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Part of gratitude is accepting what you've got, and another part is that concept of micro goals and being able to put markers of what you've achieved and to be thankful and to acknowledge pat yourself on the back. When you look at things like traumatic experiences and stress alls, it's relative to the individual. You can't compare your trauma to someone else's. It just doesn't work that way. It's what you're resilient against.
Welcome to the Sees the Yay Podcast. Busy and happy are not the same thing. We too rarely question what makes the heart seeing. We work, then we rest, but rarely we play and often don't realize there's more than one way. So this is a platform to hear and explore the stories of those.
Who found lives. They adore the good, bad and ugly.
The best and worst days will bear all the facets of seizing your yay. I'm Sarah Davidson or a spoonful of Sarah, a lawyer turned entrepreneur who's what the suits heels to co found matcha Maiden and matcha milkbar. Cz The ya is a series of conversations on finding a life you love and exploring the self doubt, challenge, joy
and fulfillment along the way. Most of you are already aware of my fascination with the military, the origins of which I'm still not really sure about, but which I've pretty much stopped questioning now because we also all know that weird things will make you ya, so just roll with them, because you're already far better off than those who haven't found their ya yet, so you won't be surprised how much I enjoyed this week's two episodes, but
I promise the military connection was just a timing coincidence.
If you haven't.
Listened yet, our Yas of Our Lives guest for this week was Tom Howell, Director of Field Operations for Disaster Relief Australia, a partner of our partner Mitsubishi, so basically
part of the neighborhood. Tom started out as an Army combat paramedic doing some fascinating work in Afghanistan, then later worked in the jungles of Papua New Guinea learning all about jungle medicine, before becoming a full time firefighter, which he does alongside his work with dra Today we're joined by two fellow veterans and legendary brothers, Dan and Ben Pronk, who, along with their close friend Tim Curtis, just published and already sold out mind you, their first brilliant book, The
Resilience Shield.
All three were.
Elite soldiers in the SAS, which is already impressive enough. But later I went on to complete their MBAs, launching successful post military careers, and the brothers now fondly refer to themselves as two thirds of an author. Setting today's warm, self deprecating tone, I already gush about Resilience Shield enough
in this episode. I mean, I really do. But whether you're interested in the military or not, it is a transformative handbook for our crazy times that we find ourselves in, aiming to help us build a shield of resilience against
the undeniable, uncertainty, and sometimes unfairness of the world. Hi Adrenaline military anecdotes are weaved seamlessly in among dense philosophy, science and research from around the world around timely themes like fulfillment, loss and then rebuilding of identity, trauma, modern information overload, and goal setting no size twelve fonts. Storytelling here Resilient Shield is packed full of a methodology built over three stellar careers to date, but with endearing or
latable language like one of my favorite chapters. But what about my dickhead boss? I'm pretty much just rehashing what we talk about now, so I'll let the boys tell you more themselves. But I truly truly enjoyed this one so much, and I hope you guys do too. Pronk boys, Welcome to the show.
Thank you, sir, Get you, Sarah. It's great to be here.
I am so excited.
I was listening to you guys on with your third co author on the Unforgiving sixty podcast the other day, referring to yourselves, there's all collectively one third of an author, like you together make an order, So I have two thirds of an author here today.
I'm very excited.
You've almost got a complete real.
Author, almost one complete real author. Congratulations on your incredible new book, The Resilient Shield, which I have just found out has sold out nationally, so I can't even believe how lucky I was to.
Get a copy of this.
Thank you.
How are you feeling stoked?
Yeah?
Absolutely, the response has been a bit overwhelming. We didn't know what to expect when we threw it out there. Of course, we hoped for the best, and it's sort of met all those expectations and more.
Well, Oh my gosh, you guys have done an incredible job. I was just absolutely gushing before we started recording about I mean, everyone who listens to the show knows that I'm incredibly joy focused in positivity, But for some reason, war and the military is like a random obsession of mine.
So I soaked up.
All the anecdotes and all the stories, but also found it so impressive how you've distilled military concepts and stories and made them translatable to people's everyday lives at a time where I think resilience is something we need more than we ever had. People are facing loss of purpose like you guys facing the end of your military careers and finding your why again. People are facing that more
now than they ever had. And something you said about the resilience requirements of elite soldiers, solicitors, and students differ by degree and not kind. So while we would I definitely put you on a pedestal for all the incredible things that you've done, and also all of you are ex special force of soldiers who all have MBAs too, Like what is even I don't even know how to compute that, But you've done an incredible job of making
it really practical and very very timely. So it's an honor to have you on.
Thank you, And it is funny. I mean again, we were talking just before we came on. It is awesome to hear those reflections, and we thank you for them. But it is funny that that whole idea of people being vastly different because of what they do. Dan's first book was called The Average seventy kilo Dickhead, and I think I'm a little bit more than seventy kilos now, but I think all of us do view ourselves as average people who have had this amazing opportunity to do
something cool. But it doesn't mean that we you know, resilience needs are going to be a different kind, as you mentioned before. So we were fascinated about learning for ourselves how this whole thing about resilience worked, how we could get better at it, and we're stoked that it has proved to be relatively universal. We're getting great feedback from a lot of different recorders on the techniques we talk about, and.
I think that's why the cutthrough is so potent is because you are also very down to earth, Like, there's a whole chapter about but what about my dickhead boss? And I'm like, wow, there's also some incredible science and very articulate intellectual material, But then this chapters like that
that just gets everyone on your level. You know, everyone has had a dickhead boss in their time and knows they need resilience against that, which is why I start every episode with a little icebreaker by asking everyone what the most down to worth thing is about them to kind of break through that glossy surface you often, you know, our identities has perceived through the media or through social media.
And you guys are authors. Now, as I.
Mentioned, you have incredible military careers behind you, at host of amazing achievements.
You all have MBAs. I mean, it's just outrageous.
What are some really normal things about you other than your vintage Lamborghini, Dan, because that is not the kind of material we're.
Looking for in this section. What are some really relatable things about you guys?
Well, I think for both of us, we're both dads, So I've got three young kids, three young boys. So at the end of the day. My day to day life is that of raising young family, just me and my wife trying to do the best we can to raise the kids. And we have the exact same sort of stress alls in that realm as anyone else, which is a great opportunity to flex some of the resilient shield type stuff.
But it's all it's all.
