SNW Ep 4 Preston Cline PhD. - Elite Team Techniques That Help Us Thrive in Sobriety.

Podcast Description for "Sobriety Now What"

Welcome to Sobriety Now What, the podcast designed to empower and inspire individuals navigating the journey of sobriety. Hosted by Stuart Cline—a master's level addictions counselor, mental health professional, and success coach with over 25 years of experience.

Each episode delves into actionable strategies, motivational insights, and expert advice tailored to help you build a life of clarity, connection, and purpose. This podcast explores topics such as creating a supportive "sobriety success team," and transforming setbacks into opportunities for growth as well as helping you add to your Thriving Sobriety Tool box.

Whether you’re just starting your sober journey or seeking fresh perspectives to enrich your life, Sobriety Now What offers practical tools and inspiring stories to guide you.  Sobriety isn’t just about saying goodbye to substances—it’s about saying hello to your best life.

Tune in weekly to learn, grow, and thrive in sobriety. Because thriving in recovery isn’t a solo mission—it’s a team effort, and we’re here to help you live fully and thrive.

Invitation to consider at least one helpful piece of information to help them thrive in their sobriety and to share with podcast with others and to follow and email questions. 

Transcript

SNW Ep 4 Preston Cline PhD. - Elite Team Techniques That Help Us Thrive in Sobriety.

[00:00:00] Welcome to sobriety now what. The podcast to help you thrive in sobriety. I am you host Stuart Cline a masters addictions substance abuse counselor, mental health counselor and success coach. I have been helping thousands of people in recovery for over 25 years.  Let me ask you a question. 

What do Navy SEALs, Green Berets, firefighters, police officers, and surgical teams all have in common? They're high-performance teams who my guest works directly with. These teams operate in life-or-death situations, often making life and death critical decisions in 300 seconds or less. Their success depends on trust, communication, and shared goals—principles that can be transformative for anyone, including those of us navigating sobriety.  These teams are the best of best.

I thought I would ask an expert in understanding what high performance mission critical teams have learned that may help you enjoy a thriving sobriety. If you have ever seen Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible movies, well, my guest today is the one who helps people make those missions possible. Today, I'm thrilled to bring on my brother, Dr.

Preston Cline. Preston works with these elite teams to help them thrive under immense pressure. He has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, a master's degree from Harvard, and years of experience teaching teams how to manage uncertainty and make the best decisions in high [00:01:00] stakes environments. But how does that relate to sobriety?

Well, let's think about it. Recovery, like any high performance endeavor, is not a solo mission. It's a team effort. Sobriety. It can be a hard life, but it can also be completely fulfilling and rewarding. And just like those elite teams, we need clarity of purpose, support from others, and strategies to handle stress, uncertainty, and setbacks.

Preston will share insights from his work with these incredible teams, offering practical takeaways for you to use in your thriving sobriety toolbox for success. We'll explore why stuffing down emotions can be toxic and how to create a thriving mindset. Sobriety is not about going it alone. It's about connecting with others, leaning on your team and contributing to a shared mission, building a better life.

I'm so excited for you to hear Preston's [00:02:00] perspective and take away lessons that can elevate your recovery journey. Let's dive in and learn from the mindset of some of the world's most elite teams. Welcome to the podcast, Preston. I'm glad you're here. Let's get started. Sure. Well, first and foremost, I'm your older brother.

Let's just focus on that for a hot second. And then you have to get in brother stuff. Otherwise, of course, right. What's the point? I had Francesca on last week and we had a few flubs and I was like, I think brothers and sisters could do this. So I think we have a lot more room to, to, to. Go with this 100%.

So I run what's called the mission critical team Institute. We are a group of practitioners and researchers that work with decision with teams that operate in decision making environment. So about. 300 seconds or less where the consequence of failure is catastrophic. So think trauma surgery, think military special operations, fire.

