Here is the full transcript of Angus Fletcher’s talk titled “One Door, Two: What Special Forces Taught Me About Anger & Anxiety” at TEDxOxford conference.
Angus Fletcher’s talk, “One Door, Two: What Special Forces Taught Me About Anger & Anxiety,” explores the transformative power of counterfactual thinking in managing emotions. Fletcher shares insights gained from training with U.S. Army Special Operations, highlighting how imagining different outcomes can significantly reduce anxiety and anger.
He recounts a compelling example where soldiers devised innovative solutions to a high-stakes dilemma involving two bomb factories, thereby illustrating the practical application of creative problem-solving under pressure. Fletcher extends the application of this method beyond the military, demonstrating its effectiveness with groups ranging from corporate executives to third graders.
A poignant part of the talk includes Fletcher’s work with a third grader, showing how counterfactual thinking helped her address feelings of anger and anxiety by redirecting her aspirations. Fletcher advocates for viewing anger and anxiety not as negative emotions to be suppressed but as cues to employ creativity and open up new possibilities. The talk concludes with an empowering message: by embracing imagination, individuals can navigate stress and conflict more effectively, fostering personal growth and resilience.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Thank you, Oxford. I promise you, I’m not that eminent, but I’m honored to be here. The first time I gave a talk to a large crowd like this, I was ten years old. I was at school, and all I really remember is my heart racing, my mind going blank. I got off stage, my teacher, she races up to me, and she goes, ‘Don’t you worry, it won’t be nearly so scary next time.’ Next time, I panicked. I’d rather die.”
Overcoming Fear and Anger
Well, here I am, back alive, hopefully remembering more of my talk this time. I’m here to talk to you about that feeling of being so scared that your mind goes blank, and also about another related emotion, anger. Anger and fear are very tightly connected in the human brain; they both come from feeling threatened.
Like fear, there’s an enormous amount of anger going around right now. As we sit here, there are about two billion people worldwide feeling angry right now, right at this moment. More than one in five of us in this room is close to anger, and for most of us, that anger isn’t good. It’s harming our mental well-being; it’s leading to violence against ourselves and others.
So, what is it that we can do about all the unwanted fear and anger that we find inside ourselves? The usual answer is to calm your emotions by being more reasonable, more stoic, more mindful. But as I recently discovered, there’s something else you can do. I made the discovery while working with U.S. Army Special Operations, which is honestly not something that I ever expected that I would do.
An Unexpected Collaboration
I’m not in the military, and in fact, I’m the kind of person that can’t harm a fly, literally. When there’s a bug in my house, I cannot swat it; I have to gather it up very gently and escort it outside. And if it’s a cold day, like today, I instead take it down to the basement, where it won’t freeze. You do not want to go down to my basement when it’s winter; you’ll get bitten alive.
Despite my generally harmless nature, however, I started working with U.S. Army Special Operations because I research psychological resilience. How our brains can get stronger and smarter from pressure, so that instead of becoming fragile, we become anti-fragile. How we can take negative feelings, like anxiety and anger, and turn them into positive sources of growth and action. And so that led me to start working with nurses, and then from there with the Army Nurse Corps, and then from there to special operators, like the SAS and the Green Berets, to study how their brains evolve in complex, high-stress situations.
A High-Stress Scenario
And to give you a sense of what I mean, I’m going to tell you the story of one of those situations. It was told to me by the unit commander who was there on the ground. It’s his story, but for a moment, I want you to pretend that it’s yours. You’re a special forces officer, working in Afghanistan, when all of a sudden, you get called into your commander’s office and you’re told that you have to go evacuate a village.
Why do you have to evacuate this village? Well, because sitting in the middle of that village is the largest bomb factory that anyone has seen. It’s filled, at that moment, with tons of bombs. Literally, tons of bombs could kill tens of thousands of people across Afghanistan.
So, you’ve got to go in there, pull all the people out of that village so that an airstrike can happen and destroy that bomb factory. You gather up your team, hop on a helicopter, fly through the night, and arrive at that village early in the morning. At first, everything seems to go easy. You wake up the villagers, explain to them what’s happening, escort them and all of their children to a little grove of trees outside the village so that the airstrike can happen.