Get up, get the kids ready for school, getting them off to school, and do our thing. And you know, there's we've got our day jobs as well, and these these sort of things are just side projects. And like you say, it looks exciting, and social media is a is a great forum to put forward this idealistic but at the end of the day, where we've got normal day to day lives and then we've had this great opportunity to engage in this space and put this book out into the market. I think for me, Sarah, I'm
actually a shamble. It's like, it's funny when people have this perception of this. You know, I don't know whatever you see in the movies the Elite Soldier.
And the one that I always love.
Apparently I'm quite noisy if I come home when my wife's asleep. I've been out or whatever, you know, I get sort of bang into every surface in the house. And so this idea of this sort of stealthy soul just sneaking in and being totally squared.
Away, and my real is very much in a bit of a clots.
So I do laugh when I think about what people might perceive and essays to be like in terms of that, I'm kind of the opposite.
Well. I love that one of your very first academic references in the book, where you like put a little reference note and then there's a note at the bottom of the page, was about how people do have this big perception. I think it was a guy called Wade maybe as being these like staunch, like tall built dudes who are always in uniform with like vests and shit all over them, and you guys are like, we're slightly shorter and a little bit rounder than you.
Might expect, which I do not believe.
I was disappointed that you didn't wear your uniforms today though, even though you're retired.
I was like, come on, guys, I mean, you know we're videoing here.
Actually I'm surprised Dan's not in his back shed, which is that you know, it's got a better collection.
Than the War Memorial in terms of soon so stuff from war zones that could have ticked that box.
Well.
I also have to say, for people who have been listening to the podcast for a while, they'll remember Mark Wales and you know how much I just adore him as a person and his story. But I have told a story quite a few times about the military precision that comes back even after you've transitioned back into your civvy life. How we were at Sam and Mark's wedding and you two were probably part of this story. I've
just connected and it started raining. The wedding was outside and we needed to move all the furniture inside really quickly. And all of us were.
Like, oh it's raining quick and like faffing.
About like headless chalks, like how do we get all the stuff inside? And the military guys just all you could see. You all just go into like this precision focus, not no words. You all just made eye contact and like forty seconds later everything was inside. I was like, what, we're at a military wedding.
That was pretty cool. It was very much a whole m. Guys, were you in that story? Oh my god, that was a very cool evening.
Yeah, I did like that part and I loved I mean, Markent, what amazing people and what an amazing group of people at that wedding.
But it made it better. You know, you think there'd be.
Some circumstances, whether the rain for the outdoor reception would be just the deal breaker, but it just I think the kind of I guess the things you epitomize in C's THEA. I mean, people just enjoyed that we had a cooler knough because of that, we were able to really see the benefits and how I really enjoyed that.
Yeah, guys, we embraced the suck. Really is what we did.
I am now adopting resilient shield language in all of my life. I'm just announcing for you awesome. So that leads to the first section, which is your way to A and how you got to where you guys are, And I mean people can read about your stories in the book and I loved reading those anecdotes all the
way back from childhood. But just to set the scene before we jump into the book itself and the concept of the resilient shield, because again, like I said, I think it's so timely for what we're going through right now, I think it's really important to go through all the chapters that you went through before that formed to who you are and the views that you translate into the book, right back from childhood and how you even decided you wanted to enter the military, and then how you transitioned
out of it and found who you wanted to be after that. So, as you say in the book, you can't grab the fruit without the climb.
There is no linear pathway in life whatsoever.
So take us through all those little chapters along the way so we can get some context before we jump into the book.
I was on the planet first, so I'll go first. Dan and I were army brats, So our dad was in hindsight well at the time as well an amazing human. He was a really kick ustad. He was an army helicopter pilot and very much instilled in both of us this view that you could achieve anything, and not in.
A platitudinal sense.
It was more like through his example that the dishwasher broke. You know, yes, you could call a person to do that, but if a person can work out how to fix a dishwasher, then so could we. And so that kind of attitude led to a ton of stuffed household appliances that you could do things, you know, you could try things and achieve things and work things out.
And so that was when we look back, when.
We both looked back, that was so fundamental to I get anything that we've achieved in our own lives. My story is much more boring than Dan in terms of I was always kind to join the Army. I did school cadads. I'd seen how much Dad loved it. He never pressured us either way. But for me, I was the kid in cams at age thirteen, and I was a fat kid as well, which I sort of look
back on. I think that was a great thing. I've still got some kind of weird Freudian psychological issue, and I think that'll keep me skinned for the.
Rest of my life.
So yeah, that was me, fat killing cans. And I graduated from high school, took a year off because I was a bit young, but then went to the Defense Course Academy, four years there and done troon, graduated to Infantry Corps, and again, with hindsight, you know, we'd been thirty years without a major. The military have been thirty years without a major. Deployment, so there was kind of
no expectation that we were going anywhere. Our dad had been in for about that whole period post Vietnam and had never deployed, and so.
It was very much this kind of peacetime army, and.
None of our instructors had medals or any of that sort of stuff, so we graduated with no real expectation. Interestingly, it rained on my graduation parade at R and C and the urban myth, the old R and C myth, if it rains on your parade, you're going to war.
And we sort of all super excited raining and the parade, this must mean something.
I was not excited standing in the fucking rain yet another one of your parades at the time. But sorry, continued, Yeah, I didn't share your enthusiasm. And we'll get to that because because Dan was standing there in badly mustard three quarteral pants and shoulder and here he was like something out of an April lavine.
Got a length pants?
Wow?
What a.
Yeah?
Let's yeah, Okay, put it in context.
I'm still in the charts.
If he wasn't in the charts, he's definitely still.
Exactly back to me.
So it rained on our parade, and yeah, within two years I was in these team or the first push out of second to ten and so that really, in hindsight, kicks off this whole thing. So I came back from that, did essays selection and then essentially spent the rest of my career in special operations and just an amazing sort of journey. Clearly met Mark along the way, people like that of that caliber. It's just such an incredible place
to work. But yeah, I was lucky enough to command it sort of everything from five person patrol up to the entire unit.
I deployed a number of times to Afghanistan.
I've deployed on exchange with the Americans to Iraq, a couple of trips to Team Or. I had a year in the UK on exchange study. Just this incredible series of experiences, some good, some bad, but certainly very fulfilling. At the end of my time as unit commander, I was looking at transition options and so took a year off to do an NBA, decided I wanted to get out of the Army.
At that point met.
