Psychological conditioning
“Strengthening your mind”
What is Psychological conditioning?
Like physical conditioning strengthens your body to handle tough conditions, psychological conditioning helps to strengthen your mind to cope with difficult situations. It provides people with the skills and knowledge to build a strong sense of self – as an individual and as a citizen, soldier and veteran. It helps people adapt, persevere and grow so they can cope with the struggles and stresses of life, both on and off the battlefield.
A key tenet of Army’s psychological conditioning program is positive psychology, which is a focus on building a person’s available tools and mental processes to support positive mental states, well-being and positive relationships. It is not about having unrealistic optimism but about developing skills and habits that shift a person’s perspectives, thereby improving their insight, self-efficacy, well-being and quality of life. Army is also approaching psychological conditioning through a strengths-based lens: this is a focus on identifying and leveraging a person’s strengths, talents, and interests, rather than emphasising deficits or areas of weakness. Together, these approaches promote an environment that can mitigate the negative impact of adverse experiences. This is important for Army members for whom adversity, harm’s way and tough environments are realistic expectations of service.
Why is it important?
Army’s focus on strengthening our member’s psychological conditioning is part of Army’s response to the Royal Commission into Veteran and Defence Suicide (RCDVS). It is recognised that aspects of military culture (shared beliefs, values, behaviours, norms, symbols and practices) can become problematic and cause adverse mental health issues during transitional periods in member’s lives. These transitional periods can be for many reasons, including a change in rank, posting, operational duty, rehabilitation or discharge from service. Regardless of the reason, these periods of change may cause individuals to lose their sense of identity or purpose and experience negative emotions such as guilt, shame, anxiety and self-condemnation.
The purpose of psychological conditioning is to build the individual and collective resilience of soldiers and teams, and strengthen the Army’s culture, to achieve a measurable reduction in the incidence of suicide and suicidality of members.
What can you do to ‘strengthen your mind?’
Army is currently incorporating psychological conditioning into its individual and collective training continuums through learner-centred lessons and resources, upskilling instructors, and updating policy. The Cove will support psychological conditioning by developing and publishing PME articles to support members to start the journey to strengthening their psychological conditioning now. Continue to check back into this page, read and complete the activities, and let us know your thoughts.
A great article to start with is this one from Macquarie University’s Performance and Expertise Research Centre about self-reflection. It covers the benefits of self-reflection and provides some tips on how to get started. Read the article and answer the following questions in your own reflective journal:
- When have I been faced with a difficult situation within my team?
- How did I handle it at the time?
- Was I happy with the way I handled the situation?
- Why?
- Why not? What do I think I could have done differently?
- Have I been faced with a similar situation since then, and did I change the way I handled it? Should I have?
- What did I learn about myself in the process?
You can also check out The Cove's resources on reflective practice here.
