Getting Combat Ready, Dr. Jason Winkle Style

· By Susan Wade

· Posted on May 24, 2019

Snap-on Dodge driver Cruz Pedregon’s Funny Car career has taken a puzzling path since he won his second series championship in 2008. In the 10 seasons following that high point, Pedregon has earned one third- and one fourth-place finish, finished ninth or 10th four times, and missed the Countdown four times.

He said at the end of last year that he’s “proud of what we’ve done as a team: getting more consistent round-wins and three-second runs.” But he wants improved results in the end. So he has been absorbing some ideas from Dr. Jason Winkle, the human performance consultant is author of the book “The High Performance Athlete: Lessons From S.W.A.T., Special Operations, and Elite Athletes On Achieving Excellence in High-Pressure Situations.”

Winkle is a former faculty member at the United States Military Academy at West Point and former Associate Dean in the College of Nursing, Health, & Human Services at Indiana State University. He’s the founder and CEO of WinkleCorp, which focuses on enhancing individual and organizational excellence, and President of WinkleAthlete, a player- and team-development organization for athletes and coaches. At Indiana State, and he met and coached Cruz Pedregon Racing General Manager Caleb Cox, who introduced the educator and Funny Car champion.

“He’s an amazing guy,” Pedregon said of Winkle. “I met a lot of people in my lifetime, and he definitely is probably the most intense, focused human being I’ve ever seen and met. I like talking to him, picking his brain, what he does.” That includes how to deal with high-pressure moments.

The beauty of Winkle is that, like Pedregon, he’s always learning, always analyzing. For example, Pedregon told National Dragster writer Kevin McKenna in an April 13 article, “I didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to be a crew chief. I did this out of necessity, but I’ve paid attention for a long time. . . . Since Day One, I’ve wanted to know how these cars work . . . and how to make them better. Even now, I put in my time during the week. I feel like I know what I’m doing, and I believe that I am the right man for the job.”

Pedregon never has seemed to be short on self-assurance. But Winkle humbled himself to recall vividly a moment when his own confidence was on shaky ground. That career-altering moment is what led him to the truths that he passes along to his clients today.

Winkle said he is one of only two civilians to achieve West Point teaching credentials.

“I’ve always been a civilian, so I’ve been an outsider in about everything I’ve ever done. So I think of myself as an academic. I’m a collector. I try to collect wisdom from everyone I kind of come in contact with and learn from it, kind of put it in a pot, stir it around and see what I can get out of it to share with others,” he said. “I’ve worked with law enforcement, teaching tactics and other skills. But I’ve never been a law-enforcement officer. I’ve always been an outsider collecting wisdom from people who are really, really talented and good in their realm. Same thing in sports. I’ve never been an elite athlete, yet I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by elite athletes.”

A number of years ago, Winkle was chosen to train groups of soldiers, including the Army’s Hawaii-based 25th Infantry Division, before their deployment to Afghanistan and Iraq.

“One of the things that they would train their soldiers on is close-quarter combat. We spent hours training these soldiers. It was all these hand-to-hand combat moves, and at the end of the day I had this young man come up to me – he was probably an 18- or 19-year-old young man – and he said something that literally changed my life. He said, ‘Sir, are we combat ready?’ And I saw this fear in his eyes. The thing that hit me, and I don’t remember what probably knucklehead answer I fumbled through. It sure wasn’t legit, whatever I said, but I realized at that moment the disservice that I had been doing, because I was teaching a skillset with no context,” Winkle said. “And by that, I mean I can teach you how to break a skill down. I can teach you the biomechanics of conflict and combat. It bothers me to this day, so I became kind of almost obsessed with this, because I had failed.

“What I failed was understanding how you do these things in an environment where you are under high stress or high fear. And it took that young man saying that to me for me to even go, ‘Oh yeah, I didn’t even think about ‘Could they do this when they’re terrified?’ And then I started backing up going, ‘OK, if the situation’s going to be one that is absolutely worthy of high fear and is guaranteed high stress, what can we do to help them prior to getting into that situation to mitigate or manage that fear and that stress?’ And that’s kind of where the whole thing started,” he said.

“Without that context, without that true understanding of the role of psychology, the mental in this, you really can’t understand what’s going to happen, predict what’s going to happen. So that was really life changing for me. That was a big, big switch and then that kind of drove me to do all the research I’ve done and talk to more people and get more focused questions to these athletes and military and law enforcement folks that are doing it all the time and doing it with success.”

The key question, he said, is “What are you doing to allow you to be successful?”

Among Winkle’s core beliefs, he said, are three absolutes: (1) Developing a ritual, (2) Visualizing the anticipated situation to remove the fear factor from your performance equation, and (3) Remembering that internal dialog affects external performance – always.

