Our presentation today was by Scott Sonnon, Operational Readiness Scientist for Federal Forces, martial arts expert, and creator of the TACFIT training system.
Scott’s life has been largely shaped by the experiences of his youth, which was plagued with both physical and mental hardships. Relentlessly bullied for his physical appearance, speech impediments, and mental challenges, the personal cost and mental fatigue wore him down. Eventually, he was institutionalized in a mental facility during a time when childhood mental conditions were not well understood. In addition to his personal struggles, Scott’s father returned from the Korean War a changed man. The toll of war and lack of support or direction eventually caused his family to collapse.
Instead of giving up and allowing darker thoughts to take hold, Scott used these experiences to reorient his life and dedicate himself to fixing the problems that afflicted him and his family. He began training both physically and mentally through martial arts, eventually becoming a world-renown instructor in Sambo and International Martial Arts.
His career reached an inflection point when the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001. Scott was in the air when the planes hit and felt a sense of relief upon landing safely, but also guilt about that relief. Scott recognized that military personnel, especially highly trained personnel, will put extreme stress on themselves to complete their objectives, even at perilous personal cost. The guilt he felt for feeling a very natural sense of relief gave him personal insight into this cost.
Scott’s new focus was to create a program to help military personnel, like his father, re-integrate successfully into society. Using his own experiences with mental difficulties and fatigue, Scott designed a system to evaluate and build up a person’s mental reserves. He identified the extreme cost of mental burnout and that a balance between mind and body was essential for long-term success. Utilizing his own experiences as well as delving into the science of how our body and mind works, Scott is implementing an extremely effective system to prevent the very real costs to some of our most valuable assets.
His personal mission is to ensure that we are looking at the total picture of a person, helping them find a higher purpose, understand the personal costs they will inflict on themselves, and don’t let them make those sacrifices if they can be avoided.
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