, they need to go underwater and the list would go on and on and this is what the list looks like today well 50 years ago, let's say during Vietnam that list looked very different 25 years ago during the Persian Gulf or that list looked very different, right? and that makes sense because war changes.
Special Warfare changes techniques, tactics, technology, it evolves exponentially, so it is adopted. the fly, but I guess what hasn't changed much is basic SEAL training, so if I took you all on a tour of the SEAL training center, you would be disappointed, it's a blast from the past, not a peek. In the future, you walk around and see 300-pound telephone poles lining the beach, you see pull-up bars, you see climbing ropes, you see 300-pound rubber boats that look like you're 50 years old, you'd see diving platforms that look like they have 150 years old and the kids that walk in the door come from all walks of life they come from Georgia they come from West Virginia California they come straight off the boats in the Navy they are tall they are skinny they are short they are wide some of them are former bankers some of them they're XT Jers some of them were this room here approximately the same image, so what do we have here? 150 ish Smith, come on let's say 160 so you're a training class that's about to start training.
I line you up and I post someone from the audience and we have a competition between you and me to predict the 30 because only 30 of you are going to make it with that. number more or less 30 will arrive 25 weeks later you will graduate everyone else will leave you would have as much chance as Meat or any seal instructor in terms of choosing who will do well why is it because the seal? The instructors

know

what the lady. What Packard knows is that doing that 10-foot headshot with the snowball doesn't matter, doing that 50-yard headshot with the snowball doesn't matter, you can be an expert at a lot of things and It doesn't matter if they're not looking.
To the experts and despite what they may read or what they may see on the big screen, it's not survival of the fittest by any means, so what you're looking for is the kid who knows it's a bad idea to throw that snowball. bad idea wrong place wrong time wrong target wrong weapon of choice intention versus expected outcome isn't going to work in my favor isn't going to work in my favor right, yeah, and even if it was a good idea to throw the snowball You're going to look at the risk and say no, I'm leaving, so who are you, what do you value, how committed are you, what are you willing to do to preserve this value system that you have, what is the true nature of your character? that is going to be tested and that place is definitely going to find the answer to those questions because the truth is that that is the sexy and sophisticated list that the Secretary of Defense has of all the things that he needs to be able to do and that can be done. we teach we can teach those things we can teach you how to perform a sniper shot at 500 feet we can teach you how to jump out of a plane at 30,000 feet we can teach you how to become a combat diver Li Li we can teach you how to do wrong for example for example, okay, but what you can't teach what you can't teach is this character, right, the instructors in the three short weeks that they have these kids before the fourth week, which is Darwin's big cut, It's called hell, we'll touch it.
They have it for three weeks you can't reconfigure someone's values ​​they are already stewed they have been raised well either by their parents or their grandparents or a pack of lemurs they bring that value system with them at the front door, so the Instructors are in the position of trying to discover diamonds correctly, not create them. So how will these children think, act and decide when they are emotionally, physically and psychologically bankrupt? How are they going to measure the risk to themselves? for your teammates the risk to the mission when they are in very dangerous or uncertain environments, well, there are many ways you can probably get those answers, but SEAL training chooses, for efficiency reasons, to generate stress and fear, such as could be. fear of heights could be fear of water cold water deep water could be fear of quitting smoking fear of failure fear that my girlfriend will break up with me if I get kicked out of seal training, right, but the question is: are you afraid of anyone? ?
Does that matter? That's not even the right question, the right question is why are you afraid and what are you going to do about it. SEAL training gives students daily opportunities to answer that question, so 25 weeks are divided into three phases, the first phase lasts seven weeks and that is physical fitness is the space of intensive physical fitness seven weeks and 120 of you , 130 of you who are not going to make it, are not going to graduate in 25 weeks. then we lose you in the first seven weeks, more specifically we lose you in the first four weeks and most of that happens in the fourth week, okay, which is the week of hell, the second phase lasts eight weeks and it's called phase diving where students learn. how to become competent combat divers and swimmers and the third phase is land warfare where kids can shoot, learn to use applied explosive techniques, learn small unit tactics and mission specific skills, but Darwin's big cut in the fourth week is where it's the litmus test for that character and all those questions and a lot has been written about how woke has been said, but the best advice I've heard that would apply to students entering hell week was said by Winston Churchill.
I love what he said. You know, if you wake up and find yourself going through hell, keep going and that's simple and it's a secret, so the week starts on a Sunday night and ends on a Friday night, five days in a row the students are divided into seven men. The boat crews get a 300 pound three-hip rubber boat, they take that boat with them everywhere they go and it's non-stop, you sleep two hours in five days, you're constantly cold and you're constantly wet and they move you from one place to another. physical event. to another, to another, to another for five days, whether it's running or swimming or an obstacle course or you're paddling in the surf zone or you're just sitting in the surf zone, that's what happens for five days and What Find out what the purpose of hell week really is: to simulate an environment to simulate the stressors that these kids, if they graduate, can or will experience in combat, so that you can't connect these kids to combat and understand how they will act and decide. so you use hell week is a substitute to eliminate all the emotions and all the psychology and all your physical defenses to get to the answer to those important questions why are you here? what is your? what is your value system? seeing things that you wouldn't even be able to comprehend in your mind to students or taking them to a place in their mind where they've never been before and they're fighting against what they think are their left and right boundaries. and if they do it long enough, most of them quit, but the ones who follow Winston Churchill's advice and keep pushing and pushing the left limit and the right limit and keep going, those are the ones who achieve and learn a very skill. criticism during hell week because you will be in that situation once you graduate, once you are abroad and once you are in the middle of the tumult, you will be giving a place in your mind where you have never been. before and you're going to know what to do you're going to keep pushing and you're going to keep pushing and you're going to push to the left you're going to push to the right because that's the only thing you know how to do and in many cases that's the only option.
A funny story helps you appreciate the help. As a student, my boat crew and I were there on Thursday night and the event was held all over the world and what the students do is get in the water with their boats. on the San Diego side of the ocean they row up the coast, row out into the bay and then head south towards the south end of the bay and it's a race and periodically you row to shore to compete in other pranks or some event and Then and then you run back to the ocean to continue paddling well, around two in the morning you find yourself in the bay and the lights of San Diego cascading off the water bringing fun tricks to mind.
So I was the third guy on the starboard side paddling, the kid in front of me lunges at the kid in front of him and, explainably, starts biting his shoulder and he starts screaming, so we grab this guy and we have to Dip him in the water and take him out and as we take him out, he screams at the top of his lungs sir sir, you have to let me go there is a brownie on his shoulder you can't make it up that's a good thing and that's why these these kids get to these 30 or 40 they do these diamonds, they discover them, they make their way and now you have a child who just doesn't know how to leave him.
I mean, I have to kill him now before he quits. and these kids after a great week only know two speeds, they know how to stop and they know how to destroy, and the rest of the training for the instructors becomes an exercise to help them build a toolkit that includes much more than just stopping and destroying. . where there are many elegant solutions to very complicated problems including weak left weak right go back go forward and a story for another time but it all begins, whether we knew it or not, whether we liked it or not, it all began in kindergarten this identification of character and building and develop character and harness fear, harness failure in an effort tobuild this character, so a big shout out to kindergarten teachers around the world: you have a big responsibility and we are indebted to you and, in a big thank you, to mrs.
Packard, wherever you are, you would have made an excellent seal instructor. Thanks for your kindness.

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