Back up with an old boss of mine, Tim Curtis, who'd been out for ten years, and we had this serendipitous sort of crossing of pat So I think I decided I was getting out of the Army. I thought I was going to go to another big institution, in another big company, and Tim said, why don't we start this thing together, which became Metal our company, and geoon glad.
Don't tell him.
That, I said, but I'm glad that we met. I'm glad he was that safety net to allow me to try something like that. And I'm so glad we've done what we've done because it's given us these incredible opportunities
that I wouldn't have got. And look, I talked a little bit about it in the book, but for me, there was this transition, and when I really looked at it, there was a status based transition that I had to let go of being special or being a lieutenant colonel, or being in the ESAs these kind of things that I don't think consciously I.
Was aware of.
But that's been a big part of the journey and
understanding with resilience. So, yeah, we've done this sort of consultancy for the last four and a big years, and along the way sort of did a lot of work in that leadership and resilience space and the pandemic really gave us not only a chance in terms of a few quiet months work wise, but also the catalyst, as you said, with the whole world suddenly in their heads around how to deal with stressors and the unpredictable and the extraordinary, which really led us to codify our thoughts
and our model into the I.
Think it's just extraordinary.
Like I feel like books and opportunities really come to you just when you need them, or just when the universe needs them, just like you'll open the page of a book and a quote will come out that's exactly what you need to hear. And I wouldn't have thought that someone's transition from you know, and a position in Special Forces to back to a consultancy or even studying, or even just into family life and coming back to Wa from Afghanistan like you have such a different pace
of life. But the message of losing your purpose and your title and your identity in one world and having to find it again.
In a new world, in a new normal.
Is exactly what everyone needs to hear right now. And your whole first chapter about uncertainty, unfairness in the world and not knowing why some things happen and trying to make sense of that but still living a fulfilling life. That's what everyone needs right now in the most you know,
acute way. So it's incredible how you might never have known you'd become authors, but the minute that you did was exactly the minute when everything cold went over the last however many decades is what the world needs to hear. Which I just think is that's yay for me. That is so exciting, which is why I've just been like so thrilled to have you guys on. So, yeah, what a story. And I know that, I mean, obviously that's
a very very short form version. And I am going to tell Tim later that you did refer to him as your wife, which I.
Think is really lovely. But joined the.
Three of you together collectively making up one legitimate author. I love how much you guys are like brothers and wives and partners and like, it's just.
This beautiful little threesome going on.
So Tim, someone just started listening at that point.
What I walked into.
Maybe they see joy in an interesting kind of trio way.
Oh, so Ben was.
The fat kid, Dan, you were the professional triathlete, I mean the opposite.
Yeah, let's let's back up there, Sarah. That's I mean.
I love that it's professional.
I think the word failed it will become before that was certainly my ambition. And don't get me wrong, I was. I was a chubby little kid as well. God bless her he fed us up. Well, there was always common jam doughnuts waiting for us when we got home from school. And but yeah, I turned down a little earlier than Ben. I couldn't even tell you why, but I.
Think it was I realized that.
That you were going to be wearing three quarter pants, so you have a.
Good, very flattering for my chubby form.
So yeah, with the baggish, baggy shirts, and yeah, I was that guy with that annoying little hat on Backwoods listening to gangster rap as a little fat, thirteen year old white kid.
But for whatever reason, I got.
Sorry, did you did you mention the rollerblades going to focus?
I think it's important.
Yeah, there was a roller.
Waiting stage, but once again, like the three quarter length pan, this was the nineteen nineties, so it's not like a twenty twenty one rollerblater. I'd like to keep anyway, moving on. So yeah, when I sort of hit my mid teens, I became interested in middle distance running and so started running relatively competitively. Had a bit of success with that, just at a state level, nothing sort of extraordinary, but that led to an interest in triathlon.
Got into the Trithons.
And when I got out of school, was starting to show a small amount of promise as a junior triathlete, and so I did pursue that for about five years pretty seriously. In that period of time, I got out of school and moved down to the Gold Coast and I'd done okay at school, not great, but well enough to get into an exercise science degree.
Pretty much.
My parents and our aunt, good old aunt Mary, I'd said hey, we'll support you with your triathlon, but you have to study. So I went off to UNI. I was in my mind, Adam and I was going to be a professional athlete and the academia was just a necessity to get some support. Went through all of that and sort of thrashed the trithlon thing for five years. It became really clear I wasn't going to be the athlete I wanted to be. I had finished my exercise science and done quite well in that in the end,
because I got it. It made sense to me. It was relevant to the triathlon. I was doing a lot of the biophysics and the biomechanics, and we're in the exercise testing lab doing VOTWO max testing, and so it was the first time I hit my academic straps.
And at the end of that that was a year two thousand.
I took that year off to try and give triathlon a final nudge, and it was abundantly clear I was nowhere near the athlete that I wanted to be. There wasn't a future there, and so that all fell through, and realized I had to grow up and get a real job.
And I'd gone through my youth with no.
Interest in the military at all. And as I said, I'd go along to Ben's graduation parade with shoulder length dreadlocks and an earring and just sort of watch the officer cadets march around, completely bemused.
By this whole spectacle.
And never did I know I'd end up doing that same sort of being on that same parade ground doing orbit a very limited officer training.
So when the trathline thing fell through, it done. My exercise science.
Didn't really want to work in that area. I on a bit of a whim SAT the Graduate Medical School Admission test, the gam SAT to go and do postgrade medicine. That was the first time that the Army started looking like a reasonable option for me because I just didn't have a career path and I was in my early twenties and started to prove into both of them, got myself into med school and then Dad actually told me about the scholarship scheme. So the Army has a scholarship
scheme to put people through postgraduate study. And so I managed to get an Army scholarship, went off and did medicine, and it was at the first year of medicine, so I was full time Army. They picked me up, but I was at a civilian medical school, so fundamentally a UNI student. Still no real interest in the Army at that point. It was just a means of funding my education.
I saw it a spree money be perfectly free. And then it was the end of that first year at med school, which two thousand and one, when I was going to interject because at this stage I'm deep and I'm about queen and country.
I'm like you to do something the nation and this is more than a job pain yet to go to med school and I don't even have to do anything ext study.
When do I sign it?
Yeah, that was a bit of a burr under my st le for a little.
I mean, but if if there's any better example that pathways into the military can happen in completely different ways and you can get you can have different goals but still come out with really rewarding careers.
I mean, you guys are a walking ad.
Really.
