Stress performance Training

The brain under acute stress is an entirely different beast.  If you haven't experienced the shut down that can come with life or death threat, you can't know how to deal with it.  

Time changes, perceptions skew, and suddenly you are reacting without choosing your actions. Your training can vanish as you fall back on instinct, appropriate or not. 

Practical Tools literally teaches people how to keep their head under stress, allowing them to access their training for optimal outcomes.  

Why

Practical Tools' Stress Performance Training was created because first responders are not being adequately prepared for a key reality of their jobs - that the physiology of acute stress can block access to their skills and training during critical incidents.  

The men and women in these jobs deserve to be taught the straightforward skills needed to manage these effects, leading to better outcomes for themselves and the public.  

What Drives Us

Stress Performance Training is the missing link in the training and education of first responders. 

Without explicitly giving these men and women skills to manage acute stress physiology, we fail to prepare them for the reality of their jobs.  

Science knows how to do this better.  We bring what research has learned and make it applicable to the real world.

The skills we teach are practical, performance focused, easily learned, and easily integrated.    

How We Do It

Combining Sciences. Our training is informed by research in kinesiology, psychology, and neurology. 

New Technology. Realtime biofeedback (in the form of heart rate data) makes information and skills concrete and relatable.  Biofeedback increases the speed at which trainees learn stress regulation skills.

Learning Science. Our training is based on what research has found to be most effective for skill retention.  This informs information presentation, feedback, and practice. 

INDUCING STRESS. Our most complete training programs involve stress inducing practice.  Trainees feel the effects of the stress response on performance, and then learn to apply their regulation skills.  

Think Differently About Stress

Eliminating the stress response isn't possible, and worse, suppressing it can cause long term physical and psychological damage.

Form dictates function, and the brain is no more able to operate without the stress response than a gun is to grow flowers. 

Learning to harness the stress response for performance is the way forward.