Fight to Survive

Hear that sound? It's the thump-thump-thump of a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter as it picks up a team of soldiers and deposits them 25 miles away in the North Carolina countryside. Those are Special Forces trainees climbing aboard, embarking on a field exercise that's designed to test their mental and physical stamina. Although they'll be gone for days, they have scant resources. No tents, despite snow in the forecast. No night-vision goggles, although they're expected to hike through the night. And no food (their last meal was yesterday).

Their mission: Avoid getting captured by "enemy" troops, and make the best of a bad situation, using little more than a knife, a compass, a sleeping bag, and a canteen. In other words, survive.

It's a lot like the challenge that companies, executives, and employees -- not to mention the ranks of the unemployed -- are facing as the economy takes its time to recover. Get by on next to nothing. Make do with what you've got. Understand that things might get worse before they get better.

Clearly, the fight for survival is a different and difficult way of working. So we consulted world-class survival experts for lessons on how to fight the good fight. For executives, survival involves keeping their companies afloat and their self-esteem intact. For the U.S. Army's Special Forces -- more commonly known as the Green Berets -- survival is a matter of life and death.

At the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, the vast Army base located just outside Fayetteville, North Carolina, soldiers train for two to three years to join the Special Forces. Only 20% of the candidates make it their first time through. The final stage is Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, or SERE for short. For three weeks, students live primarily outdoors at Camp Mackall, where the SERE exercises take place.

With the help of several SERE instructors, Fast Company has put together a survival guide for tough times. Because they could still be deployed, some of the instructors asked to be identified by first name only. And we've kept the business analogies to a minimum here. If you're smart enough to survive these perilous times, then you're smart enough to make the connections between what these instructors teach and the challenges that you face.

Rule 1: Only the Mentally Strong Survive

When a soldier or a unit gets stranded in a hostile environment, survival hinges on mental toughness more than anything else, say the SERE instructors. Says Gordon Smith, an instructor who spent 26 years in the Special Forces: "I tell the students, If you have a guy with all the survival training in the world who has a negative attitude and a guy who doesn't have a clue but has a positive attitude, I guarantee you that the one with the positive attitude is coming out of the woods alive. Simple as that."

Often, the biggest obstacles are psychological. Fear of the unknown. Stress over things that are beyond your control. Anger at being in this predicament. Guilt over comrades who didn't make it. It's important to recognize that those emotions are normal, says John, a master sergeant and the chief instructor at SERE. But such feelings are potentially overwhelming. If you dwell on the negative, you can become paralyzed, depressed, and indecisive. The stress will crush your confidence.

Throughout SERE, instructors focus on the psychology of survival. Instead of allowing fear and anxiety to become destructive, trainees learn how to use those emotions as a positive force -- as motivation to keep going, to avoid being cavalier and leaving yourself vulnerable to the enemy, to rise to the challenge.

Of course, maintaining a positive attitude in the face of countless setbacks and seemingly insurmountable odds is hard, to say the least. When you're in survival mode, it's important to keep working to improve your situation, even if it's only by degrees. "You need to celebrate small victories: 'I caught a fish today,' 'I've avoided getting sick,' 'I have enough water to last a few more days,' " John says. "You're looking for any reason to hope."

Rule 2: You Can Condition Yourself to Stress

The goal of SERE training is to get you to master yourself and your emotions, John explains, but you can't achieve that if the crisis remains theoretical. So field exercises are held to give students a trial run -- an opportunity for them to gauge their performance under severe stress. "A big part of what we do here is prepare students by forcing them out of their comfort zone," says John.