Look, it just made a whole bunch of sense.
And the motivations initially weren't probably the right ones, but they certainly became that.
And it was end of one when.
So Ben was over at SASR. By that point I still had no interest in special operations until the December Holidays UNI holidays after my first year med school September eleventh had happened and Australia had pushed its initial special
operations over to Afghanistan. I think, Ben, you're gearing up for the second push in very early too, and I went over to Perth to visit Ben before he deployed, and that was when I met some of the other blokes from the regiment and went to the base and had a bit of a look and just got that inside and it was like this light bulb moment was I got to be involved. This is for me, And so set myself the goal at the end of one
to try and get into the Essays Regiment. I still had to finish medical school and then do an internship and another year as a junior dog, do all my army. So it was a lengthy process, but I had this focus again that I hadn't had in my life since the triathlon. So it was a great way for me to just have this long term goal that motivated me
to train. I had my study and yeah, then sort of fast forward, finished my med school, did my internship residency, went in, did all my basic medical officer induction stuff, and then the first chance I got, which was in two thousand and eight, I went and did the essays selection course and got through that, and then there was a bit of a convoluted pathway, but that pushed me into the Special Operations direction and I managed to get the opportunity to serve with the Second Commando Regiment and
SASR over the next five years. And so had that just that incredibly rewarding experience there and found a real passion for the tactical medicine in terms of just applying the medical skill set in that military environment, and so that while it didn't start off as having any real passion for either medicine or the military, it really came together in this incredible thing that's to date's been the most professionally rewarding period.
Of my life to go and do that.
Then got out in twenty fourteen, did my MBA that year. Actually over a couple of years, I did it corresponden so online and then started to where I did a bit of line fly out staff, worked as a ship stocked, a couple of other different remote jobs. Then had an opportunity to go and help run a small hospital up in Queensland, so to work as the deputy medical superintendent of a hospital for a good friend of mine who
was the med super up there. So did that for three years, working in ed and also helping run the facility. And then my wife's Adelaide girl and so we moved back to Adelaide and I picked up a role running as the medical director for the state Prison Health Service.
So I worked in the medical side of.
Prison health for a few years and have gotten out of that earlier this year, and doing a little bit of d work and a few other bits and pieces at the moment, and then of course the whole Resilient Shield project. My interest in that fell out of that transition out of defense, where for the first year or two I had a really warbly time and it was just a huge adjustment. I'd lost my purpose once again,
I'd lost my identity. And it was at that stage that some of the cumulative experiences of my time, particularly on operations in Afghanistan, started to catch up with me and it just seemed paradoxical that I'd never been safer, I'd never been earning more money, I'd never been at home more, and this stuff was starting to come back to bite me on the ass. And so I started to just do a bit of a deep dive into what this resilience thing was, why we were all able
to stay so resilient in those high stress environments. And then when you take the pressure off a lot of discharging soldiers, that's when they start to have a few problems, as I did. And so yeah, that led to my deep interest in resilience.
Well, I love that. I think now everyone will understand a little bit better. Why I was like, God, why did I even research these guys before they came home? You were so qualified, incredibly articulate, and the intellect shines through so much when you just refer to taking the gamsat which people study for like eight years for I just.
Like I just did medicine. I just accidentally became a doctor.
It convinced.
That test has got exponentially harder than when I did it, because I was trying to help someone study for it a few years back, and I couldn't. I couldn't do half.
So yeah, I think it was. It was easy when I did it.
I'm sure of it.
Oh, I doubt that.
But I think that's something that is so unique about your book as well, is because you both, well all three of you do have this incredible academic basis as well. You bring a lot of science to a lot of the conversations. There's anecdotal evidence, but there's a lot of science. There's a lot of diagrams, there's a lot of backing
for certain concepts and certain patterns in the brain. That adds a legitimacy that sometimes you don't get in books like this that are really trying to army with tools, which I loved so much and thought was a really really different, valuable part. It's hard to write a different book right now, but you guys have done an incredible job. They continue to just flow me away.
Well, it's awesome you say that. I mean sorry that that was a massive, really important thing for us that the last thing we wanted was another book saying you know, I was at war need even grenade pins, and you should be more like me a because that's not the case. Because we've seen so many of our friends who were, by most metrics, incredibly resilient. They were physically indestructible or mentally robust, and yet some of them were still having issues.
So for us, this.
Concept of resilience obviously needed to be more than just that, and so that was part of the exploration. But the other thing for us is that, you know, we didn't see ourselves as that different. We've done this job, which seems different to a lot of people, but we've done a lot of training for it, We've prepared for it. You know, it wasn't I guess that sort of I
guess superhuman type thing. And so it was really important to us that whatever we did was scientifically backed and applicable, sort of beyond just our own I guess limited experiences.
I don't know about you, guys, but I guess it's such a rush of motivation and energy to keep learning and upskilling when I hear from our guests each week. If you're feeling the same, I am so thrilled to share that I'm hosting a free small business boot camp series presented by our partner in Ya PayPal, putting some incredible guests, connections, and targeted tools at your disposal from
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The show notes.
One giant silver lining of the past year or so has been getting access to some of the cleverest minds and their wisdom without having to go anywhere. So don't miss the chance to take advantage while you can hopefully see you there neighborhood. And I think something else that's really evident in the way that you write and present a lot of these concepts, and it is even explicitly mentioned,
is the relationship between resilience and vulnerability. And from three sas guys who have just not been scared in situations that terrify most of us, and we'd freeze, you know, like who you have these preconceptions about your masculinity and your strength, and I think it was so important that you did share. Like Dan, you shared that you did have a hard time transitioning back into life. There was a lot of trauma, and that being vulnerable isn't the anathema to resilience.
They actually go hand in.
Hand, which makes it even more relatable because people don't think, here's these really feearless sas guys telling me what to do, because of course they wouldn't be scared of anything. You actually opened up about those parts, which I think made it even more like it hits even harder when you see that you are just people who have vulnerabilities as well well.
Exactly as Ben just said as well, it's what you're trained to be resilient against, like you can train resilience and so and that's an important thing. And it's when you look at things like traumatic experiences and stressors. It's relative to the individual. It's not you can't compare your trauma to someone else's, it just doesn't work that way.
It's what you're resilient against. And so for someone like a special operation soldier, they can go off into a combat environment and that's not necessarily stressful for them, but you know, put them in put them on stage and tell them to sing, and they'll be panicked like anyone else, you know, because they don't have resilience.