We work with NASA, we work with FBI and secret service. So it's all those teams really about [00:03:00] learning and specifically what our research is around is what's called the tacit knowledge transfer problem, which is just a very fancy way to say, you know how to ride a bike, but you can't explain it to me. And while that's an interesting problem, it gets real interesting if you're an attending physician handing a resident a scalpel for the first time, you better know how to talk about what right looks like.

And so we help teams sort of be able to articulate that and study that to make teams better so that when you go to the hospital, you have a better outcome. Like being a juvenile delinquent and then spending a lot of time working with juvenile delinquents. All my research is really about trying to understand how people learn to navigate uncertainty.

And so one of the things I would encourage everybody to do is that instead of thinking in these terms of right and wrong, there are rights and wrong. There are moral absolutes for sure, but it thinks in terms of like. What would, and it goes back to something you said before, like how, what moves me towards thriving?

What moves me towards contentment, how do I navigate [00:04:00] this environment that I get my needs met and, and I'm not a jerk about it. Right. Like what, what does that path might look like? How, what help might I need to get there? Because we all need help from time to time. And so I would just encourage everybody that you're not going to be able to fix this alone.

I work with some of the most elite people. Teams in the world, and I will tell you, none of them do it by themselves, not one of them. And so if you're out there and I know, especially you introverts, right? You're like, well, that's a nice person. I don't really like humans. I get it. I'm I've met the humans too.

I've got some real questions. However, you actually do like, not all the time you need your own time, but. From time to time, you actually need the other humans. Cause they're the ones that can help you make meaning of things. And so if you're listening to this and you're like, I don't like the humans, I get it, but here's the bad news.

You need them. There's, there's more and more research coming out that shows that efforts that try to make yourself happy are not often very successful, but in efforts to try to make others happy in a very [00:05:00] sustainable way, not in a pleasing or deferring way, but like a collaborative way. Will actually increase your own happiness in a much more sustainable way.

Well, I love that you said that because the podcast before this one with Francesca, she talked about the, the kindness ripple out effect that by helping somebody else by giving someone like a dollar or helping them be being kind with them. It's as if we're Our dopamine levels in our brain, that feel good chemical that we all have.

In fact, why people do drugs in the first place is to get this feel good chemical dopamine that's already in your brain. Well, kindness kickstarts that it activates that. And it's as if someone gave us like, you know, a 5 bill or kind of uplifted us and makes us feel better. And so Absolutely. One practical exercise.

Have you guys talked about gratitude walks at all? Not gratitude walks. We talked about gratitude lists last year. Yeah. So on the walks. Yeah. So we now got to imagine there's some of the most dangerous people in the world, [00:06:00] like Navy SEALs and Army Rangers and, and really dangerous people. When we were on a week long courses every day at 2 PM, which is the circadian low, you're not accomplishing anything at 2 PM.

Your brain's cooperating with you. Take a 15 minute walk, preferably with someone you don't know that well, just 15 minutes, be outside, take deep breaths, try to see the horizon line, and you're only allowed to talk about what you're grateful for. And if you do it for 15 minutes or you do it for two weeks, it'll positively change your, your biochemistry.

And you start seeing it more around you, right? The gratitude and appreciation, the groups that you work with, the people in companies that you work with, a lot of it has to do with mindset. Is that fair to say? Yeah, it totally is. Yeah. Okay. But you should also know, Stu, that Like that, if you look at firefighters and cops and surgeons and military, they have four times the rate of suicide that the average population has four times as many addictions, divorce, all that stuff.

So the stressors that you're [00:07:00] talking about, we want to be really clear that part of what we do is investigate how to do that better, which is to deal with the exact issues you're talking about. So just because you become a firefighter doesn't mean you crack the code on that. In fact, a lot of people it's killing them.

Thank you for bringing that up. Yes. And it's transitioning from trauma experiences, people who grew up in alcoholic homes, abusive homes, that kind of thing, or have been in, you know, chaotic scary situations, life threatening situations they take with them and then they still have to show up to work the next day.