You’ve done your job, put in the call, tell them, ‘Go ahead, do the airstrike,’ and that’s when things start to go sideways. You’re told there’s been a delay. It turns out that this factory is so enormous that the Afghan government has gotten involved, and they’re now holding a special meeting to decide whether or not to authorize this airstrike.
The Situation Worsens
How long is that meeting going to take? Well, it’s a government meeting, so nobody really knows. So now you’re out there in this grove of trees with dozens and dozens of families, hundreds of children, you have no food for them, you have no water for them.
They are tired, they are confused. That story that you told them about their entire village blowing up hasn’t happened, so they no longer really believe you.
And after about an hour of this, the children start to cry. As you can understand, they’re hungry, they’re restless, they want to go home, and when the children start to cry, the parents, they lose the little patience they had for this strange exercise, and so they all start to walk back to the village. You try to convince them to stay, but they don’t trust you anymore. And there’s just a few of you, and there’s hundreds of them, so there’s nothing you can do to stop them.
A Critical Decision
And before you know it, they’re back in the village, the children are playing in the streets, the mothers are in their kitchens, making breakfast, the fathers, of course, go back to bed, and you’re standing there, watching this idyllic scene, when you get that call on your sat phone. You’re told, ‘There’s good news, and there’s bad news.’ The good news is the airstrike has been approved. A plane is in the air, and it’s flying to blow up that factory.
And as you hear that, you look at all the children playing in the street around that factory, and you imagine what would happen if that factory blew up now. You wonder how many innocent people would die. And you think to yourself, ‘If that’s the good news, what’s the bad news?’ The bad news is that another bomb factory has been discovered, about five miles away, and satellites have seen a convoy of trucks driving towards that factory, which means that those trucks are about to get loaded up with bombs now. So you have to go there right away, and secure that factory, and stop those trucks before all those bombs are dispersed across Afghanistan, and thousands more people die.
Finding Solutions Under Pressure
So that’s the situation you find yourself in. There’s a bomb factory that’s about to explode, in a village filled with children, and there’s another bomb factory, miles away, that you’ve got to get to immediately, so that thousands of other people don’t die. What do you do? When I first tried to imagine myself into this scenario, I had literally no idea what I would do. I felt like I did back when I was ten years old on stage, my heart racing, my mind going blank. It’s how I earned my special operations nickname, Captain Panic. It’s true. So, I panic.
It’s embarrassing, but it’s not surprising, because when the brain is confronted with complex high-stress situations like these, it naturally tends to go into fight or flight, which is where the origins of anxiety and anger come from. And what that means is that a lot of people, when they’re faced with this problem of the two bomb factories, feel like I feel, overwhelmed by anxiety.
And it also means that the other most common response to the problem of the two bomb factories is to get aggressive. It’s to suggest that the answer is for the soldiers to impose their will on the situation, to force those villagers to leave their homes, to grab them out of their kitchens and out of their beds, and take them to the grove of trees, so that the airstrike can happen, and the other trucks can be stopped.
But what do you think happens when soldiers try to force people to do things? It’s exactly the same thing that happens when bosses yell at their workers, or when parents get angry with children. In the short term, it produces results. But in the long run, it creates anger in the people you’re angry at, and then they get hostile and cause more people to get hostile. And before you know it, you’ve got two billion people angry worldwide.
So, what’s the alternative? To find it, let’s do a little mental exercise to explore what happens in our brains when we go into fight or flight, experiencing emotions like anxiety and anger. I want you to start by imagining that you’re in a room with no windows and no doors. How do you feel?
Exploring Mental Strategies
You feel trapped. That’s what it feels like inside your brain when you feel like you have no options. You feel like there’s nothing you can do. So, your anxiety starts to build, you get stressed, and you edge towards panic.
Now, imagine that a door has opened in that room. How do you feel now? Well, you feel a little less helpless, but you still feel stressed because that door is your only option. You have to get through it. And so, your brain starts to transition towards being forceful, it gets pushy, and aggressive. That’s where anger comes from in the human brain. It’s the brain thinking, ‘There’s only one way to solve this problem. We have to do this, and I have to make other people do it now.
But once you realize that this is how your brain works, you can see the alternative to anxiety and anger. Because if anxiety comes from your brain thinking that there are no doors, and anger comes from your brain thinking that there’s only one door, the alternative is to create more doors.