Against that stress.
And so I think that's a trap that people fall into when I've had it a number of times at presentations and things, people opening up coming and seeing me in a break and saying, oh, you know, it's nothing compared to you, but you know, I've had this happen and some of those are hugely stressful things for these individuals. So I think we have this tendency to diminish our own experience relative to someone else's, and we need to not view it like that. It's not a competition. If
it's real to us, then it's real. And it's that balance of the stress or versus your resilience against that stress or, and if the stress overwhelms your resilience, then that's going to be a traumatic experience for you totally.
And I think you bring a lot of concepts in, like even the first three chapters are on the sense making concepts that help really break down the way our brain works and the way that we are so different and stress isn't something that can really be measured because and particularly in a pandemic, like people are trying to measure, there's a lot. It's a heavy newsweek this week, there's
a lot going on for other people. But that doesn't mean that you're not having a challenge because your world is dismantled, even in a different way to how someone else's is.
So I think that also is particularly timely.
I mentioned before there is so much I took out of this book, and I didn't know where to start, and I've written so many notes, but I thought maybe it might be easier to get you guys, to sort of introduce the concept of the shield, what it is, a little bit of a taster into how you chose to break down the chapters and the way that you brought in anecdotes versus like the way that you've even managed to in the same book compare life to a Chicken Street carpet shop, and also talk about Wabi sabi
in Japan and Cisu in Finland and Richard Harris our favorite episode on this show, the Cave Diver, and then also Dickhead Bosses and porpoising in a chinork like, I don't even know how you did it.
So introduce us to the Resilient.
Shield, the concept, the big takeaways that you think we all need to hear right now.
So I think from the genesis of the model, Dan's experiences were a catalyst. And as I mentioned before, it didn't seem to make sense on the surface that he could get out of the military, get away from all of that stress, and then have the negative experiences. And it also didn't seem to make sense in that he's it together, dude, he's physically mentally with I can't even say that without last.
Advanced to retire from three quarter pants, he wears full length pants.
Now he's come a long way.
He doesn't anymore.
So are you sure?
Well?
I'm not so.
I play for his looking all right, and yet you know he can still have these issues. And so the big thing for us when we sat down to try and nut out a model of resilience, it needed to be scientifically packed. It needed to be dynamic in that it could grow with us, and it could search and flex to different points in our life and also to different life experiences, different people's life. It needed to be
multi factoral. We've seen a lot of outstanding resilience related stuff out there that talks only about one single day. So it might talk about gratitude and mindfulness, or it might talk about physical fitness, or it might talk about the importance asleep. We want to work out how all those things interrelated. And it needed to be modifiable. There was no point having an academic document that sort of explained why you were having depressive issues. It needed to
be something we could get better at. We could look at ways of improving. So that was the parameters we set ourselves. We ended up necking it down to the six layers that we've spoken about in the book. The the innate layer nature, nurture, genetics, effort, genetics, your character, your personality or values. The mind layer is the next on the metal one, which includes everything spiritual and psychological.
It includes your perspective, your mindset, your views, but also, as team loves to say, your ability to flush the nonsense out, so things like meditation, things like mindfulness, things like gratitude, what you store in your head, and how you process things. The body layer is three words slip, diet, and exercise. Social layer, absolutely crucial, how you interact with people, particularly those outside of a work setting. You know, the social connections we're likely to have for our entire life.
And then the professional layer, which talks about our ability to find purpose and virtuosity and what we do in a professional context. We wrap it all up in this idea of adaptation, the idea that if you can develop competence in each of those previous layers, or recognize competence in them, then you're essentially ready for whatever the world's going to throw at you when the zombie apocalypse comes, even though you might have seen it before. You can adapt those characteristics going forward.
Or as we outline. And you know you mentioned Harry before.
When an unprecedented event occurs, you've got a bunch of people stuck in a flooded cave. Guess what, We've got a guy here who's got a huge amount of skills in anesthesia, a huge amount of skills in cave diving, brings them together and goes and well, not single handedly, but it was fundamental to saving the day.
Yeah, I think one of the things I loved so much about that episode was that people are so flooded. In fact, you guys actually managed to scientifically prove and also express so articulately a concept that I've been babbling around trying to explain for so long, and now I am so grateful that you've proven that it's true that the information overload that we face in our life has increased at a pace that our brain's physical evolution can't
keep up with, which causes all kinds of problems. But because of the increased visibility of everyone else's lives, we're subject to so many expectations and norms about what happiness looks like, what success looks like, what joy looks like. And Harry, to me, was such a perfect example that if you have random things that light you up that don't make sense. Being an anesthesiologist or an ethetist and being a technical cave diver are not related. They don't
necessarily help each other. You have to organize your life in a way that allows you to do both. But he's stuck to it, and there was only one of him in the entire world that could save those boys, And that to me was like, you have just proven the theory that whatever weird stuff makes you happy, you need to do that because one day that exact combination will be what someone else in the world needs, which is just thrilling to think that our weirdness is what
makes us special, not our uniformity. It's the stuff that makes us odd balls.
I love that, and I love you.
The flip side, Dan said that the resilience and stress is not a competition. You know, you shouldn't be thinking I didn't have to say, you know, kids from a flooded cave, or I didn't have to go to war. Therefore I don't deserve to feel stress. Our weirdness, the different things that stresses it shouldn't be about sort of working out a relativity or you know, what's better or
more worthy of the stress or resilience. It's about accepting that, hey, if this is having an impact on me, positive or negative, then lean into the positive and deal with the negative. It's not about comparing it to other people.
Yeah.
Absolutely, something that quite a few different chapters kind of covered these concepts, and that's really pivotal to the idea of CZ is redefining your happiness around input versus output, but also in terms of positivity versus negativity and embracing the suck as we spoke about before, like negativity.
Will always be there.
And then also when you do find your purpose and you do have your goals, that idea of micro goals and not always needing to jump to the end. I always say in my book it's called dream big, Plan small. For you guys, it's expressed is always a little bit further. And that concept just it hits me in the gut every single time of just how much society hails this idea of like here starting point, destination and nothing in between.
But in between is the bit that's life, you know, and I get so frustrated.
I'm like, it's not the destination.
So especially with you guys, having reinvented your identities completely a couple of times in your life. Yeah, it took us through those kind of concepts in the book.
Yeah, I think it is crucian.