And they have to put up that mask and being like, everything's good. While inside their nervous system might be a bit shot, it's like, cause this is, they're hypervigilant. They're looking over the shoulder. Where's the exit. You know, are these people safe? I don't feel good about this. Let's get out of here.

And transition is a, is a huge part of what we do. We've written some articles on it and we're working on some projects now with different teams. So I'm going to go back to something you said and kind of help frame. Some of these conversations, how they might connect between sort of an addict or a child of an [00:08:00] addict the, their lived experience and how they make meaning of it and people who work on the edge of things and how they make meaning of it.

And so I can remember being in an environment, a home environment that was scary, threatening, uncertain, all these things, and then go to school in the morning around all these people that appeared normal. And one of the big questions I had as a kid was, what is normal? And as I got older, I really struggled with like, am I normal?

Are they normal? Should I be trying to get closer to them? Should they be trying to be like more like me? And this becomes really an issue when you're a firefighter or let's say a paramedic who has a eight hour shift and see some horrific things. And that is a 30 minute drive home to dinner with the kids.

And you're supposed to transition from that to being like a normal person. Absolutely. And so what is normal to them? That term normal, when it comes to people with addiction, you know, when people are in that addict mind, that fighting, like world is tough. I have to [00:09:00] keep secrets. I have to keep lies. I don't want people to know the struggles I'm having and that's their normal.

They see everyone as a threat. They're trying to avoid arguments and confrontation, and they don't want to be caught doing, you know. Bad choices, doing bad choices. So that's their normal. And so they get sober and the idea is, okay, what's my new normal now? One person having two lives, if you will, right?

The addict life. And then they sober up and they're like, what the hell is this? It's not very exciting. Like their thing is, is they have to be honest now and vulnerable and that's scary. And what does that mean? And what I recommend for recovery is changing that. term normal to healthy. What's a healthy behavior for you?

And we know healthy because we can feel it, we know when we're eating junk food that it's kind of sucking our energy. It gives us, you know, that sugar high, but then we drop when you make a mistake, how do you come back? Yeah. And so we call it reset in our research. We do a paper called the DR five and real fast.

It sounds for detection, recognition, reaction, response, reset, [00:10:00] and reflection. And what it means is, is that if you're doing surgery or you're a professional sports or you're doing hostage rescue you have to do things very, very fast. And sometimes it's unconscious. So detect a threat, react to that threat.

A lot of your listeners will be very familiar with that concept. What they often don't do though, is recognize whether it is a threat. They go from detection to reaction. They don't pause and go. Well, this is actually a threat. And then what happens is when they make a mistake and everybody sees it and they're embarrassed, they're walking away.

And they got that inner monologue like, I suck. This sucks. I'm embarrassed. Oh my gosh. And they can't reset, they can't sort of get back in the game. The problem is in my world, my world's a team based world. And when you're on a team and you get. focused on your own internal sort of toilet bowl spiral of shame and embarrassment.

It's a fundamentally a [00:11:00] selfish thing because what you're saying is that your ego is now more important than the mission. It's more important than the kid in the table or the kid stuck in the fire or the hostage that needs rescuing or whatever those things are. And so you have to do what like Ted Lasso says, 

you have to have the goldfish mind and you have to have a short memory. Basically what you have to do is say, Hey, I'm going to compartmentalize that, and I'm going to come back to it. You're gonna make a commitment to yourself. I'm going to shove that away for right now, and I'll deal with it later.

Here's the big thing, though. Compartmentalization, they've done some research now, and it turns out that if you compartmentalize something, and you don't bring it back out within about 30 days, it starts to turn toxic. And so if you're going to compartmentalize, and be honest, what allows surgeons, firefighters, and cops to do their jobs is their ability to compartmentalize.

It's also the thing that's going to kill them. So it's a double edged sword. It's the thing that saves them. And it's the thing most likely to kill them. So it's one of those things where you got to be able to open the box [00:12:00] and shove your feelings in there, but you got to be able to open them back up and pull them all back out.

