Embrace the Shake

The river doesn’t argue with the rocks. It flows around them—adjusting, adapting, and moving forward. That’s what we do too.

Embrace the Shake is a Tactical Camper principle rooted in a lesson I learned years ago during CIOR training. Our pistol coach—a seasoned shooting instructor with the Quebec Provincial Police—watched as I struggled to steady my sights under pressure. He told me plainly:“You need to embrace the shake”, in a thick Quebecois accent.

His point was simple but profound: no shooter is perfectly still. The pistol will move. Your body will shake. Fighting it only makes it worse. But if you accept the movement—work with it—you find the rhythm, timing, and control. That concept stuck with me far beyond the range.

Now, it’s become something more.

Embrace the Shake is about accepting the reality of instability—mental, physical, emotional—as part of the process. In Tactical Camper, we don’t treat fear, trauma, or struggle as weaknesses to be suppressed. We treat them as terrain features—rocks in the river. Unavoidable, but not impassable.

You stop wasting energy denying what’s already true. Instead, you redirect that energy toward adaptation and movement. You learn to navigate—not eliminate—the difficult.

Whether it's the subtle tremble of your trigger finger, a surge of panic in a crowd, or a sudden wave of grief that catches you off guard—the shake is always there. The mission is to train your mind and body to Embrace the Shake.

We don’t argue with the rocks. We learn to navigate life's obstacles. We Embrace the Shake.

Footer:

This reflection draws on my experiences growing up on the lakes and rivers of Muskoka, leading countless self-directed wilderness excursions, and later retiring as a Sergeant in the Canadian Armed Forces and in law enforcement as a Tactical Officer. The Tactical Camper philosophy is built from a lifetime of outdoor exploration, operational deployments, specialized tactical training, after 22 years of uniformed service — adapted to guide resilience, preparedness, and leadership in everyday life.