His daily ritual is rooted in his Christian faith.

“I’m very much a Christian. I have a very strong, deep faith, and it impacts how I train people,” Winkle said. “We’re the ones ultimately responsible for our actions, right? No one else is. We are. When you’re in the public eye and the microscope is on you, and you’re living a competitive lifestyle where you’ve got pressure on you all the time, a little misstep can really hurt you. And so I always say, you have to find a ritual. I’m big into ritual. Most elite athletes that I know, and I’ve learned this from them, this isn’t something that comes natural to me. I’ve kind of learned it and tried to put it in my life, but I’m a big believer in ritual. And I’m a big believer in ritual at the very beginning of the day, because you set the tone for how you problem solve, how you work with people, how you think. It all starts that first hour you’re awake.

“So I always encourage athletes and military and all these people that are in the public eye doing stressful things, I say get up and get a ritual. For me, I get up and I walk and the whole time I walk, I pray. So it’s a walk of thanksgiving. I get up and thank God for blessing me with a healthy family and so on. Five minutes in, 10 minutes in, 20 minutes in, I’m done with my walk and I’m a really centered, happy person,” he said. “When you come to me with problems, I’m not angry. I handle my problems better, I handle stress better, I’m able to think more clearly. So I push these folks that I work with to find a ritual. Maybe you’re not into prayer. Maybe it’s simply reading the paper and having a cup of coffee quietly. Maybe it’s meditate – whatever it is. Ritual is really important to set the tone for how you problem solve and respond to people, and I think it starts that first hour of the day.”

He said he has concluded that “gratitude is a habit, and I think the more we do it, the better we get at it and the more we realize what we have to be grateful for. I think it’s one of those things that I always share with people: Thank-you is the greatest return on investment you can have, because it costs you nothing, yet two people always feel better after you do it, the person doing the thanks and the person receiving it. So really, it’s something that if you make habitual, it changes your outlook. It doesn’t mean I’m sacrificing my competitiveness. What it means is I’m more grounded and psychologically fit to handle those stressors and to get at it and feel energized and ready to go back into battle.”

Visualization is a powerful tool, Winkle said.

One of his close friends is a gentleman named Scott Warren, a former special operations military serviceman.

“He was at the highest level of the military, as far as special operations goes. And we were talking about this idea that for these guys that do that kind of work, one of the things that they’re taught is how to do a room clearing. And that is when there’s a bad guy in the room and the good guys and their team come into that building or that room, how do they enter that door that they call the fatal funnel? How do they come in and dominate that room with speed, surprise, violence, and action? That’s kind of the way they teach. And Scott was telling me that when he first got into doing this, ‘It was chaos.’ He goes, ’You’re worried about letting your buddy down, you’re worried about not covering, you’re worried about going to the wrong room, you’re worried about this, worried about that.’ And he said, ‘I started over the years [realizing] that’s a phase that everyone has to go through.’ He called it ramping up. It’s where you’re kind of ramping up your knowledge, ramping up those repetitions like you said. Ramping up the experience, and he said until at some point you realize that all you’ve got to do is go into that room, go the opposite direction of the guy in front of you, and shoot the bad guy. That’s really all that you have to do. He called that ramping down, which, in essence, means that you’ve kind of internalized that experience. So you’re not worried about the minutiae, because that’s second nature to you. It’s seeing the big picture and knocking it down into components parts.”

Pole vaulter Kylie Hutson showed him another example. She was one of the premier pole vaulters in the country for a while. “I asked her, ‘What goes through your head before you do that?’ It’s similar to things I talk to Cruz about and all these other elite athletes,” Winkle said. “And the funny thing is they already kind of do this – they have this routine that they go through that mentally prepares them for what they’re about ready to do. It separates the fear. It sifts out the fear, and they have this incredible focus on doing what they need to do to be successful. There’s no way I’d do pole vaulting, but you know, here she is at probably 120 pounds, just solid muscle, and she can throw herself 15 feet in the air.”

Another principle Winkle lives by is that “internal dialog affects external performance – always.”

He said that means “what you’re saying in your head is absolutely impacting what’s going on in the external world – always.”

He used an example from Pedregon’s long-running rivalry with Funny Car legend John Force. One option is for Pedregon to beat himself up because he just lost a race to Force, asking himself, “Why do I consistently get beat in these championship rounds?” or “Why is he beating me?”

In that case, Winkle said, “His brain, like all of our brains [would], is going to give him some reasoning. He’ll say, ‘Well, maybe his resources are better . . . maybe he this . . . maybe he that.’ But that doesn’t help Cruz. What helps Cruz is if he finishes a race, if he didn’t win, he doesn’t go, ‘Why did he beat me?’ or ‘Why did this person beat me?’”