Like you got to throw up, you got to have that feeling where it feels disgusting, but more, you get more, you do it, the better you get at it. And that's what we call reset. And so just emotional coping mechanisms and a lot of people aren't used to it, but it's very normal. If you normalize it, it gets easier every time.

You find for people to bring that compartmentalization out of the box within the 30 days that they need someone to process that, process that with because they're still in their own perception of like, I still suck as a human being. So what's the difference? Let's just stick it back in. You know, the compartmentalization.

So tell me kind of a little bit about that process. Yeah, that's really important, because, and here's why it really matters. You have to, when I've done incident investigations, especially when they've been remote settings, one of the reasons I'm called in is because I've been cold, wet, tired, and hungry in a lot of places.

And so when somebody is telling me about the kid, they weren't able to save, they know [00:13:00] that I actually know what it was like to be out there. And that really matters. And so you have to unpack it, but you have to be unpacking it to somebody that you believe might understand a safe person who gets it.

That would be talking to like a counselor, a sponsor, you know and not necessarily a family member. . Cause I know family members have some issues too, and they could get triggered on things. So a safe person is someone who has some distance, who isn't going to be emotionally attached to what you say or whatever, in a negative way.

It's true. Great advice I got early in my marriage when we were doing a lot of incident investigations. My wife's a teacher and what was happening was is that I would go to some gruesome event where a child had died and I would come home and I wouldn't want to traumatize Amy so I wouldn't tell her.

And what was happening was we were starting to live very different separate lives. And I wasn't, and I was storing up a bunch of stuff that wasn't good for me. And so I had some really good chaplains and really good [00:14:00] social workers and psychs that sat me down and they said, Preston, you're missing the point here.

You don't have to actually describe the blood and guts and smell. All you have to describe is your emotions. I'm sad. I'm frustrated. I'm angry. I'm disappointed in myself. And you'll understand all those things. And once I was able to speak to the emotions rather than the. violence or whatever it is, the person in my life, like a family member, they know those emotions.

They know them differently than you do, but they know them. And so they can help. They just can't help necessarily make meaning of the sort of technical tactical stuff, but they can help you feel less isolated. So I think you know that we wrote this residue article, with the actor Tom Hardy. Yeah.

One of the reasons Wait, wait, actor Tom Hardy, he, tell the listeners kind of what he's been in. Oh the movie Venom, Peaky Blinders. He was Bane in Batman. And he helped us write an article on this concept of residue. If you, if you type in MCTI residue, it'll come right up. It's public. [00:15:00] Super interesting.

I would encourage you to, to read it. We've had eight individuals tell us that the reason they didn't commit suicide was because of that article. And basically the reason is when we asked them why two reasons. One, we were the first people that told them they weren't broken, that they, that their pain wasn't a life sentence.

And that that the, they had a responsibility if they're going to take the hard path to take responsibility for all of it, including the bad days, right? You got to take responsibility for making meaning of all of that stuff. And what we found was after 30 years of doing this, the thing, when I'm working with elite teams, teams, the thing that I am the most terrified of is when an individual says to me, I don't understand that statement, in my opinion, has killed more people than anything else.

Because when a person leaves a counseling session or an after action review or a debrief thing, I don't understand. I understand why I did that. Why they did that, why we did that, why that [00:16:00] happened. That inability to make meaning of something is like cancer. It'll just haunt you. It'll end up in your dreams and everything else.

So one of the most important things a counselor can do or a peer group can do is just help you make meaning of a thing. Like, I now, I don't agree with it. I don't like it, but I get it. I understand how it could happen in dealing with elite high stress teams. How would you describe the mindset you need to work with and being the best in these environments?

It's a really complicated question, first of all, and there's a lot of moving parts to that, but it boils down to sort of trust and competence. So as you know, I used to be a wilderness guide, and so when I get new staff members that would come to me and I would say, here's the deal about being a staff member with me.

It's pretty straightforward. It's that. When I'm looking in front of me, I'm looking at students, and I don't look behind me because that's where my partners are. Once I have to turn my head to find out where you are or what you're [00:17:00] doing, you're a student now, right? So like you've lost the ability for me to not think about you.

