Buret McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast.

Now when it comes to high stakes endeavors, few are as fraught as brain surgery.

One falls smooth and you can forever alter someone's life.

That's why I guess I spent his life studying how to master fear and enhance performance

and gain insights that can help anyone do likewise in every area of their life.

His name is Dr. Mark McLaughlin and he's a wrestling coach, a lecturer at West Point

in a practicing neurosurgeon as well as the author of Cognitive Dominance, a brain surgeon's

quest to outthink fear.

Today on the show, Mark and I discuss how fear manifests itself in a range from mild

discomfort to full blown paralysis and how you can get a handle on it by developing

cognitive dominance.

Mark then impacts what cognitive dominance is and how it involves being able to overcome

our visceral reaction to unexpected events and respond to elements outside of control

with poise and composure.

We then talk about how to gain that kind of composure by breaking things down into objects

where things that exist independently of us with features everyone can agree on and subjects,

things that are specific to you and encompass the fear within which you can personally act.

Mark walks us through how the objective and subjective can form an X, Y axis and how

you can map the things that happen to you into the four quadrants they form in order to

figure out how to respond.

We enter conversation with how to deal with the known unknowns in life by making a two

calm list of who you do and don't want to be and focusing on the former.

...