The better response, Winkle said, is to concentrate on future pairings.

“If he goes, ‘What do I need to do to win the next one?’ that gives him a lot of different answers. Cruz, I think, is a master at that. He’s a master of going not, ‘Why did that guy beat me?’ but ‘What do I need to do to win the next one?’ And so his pool of solutions is greatly expanded in a positive way, because he gets that internal dialog affects external performance,” Winkle said. “So he conditions his mind to think positively, to be affirmational in that sense, to open up possibilities of problem-solving.”

As when Winkle himself goes through his own morning ritual, internal dialog affects external performance, he said: “My internal dialog is always looking for or being aware of things that I’m blessed with and grateful for.”

Winkle said he has learned that “we should be more childlike” in our approaches to problems – not childish, but child-like: “You think about a pole vaulter or a downhill skier and these athletes [and wonder], ‘How did they get to the point where the fear doesn’t cripple them?’ There’s this notion or this concept of stress inoculation. We do it in the martial arts. We do it in tactical training. We do it with athletes. And that is systematically and gradually start putting that athlete or soldier or law-enforcement officer in a more and more stressful situation so that you’re building up their tolerances for stress. [It’s] an ongoing progressive stress test.”

He recalled a “study done about West Point cadets and who made it though. Of the defining characteristic of a kid who made it through West Point and became successful, it came down to grit. Are you willing just to hang in there and gut it out? And when you think about athletics, a lot of times it’s the same thing. How do you deal with disappointment? How do you deal with obstacles? How do you deal with all these setbacks? A lot of times it’s just a matter of grit. You’ve just got to hang in there. You’ve got to get up the next day and you’ve got to go back out there and you’ve got to do it again, and do it again, and do it again, and do it again, and then you build that experience. And you’re getting inoculated to the stressors of that sport, of that challenge, of the ups and downs of life, and you come out the other end a different, stronger person. I always found that study just fascinating, that the difference was grit.”

For Winkle, martial arts is a problem-solver.

“Practicing a lifetime’s worth of martial arts is really the mental, the psychological, the confidence. I look at martial arts as just a really cool way of problem-solving,” he said. “It teaches people you do have options. Martial arts makes you more aware of situations that could go south. So if you’re smart, you’re going to avoid those. It helps you understand both the fragileness of life, and I think it teaches a respect for life and peace so that you recognize how easy it would be to get hurt or to hurt someone. I think there’s some real morality issues that I think can be kind of honed and developed in a young person growing up with understanding, having a respect for life and a respect for other people. So how do you monitor and manage the fear, the stress-induced heart rate that comes from anything you do scaring you? Well what’s martial arts do? It tries to progressively put you in more and more scary situations as far as testing, as far as moving from static to dynamic things.”

For Pedregon, the challenges always are dynamic. They change constantly, and they continue without ceasing.

With a nod to his race car, Pedregon said, “Look at this car. That’s about as close as you can get to tipping over without tipping over. So, so yeah, I’m a fan of what he [Winkle] does. He trains a lot of Special Forces guys. He is hard-wired and ready to go. You can tell he’s always in position, even when he’s standing talking to you. He’s, like, ready for any action.

“And I’m grateful that he loves our sport. He really is knowledgeable. He follows our racing, which is great. He drops by our shop. He spoke to our guys one time, and I really felt like our guys were ready to run through a wall after we talked to him,” he said.

“So many things with a race team parallel other walks of life in sports, because you’re dealing with people and you’re dealing with focus and being thorough and being ready,” Pedregon said. “So we’re looking forward to his visit. Anytime he comes over, it’s usually a 45-minute conversation, just general conversation. We don’t get into specifics necessarily. I just pick his brain about his knowledge and his ability to do what he does and take a guy out or down if you have to.”

Pedregon is an avid watcher of police, crime, detective, and forensic TV programs. (“I used to watch this show called the New Detectives way back before all these other shows. Now they’re just springing up everywhere. So yeah, Winkle, he encompasses all those things that I find really cool.”)

Pedregon said, “I’ve always said if I could be something, if I could start out in a different career path, I would like to be in the police force in some way. Who wouldn’t want to do undercover stuff, right? What I really find fascinating

prisons, high-max prisons. And I think maybe because my family, going back a few generations, were police officers. One of my favorite cousins was on the Gardena [Calif.] Police force for almost 40 years. So maybe it’s a little bit of that genetics that I gravitate to that. I don’t know what it is. I don’t tell a lot of people about that.”

Actually, the Funny Car driver isn’t obsessed with needing to know how to “take a guy out or down if you have to.” He’s more directed at lifting himself up and into the championship fight, trying to score a third Funny Car title. If he sticks to Winkle’s instruction and advice, Pedregon has a great shot at earning it.