If you're good at what you're doing, I'm not thinking about you. You're anticipating what I need. I'm anticipating what you need. We're just doing good work together because we're in service to the mission. Once I feel isolated where I'm not doing that and I have to find out where you are and what you're doing, all of a sudden you're another thing I have to manage.

And so when I worked with the FDNY, a famous chief, Chief Pfeiffer, we went into a burning building in in New York City, downtown Manhattan, on the 27th floor. As we walk in the building, Chief Pfeiffer, who's very famous says to his battalion chiefs tell me what I don't know. And when I asked him that question, like, why'd you ask that question that way?

He says, because I'm, I outrank them by a lot. And if I walk in and say, have you done this or done this or done this, they're going to start managing me and not managing the fire. I need them managing the fire, not managing me. And so I'm going to enter that situation so that I can be part of the team, not be their boss.

[00:18:00] So if you're with the team and you're looking behind yourself, you don't trust them. They're not confident. You don't feel like, Hey, I can do my job well. Yeah, that's right. So having the team and community behind you who knows what the main mission is, the main goal is, and everyone knows what their specific job is.

You can relax. You feel supported. You feel backed up. It helps you better your life and your position and, and attain your goals better. Yeah. Every one of these teams, it's mission over self. And so you have to be all committed to that again. It's mission over self. I'm just slowing that down a little.

Mission over self. Every, everybody has to be more focused on completing the mission than they are on themselves. Right? And so, the way you handle that is you assign people to make sure people's needs are met. So, water, food sleep, you, you put that in someone else's hands and they tell you, you will eat now, you will drink now, you will go to sleep now.

The reason for that is because you need to fixate on the mission and then somebody else is going to make sure your needs are getting met. Do you believe that adversity can sometimes be the best teacher for creating a positive outlook in life? That's the [00:19:00] only thing I think. Let me tell you a little neuroscience about the brain.

What's really interesting about your brain, everybody who's listening, is this. Your brain is fundamentally a lazy muscle or organ. It doesn't want to change unless it's forced to. So let's say you're going down the street and you have a great day. Your brain's like, great, and it won't change. It'll sit back in its recliner and just be like, what a great day.

But if you go down the street and then you trip and fall on your face, your brain's like, I gotta, I gotta figure out what happened and now it has to change. And so what's interesting is you cannot learn in the absence of error. You cannot learn in the absence of extreme stimulus, good and bad. You need change in your life in order to evolve.

And it's not, and, and by looking at that change as trauma, you misunderstand its potential for growth. All change, all, all adversity is a mechanism for growth. It's just whether or not you decide to take advantage of it. Which falls into line with this podcast perspective. So if [00:20:00] we, it's like John Maxwell, I wrote a book called falling forward or failing forward, right?

And so it's that mindset of like, Hey, I'm going to make mistakes. I'm going to screw up. And you know, what I learned from it. Yeah, 100%. Can I jump in and give you an example? Yeah, yeah, yeah, please. So when I work with teams, I asked the teams this question, how many of you think that you'll make a mistake at some point today and everyone will raise their hand and laugh, right?

They'll spill their coffee, they'll trip, they'll do something, they'll say a stupid thing, whatever. Okay. How many of you, I then ask, are going to be annoyed, bothered, irritated, or vexed that you made said mistake and they'll all raise their hand. And I'm like, let's talk about that for a second. You all told me a thing's gonna happen.

And then you told me that you're gonna be surprised and annoyed by it. Like, what's up with that? And it turns out, there's this concept called Irrational Optimism. It's what allows you to get out of bed in the morning. Without it, nobody gets out of bed. It, like, people that are clinically depressed lose their Irrational Optimism.

So, when you ask them, someone's clinically depressed, Hey, what's the likelihood of you getting depressed? [00:21:00] You know, killed in a car crash today. They'll give you the honest statistics. Whereas if you tell you and I, we're like, nah, it won't happen today. I'm a great driver. And today's my day. And so every day I wake up and I'm like, today's my day.