To illustrate what I mean, let’s go back to that scenario, that situation I told you about with the two bomb factories. We gave this scenario to young soldiers who were training to be special operators. And we asked them to come up with new answers to the problem. Answers that did not involve forcing the villagers to leave their homes. And to help the soldiers come up with these new answers, we trained them in counterfactual thinking. Counterfactual thinking, it’s a fancy scientific term, but all it really means is to get creative.
The Power of Counterfactual Thinking
It’s what children do when they imagine. It’s thinking beyond the existing data. It’s saying, ‘What might happen if I tried this, or if I tried that, or if I tried that other thing?’ And what we found is that the more we trained the soldiers in counterfactual thinking, the more new answers they came up with to the problem of the two bomb factories. The more new answers that they came up with, the more they reduced their anxiety and their anger. They were able to diminish their panic and their aggression by creating second doors to walk through. And those young soldiers came up with some really great second doors.
Let me just give you one quick example. One of them said to me, after a lot of thinking, ‘Well, you know, the first thing I’d do is I’d summon my entire team. I’d tell them, leave this village.’ And I said, ‘Okay, you’re going to tell your team to leave the village?’ He said, ‘Yes, because I would have seen that they’d already lost the trust of the villagers. So there’s nothing that my team can do here. Why keep them here? Why not send them all somewhere where they matter?’ So, I would send my entire team to the other bomb factory to stop those trucks.”
Leveraging Trust and Respect
So I said, ‘Okay, all right, but what about the factory here? What about the bomb factory that’s about to explode in this village? What would you do about that?’ And he said, ‘I’d ask myself, is there one person living in this village who could convince everyone else to evacuate? Is there one person living in this village who everyone else trusts and respects enough to listen to?’ And I would say, ‘Yes, there must be.’ So, I would find that person. I would find that person, and I would convince them. And then they could convince everybody else.”
That wasn’t the only creative answer to the problem of the two bomb factories. There were many, many others. There are others that you can think of yourself if you want to practice a little counterfactual thinking. And what all those answers demonstrate is that no matter how desperate a situation seems, no matter how stressed and angry you might feel, you can always use your imagination to create a second door. I call this method ‘One Door Two.’ It’s what I train with special operators, and it doesn’t just work for them. I’ve trained it with parents, corporate execs, big CEOs, and third graders.
And that, to me, I’m just going to go off script here for a little bit. I’ve been really good. I’ve stayed on my script. I haven’t forgotten any of my lines, right? I’ve been pretty flawless so far. You’ve been mostly impressed with my ability not to panic and run off stage. So, I’m just going to go off script for a bit and just say that working with students for me has been by far the most fulfilling part of this whole thing.
A Child’s Perspective
This summer, we were working with a third grader who was experiencing anger and anxiety because her parents would not let her go to astronaut school. And her parents gave it to me, and they’re like, ‘Astronaut school? Is there even such a thing?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know, for third graders.’ So, we did the same training with a third grader, that same counterfactual training that we did with special operators. And she started to think to herself, ‘Hmm, why is it I want to be an astronaut? I want to be an astronaut because I want to float in space.’
And then she thought to herself, ‘Well, what if I could float somewhere else? What if I could float in the water? Fish float in the water. I could be like a fish. I could float like a fish in the water. That’s what I could do.’ ‘You know what I want to do? I want to take swimming lessons. Mom and dad, can I take swimming lessons?’ They were like, ‘Yes. Yes, you can take swimming lessons.’ And that was how she eliminated her own stress, her own anger, just by using this simple counterfactual thinking.
All children have this. They have enormous powers of imagination. They are nature’s special operators. And you can do the same thing too. All it really takes is shifting your relationship to anger and anxiety. It’s to stop seeing anxiety and anger as mental misfires that you have to cure or eliminate with reason. It’s instead to start to see them as smart signals sent from deep within your brain, alerting you to the need to get creative.
Embracing Creativity Over Aggression
So when you get stressed or feeling like you need to just yell at someone and tell them what to do, see that as a cue to act. But not with aggression. With imagination. To use your powers of invention to go from one door to two. Not because anger is bad, but because there’s something better. Anger produces short-term results that are brittle. But creativity is a source of sustainable growth.
So if you’d like to see more of that growth across the globe, use your emotional intelligence. Remember, the next time that you feel yourself getting stressed, anxious, aggressive, or angry, that is your brain sending you a message. A message to get creative and open another door in the world. Thank you.