I think social media has a lot to answer for because we do just see those one minute snapshots of people doing something outrageous or excellent or outstanding, and what gets missed in that is the twenty years of training that went into that, you know, and so we get these false ideals of what's positive, and it makes us feel bad about ourselves because we can't achieve that you miss that bit in between.
And one of the sort of.
Reference points that I think is great here is you talk about someone getting on top of Mount Everest, and if you were to hop in a helicopter and go up on top there, then that's one thing, but it's not where near the same as if you train for years and years and you climb that thing and you get to the top and get that reward, and even if you don't get to the top, that's probably exponentially better than just taking that shortcut and getting plunked on
top of the hill for the view. And so the happiness is in the struggle and it's the reality of it. And I think you know, setting those goals, working towards those goals, whether you hit them or not, you're going to end up a better version of yourself.
But just continuing to evolve.
And we talk about that all ways a little further and you may not know where that end goal is, or you may have set that lofty goal as I did with triathlon that I felt miserably short of, but that allowed me to have this foundation of physical fitness that was then applicable to training towards the military stuff. And it also gave me that discipline that was also translatable across to the studying of medicine and these kinds
of things. So nothing's ever lost. And I think it's very important for us as humans to set these goals and chip away at them, enjoy the journey, and if you get to that goal, great, and then set a new one and keep going from there. If you don't and it takes you somewhere else, you know you're going to end off better often if you didn't set the
goal in the first instance. This for me is where so many of these thick concepts are interrelated, and I've got a much better appreciation of meditation on fromness of gratitude.
I think all three of them have got a pr problem, maybe particularly most Aussie mails in that you know, even as I'm saying these words, I'm thinking sort of mung beans and flowing roads and in a sense, and you know, it's not as accessible to I guess the mindset I used to have, but that idea, particularly things like gratitude. Our own research and a ton of other bodies of research has suggested that that is an incredibly powerful thing.
It's correlated so strongly with global resilience that it's worth looking at. And part of gratitude is accepting what you've got, and another part is that concept of micro goals and being able to put markers of what you've achieved and to be thankful and to acknowledge pat yourself on the
back for having done that. And I think, to Dan's point, it's not about scaling Everest, it's about you know, developing that first plan to start walking upstairs with a pack on your back, and then acknowledging that that's one step of the way. Because to your point, and we love that John life of what's happens when you're busily making other plans. I mean, this is what we've got. It's
not the end state, it's the process. And Dan has a beautiful is it a Buddhist philosophy mat to sort of enjoy the journey not the destination.
Yeah.
Yeah, Look, I think it goes across a lot of philosophies and religions, but yeah, Buddhism, that impermanence of.
Everything is an underlying theme there.
And yeah, that does tie in, as you were saying, to that whole mindfulness, like being present and not just being future focused or dwelling on the past, just doing what you can achieve in the moment, being present, having those meaningful engagements and doing it.
Yeah, always a little further.
I love always a little further.
It's so simple, but it's so tangible, like you could just write it down and apply it to anything that you're not.
You don't need to rush to the end. It's just a little further.
And I think at the moment, particularly you know on the eastern side of the country, where it's a hard thing to wake up every day and not be able to leave your house, that changing the goalposts from I need to stay as happy as I was before or I need to be as productive as I was before. You know that just get a little bit further today.
That's all you need to do is suddenly so much more achievable, which then makes your mindset better because then you don't feel like a failure because you're not being you know, working efficiently, or you're not achieving what you're
supposed to achieve. I love that mentality, And if I highlighted anything in the book, it was that just just a little further, like stop trying to aid type even with rest, you know, I'm like, oh, we've got four slow down, lockdown, Yeah, and then I a type my resting like okay, how am I going to diy renovate my house or sprin clean or like have you know
the most baths of any person in the world. You know, like I can't just relax, so that just a little bit further, you don't need to go the whole way.
That was really really valuable.
Did you guys find anything when you were writing, like I kind of find something that was Another way that you translated a military concept into something really useful for the masses was the after action report and the idea of debriefing and writing down just journaling, like it ties into the same importance of things down to consolidate your
thoughts and what you learned. I found when I was writing my book, I learned a lot of things that I didn't realize I knew, or that I hadn't consolidated, just through the process of trying to tell someone else the concept. Did you guys pick up anything that was like an aha moment for yourselves while you were writing or researching.
Certainly for me, there's a couple of things at a global level. Putting this down on paper is exactly the same as doing a journal or doing what we call a rexilience action plan. It makes it very difficult to then not live what you're preaching. And so we've done all this research about how important I keep using meditation because that was my moment coming to that through this process.
But yeah, it now makes it very hard.
For me to say I'm too busy to meditate because I've got all this research in the back of my head that says And in fact, we had a guy on our podcast call Gary Goro, who said, look, if you haven't got twenty mins and that's in your day to meditate, then you need to be meditating for forty minutes. You know, if you're that busy, then you really need this stuff. And so those kind of things I find
help really keep you to account. And I love that always a little further has resonated with you, Sarah, because that has been a mantra with me for years. It's got a connection back into the British Sas and it's an amazing poem, like I called Flecker, but it is always in the back of my head and it makes
it really hard for me. The classic for me every morning I come out of the train and I've got the incredibly steep staircase or the escalator, and I've got this absolute choice at the start of my day, and there's this little annoying dickhead in the back of my brain going always a little further and I take the stairs instead of the elevator.
But those kind of things be useful.
They do move the needle in my life, and I hope in other people. I find the same thing with that stair verse elevator thing. It always and you know, sadly, the lots of veterans Ben Tim and I included, have got mates that lost their legs in Afghanistan, Iraq, and I look at that and I think, well, you know what, I've got legs.
I'm going to use them.
And it's just a reminder these small things like to it sounds a little bit silly to be grateful for having legs, but it's a recalibration that we underwent and you come back, and certainly I did, with a completely different view of everything here and this newfound appreciation and this complete recalibration all the stuff that we take for granted, because that's human nature. When you're living a comfortable, middle class existence and then you see these other experiences and
it changes things all of a sudden. If you can realize just and if you can be grateful for the little things in life, it changes that whole mindset. And it's so positively correlated that optimism and that gratitude is so positively correlated to resilience.
Yeah, absolutely, gratitude is so important. And not to take away that people are facing a lot of challenge at the moment. There'll always be stories of trauma that's worse than yours and better than yours and whatever. But just to have a little bit of an awareness of perspective, I think is really important.