And for 50 some years some point I'm like, Oh man, I didn't pull that off. So then when I say to teams, I said, if that's true, And you have a team of eight people. That means you're having eight mistakes a day. Your choice is whether or not to talk about it or be lied to about it. That's your only choice.

Okay. So just know we're going to make mistakes and handle it in a way that we can build off of it. It is guaranteed. And this is why I tell people, you know, this is why we have erasers on pencils. We have like spell check on, on computers. We have bumpers on cars because the world knows. Humans make mistakes.

Like that's just kind of, it's not, if it's not, it's when like, and it's going to be usually multiple times a day for the average person or whatever it is. We make millions of choices. Okay, great. What's one small step someone can take today to start [00:22:00] shifting their perspective so they can move into more of a positive kind of maybe expectation of their day.

So let's say the press, let's say they're having a tough time. I'll give you a few. First of all, you got to move. You got to get out and move and even if it's just walking but you've got to actually get the blood moving and start changing your chemistry. Part of that is you need to drink water.

Hydration is a key, key thing. So just as you're walking, take a sip of water and breathe, breathe deeply in through your nose, out through your mouth. If you do those three things, walk around the back, do it a couple of times a week, and all of a sudden you'll feel like, Oh, I can move a one more foot forward.

And that's all. It's not a big deal. It's just walking, drinking water and breathing. And if you want to go to level two, bring someone with you and just talk about what you're grateful for. Take a gratitude walk. And what's interesting about the research on gratitude is it'll change your neurophysiology.

It'll change your chemistry within a week or two. What's insight from neuroscience or your studies that might surprise our listeners about the [00:23:00] benefits of a positive mindset, you know, because of the work I do. And I might have mentioned this before, but for the last 30 years some of my friends have been involved in horrendous things all the time.

Because there's always conflict happening somewhere. There's always surgery happening somewhere. There's always a fire happening somewhere. And so Well, well, regular people will be fine and they'll read the news. There's some tragedy like the fires, like the fires in Los Angeles or an earthquake or a hurricane for me, that's always happening 24 hours a day.

There's never, it's never not happening. And so the question is, is that, well, given that, how do you not be just constantly worn down by it? And the answer is, is by utter acceptance that has been always the way of the world to have an expectation that everything's supposed to be normal. Is a false expectation.

The world is a tumultuous place, right? So the different question is in the face of the storm and the tumultuousness, how do you find peace? And I find peace by [00:24:00] looking for good in the world because there's a lot of good in the world, so just seeking it out. And then, you know, as our sister would say, doing acts of kindness, 

I think being in service to others will often help us more than anything else we can do for ourselves. That's what I think. All right. We could keep talking and I have lots of other questions, but I don't want to keep you forever. I thank you for being here today. And let's see, some people may have questions.

Would you like them to kind of have questions come through me? Do you have a website or anything that they could ask you? You can go to mission cti. com. It's probably better stored. If they go through you, I'm on the road a lot and I have to pay attention to a lot of clients. And so if I don't know who they are, they often just get lost in the mix.

So if they go through you absolutely. Oh, you and I can figure it out. Yeah. I know how to find you. And my email is sobriety. Now what's one one, one, the number one, one, one at gmail. com. You can also look on the podcast, www. sobrietynowwhat. com. [00:25:00] And it will kind of list that information as well, as far as how to contact me.

One thing that you didn't mention is that you're a doctorate. You have a PhD, you've gone to Harvard. You went to university of Pennsylvania. I really appreciate you coming here. Preston, thank you so much. Those are all my questions. I really appreciate it. No worries, Stu. All right. That was a big help.

That's all I got. I'll let you go back to your thing. Thanks for taking this time out. No worries. I'll talk to you later. All right. Look forward to it. Thanks. Bye. Today, I want you to think about who's on your sobriety success team. Who uplifts you? Who do you support in return? How will you be of service?

What is your mission? And what are your goals? And how will you achieve it? And who will help you?