I think that is a really interesting balance that you know, part of what we're talking about is not belittling what you're going through, because as Dan said before, it's not a competition, it is real. These stressors are real, and we shouldn't be saying, oh, we shouldn't be stressed by a lockdown because you know, carbleg just got rolled and imagine being a prominent female in the Afghemstein infrastructure now.
But by that same token, you know, having that awareness to provide that counterbalance that what we've got is pretty good, you know, being able to be grateful for it you've got. I think they're actually nice counterpoints to one. Yeah.
Absolutely, it's hard to find a middle ground, I think with all the noise going on at the moment, but important to be aware of balancing out the two before we move on to the last section, which is taking your identities completely away from the you that is productive that has titles and just goes back to pure joy like the unburdened wonder about the world of a child, for example, And that's my favorite section because we indulge in it so little.
Just a guilty pleasure.
Question for me is around the idea that I've talked about this book so many times, and people listening are going to roll their eyes because they know how often.
I talk about it.
But there's a book called Emergency Sex, which is about the four you guys might have heard of it, the four UN workers who end up meeting each other in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, like the big nineties and early two thousands disaster zones, and how they fight for their life to get back to stability and safety and their family. They make it back, and then they hate it so much that they have
to go and find another war zone. And it's so interesting to especially for someone like me who's so fascinated in international conflict and war zones, how you can adapt to your body to chaos and to adrenaline and it can become so addictive, not because it's sexy, like I think that's a bit of an over glamorization, because it's traumatic and it's horrible, but you can only think of
the minute you're in and you're so needed. You're within a structure, you have a clear sense of what you're meant to do each day, and it's I can imagine so difficult to leave that and then recalibrate to calm, which people have outside of the military. They grow up in chaos and then they can't have stable relationships or they you know, are used to adrenaline and they don't know how to rest. Are there any parts of that life that you miss?
Do you miss all of that? Kind of that kind of crazy like action and jump out of.
Helicopter beautiful And I like that that emergency SEETX that I don't know if you've seen a movie called Whiskey Tango Foxtrow with Tina Fey in it as well, Like that's super cool.
And I've seen all of them. I've seen all of them, ben all of them.
And even in our professional work, we do a lot of work with crisis management, and even though the context is terrible in an exercise or a real life in a fatality on an industrial side or whatever, people do tend to rise to crisis. And there's a couple of characteristics. One, all the bullshit, your American Express bill, your dead, all that stuff just fades away because you've got this one crystal focus so important, so you've got a really clear purpose.
Generally, people arise.
There's obviously all the neurochemical sort of responses that you know, including natural opiates that give you a high relation to those sort of stresses. So there's a lot of good stuff going on, but I think it's important to recognize that that is not the normal, you know, and particularly your body's reaction to that. It's not designed to be chronic.
It's supposed to get you through for that stress period, and so even though it does feel great in the moment, I think that recognition that you can't chase that dragon forever.
It doesn't kind of work like that. So I don't know.
For me personally, I'm just super thankful, genuinely thankful to have had the opportunity to experience those kind of things.
I'm super thankful I got through in one piece.
I'm super thankful, you know, I haven't had sort of bad issues.
As a result of it.
But I'm also I think can recognize that, you know, I don't need to keep chasing that even though it was excellent, that it's not any enduring or sustainable way for me to live my life. There's another brilliant book to add to that list of references. I don't know if you've seen this one. Sarah it's called My War Gone By. I miss it, so I can't remember the author.
Ben you might know that, but it was a UK bloke who ended up falsifying some war reporter documents just to get over to the Bosnian conflict and from Yugoslavia and just got so involved and had such a sense of purpose there and that camaraderie amongst other war reporters that he just couldn't fit back in back in the UK and found himself more and more and then I think he ended up heroin addicted. But it's a pretty sad but very powerful, full story of exactly that same thing.
And as been said, you know, I had imagine every one of us had the same experience of that, just that complete flow state when you were engaged in say something like a combat environment or responding to a casualty, where that is your entire focus. The remainder of the world just disappears and you know you are completely in the moment, and in that respect, it's a very mindful sort of state to be in and you are one
hundred percent focused, and it's addictive. I found it quite addictive, that rush of being in those high pressure environments using your skills at the point of end from a medical perspective, for me, was the most professionally satisfying thing I've done to date. But with that comes that constant activation of all your stress hormones and you recalibrate to that hyper alert, hyper anxious state and it's like reving a car engine
at five thousand revs constantly. It's got to break down eventually. But yeah, as Ben said, I think it's great to have had those experiences, and then it's just a matter of I think, as you move on realizing that you can't get back there, and you probably don't want to get back there because there's no future in that.
Well for me.
Personally as a dad and a husband, it's unsustainable. But then it's a matter of what can I do that's you know, age and family appropriate to replace some of that professional satisfaction without that same kind of toxic stress on the body.
Yeah, it's an awesome movie called The Old Angry Shot. I don't know if you've seen.
It's Grant Kennedy and Bryan Brown that it's about the essays in Vietnam and it's a real cult sort of film and the final scene that it's this story of this patrol in Vietnam is says patrol, and they go through all these things and then they gets injured and all this profound life changing things and they come back to Australia.
The final scene is then going through a beer and.
They just had this enormous life changing experience and they get into the pub and and you've brought's just back in Vietnam.
Yeah, how was it? It's all right, it's rather Thant moves on.
And I had actually a really similar experience coming back from my first trip in Afghanistan. I just got back, had no one sort of greeted me, you know, I would just sort of sort of wandered off and went to the Ocean Beach Hotel and caught up with a friend randomly and she said, oh, you know, where have you been. I haven't seen you around and said, I've just been out Afghanistan, and like, you know, I had had this profound life changing, first real war type experience and she said, oh yeah, yeah.
What was that?
Like, yeah, she's okay, and then just nder this other conversation. It was just it was beautiful in that, you know, this was everything and nothing, you know, it was massive thing for me.
But the world keeps going on and that was wonderful.
But I think that sort of set that calibration in terms of the stuff you're talking about.
Yeah, I mean it's nowhere near the same. But we spent a month in Rwanda, working in rural Rwanda, so no running water, no anything, working at school, and we did a lot of work with of the genocide, and even in that at that time, I was still a lawyer and I really wanted to go into one of the tribunals or some kind of international conflict war area. And I actually hated coming back home, like it really
and I wasn't even even in a conflict zone. But the simplicity of their happiness that was my first big separation between happiness and success. I came back to an incredibly successful life and career and could not be okay with it for months. I was so unsettled. I had loved that just simplicity of waking up and appreciating nature and singing and only focusing on in the next minute. But I also think I learned there that when people say listen to your body, I agree, obviously it tells
you lots of things. It's very clever, but it doesn't make a take account of adrenaline, because adrenaline tells your body this feels great when it's actually most of the time not great for you.
It's necessary.
But sometimes burning the candle at both ends and not sleeping feels great. Sometimes my body says, keep doing this, this is amazing. But it's something I think we do need to watch out for that. Your body sometimes likes things and thrives on things that it can't sustain and that aren't maybe great for it.
I've got to pull you up there, sharing you well, oh yes, sorry.
It's nothing like you. That that comparison thing. You know, We've all got to stop doing that. That's exactly like our experience. Sorry, yeah, I mean going to regional wander is huge. It's huge, and it's it's so abnormal, and it gives you this new perspective and it is exactly like us going off and experiencing things in our world.
So yeah, don't do that.
I know, love it. Thank you so very last couple of questions. The last section, as I mentioned, is all about play and what you do to help yourself detach and get a brain escape, and just I describe them as those activities that make you forget what time it is when you go back to that mindful focus, but not for a professional outcome, not for like winning or
getting better or self development. And the example I use is I spent a really long time going for walks with my dog but listening to a finance podcast, or I'd have a bath and I'd try and learn a language, like I just wasn't letting myself enjoy for the sake of enjoyment. So what do you guys do other than rollerblading? Too?
Honest?
I would love to crack out the roller blades again.
I can't now you've gone and ruined it for me. Yeah, I have to wear a mask. We're wearing masks anyway, aren't we. So might be the perfect time.
You should do it. I'm going to see you rolling.
Over like, oh, it's more socially acceptable. I've cracked out the skateboard again with my eight year old and.
So Paris twenty twenty four. Here we go.
No, No, there'll be none of that. Yeah, maybe my son. I'm not sure I enjoy skateboarding. I mean anything that gets into that flow state like you're talking about, and the beauty of that is you don't need to be good at it, you just need to be you're operating at the level of your capability. And so I've started
playing the piano a little bit. I love woodworking. I'm shit at it, but I've built a home bar in my man cave and I'm constantly working on that and there's no right angles and nothing quite lines up, and it's all sort of rusty the term I'm using. But
I just find that immensely satisfying. And when I'm building something, doing something with my hands, when I'm skating with my little guy, when I'm trying to learn something on the piano, that's for me that turns off that sort of monkey mind that the fault mode network.
And I do love to meditate. I love to lie in.
Ice baths these days. I find that just outstanding. In other way, it's hard to think of anything else when you're in an ice bath. You're just focused on that moment. And yeah, so there's a whole range of things that don't need to be those high adrenaline type things to get into that flow state. It's just something challenging yourself. And yeah, maybe I will crack out the roller blades again.
I love that you mentioned you don't need to be good at it, because I think that suddenly turns like we turn all our hobbies into jobbies, Like I get so like, oh I like this, so I better be professional letter like I better go to Paris in twenty three four because I love skateboarding and it's nice to just let your sop off the hook, like it has to be something that you're not good at, because that's amazing. And I love the ice bath thing too. We had wim Half on the show last year. He screamed the
whole episode. He screamed, he was just so excited about life. How are you good? Like how many kids?
You have?
Three kids? Like it just yells everything so invigorating.
I'm a big wim Hoff fan.
I love the breathing and I love him a friend, and I have downloaded the same version of him doing the guide ever breathing.
And you know, just his his little comic bee this moment.
And you know we will say that to each other in the in the funny Dutch chessh like it's it's so it's so much goodness.
But for me, my happy place is drawing. I've come to it late.
Same thing learning a new still I think is like cool and humbling and.
All that sort of stuff.
But ge that that is just so meditative and so restorative, you know. And I kind of like the fact that at the end you've got something like Dan's Bar. You know, there's there's a tangible sort of artifact at the end, and you know, maybe it's not the it's definitely not the best, you know, but it's something that's.
Kind of a byproduct of your kind of flow state.
Yeah, amazing, And it's interesting that they're very tactile things that you can't be on your phone or multitasking at the same time, it's like precludes that opportunity, which is generally what I gravitate towards. What about Like, do you guys ever watch Netflix? Do you actually you know those people who are like I don't even have a TV? Do you watch stupid shows? Like do you do anything like that?
Yeah? We've just my wife and I've just come off the back of like it wasn't really binging, you know, we sort of limited to an episode or to Parks and rec I love Amy Poehler and I mean not in that but that kind of human So yeah, definitely, I was going to say guilty pleasure, not even guilty, but.
It's just a pleasure.
It's just a pleasure.
Yeah, certainly the same. I don't watch a lot of TV.
We don't have it on a lot in our house, and I'll generally prefer to do other things, but yeah I do.
I dance to one of these guys.
He's got a life. Wow, get off the show.
Wrong?
Oh my god.
Yeah, that people, especially from Wellness, We're like, we didn't have a TV in our home, and I'm like, I admire.
That so much.
You are enlightened human being. But I am binging the shit out of a seven series at once, Like, what are there any military shows that you've seen that you're like, that's the closest representation. I always ask this question because I think I want to rewatch it. I've watched them all like eighty five thousand times for me.
Actually, ID angry shot the one I mentioned before. It is better to get.
In terms of not glamorizing and capturing the mess and the madship and all that sort of stuff.
I loved Zero Dark.
It's just going to say the same thing.
You know, Yes, this is the ubl Ray, but there's about five seconds of gun play in the whole movie, and that to me is the whole certainly my experience with the targeting game, that it is about that sort of preparation, and it's all those unsung heroes that are doing the intelligence analysis and the imagery and the human mesdients and all of this sort of fusion, and it's
one step forward, two steps back. There's uncertainty, there's a ton of risk in improving these things, and there's you know, that that kind of political layer to it that to me really encapsulated I guess a lot of the contemporary special ops experience, and you know, it finishes with super cool court mvgs and playbooks and and all that sort of stuff, but ninety five percent of it is not.
It's that frustrating sort of slog hard work builder. I think also the way they depict that final raid was awesome in that it wasn't that typical explosive everything goes exactly to plan. It was confusing, and there was engagements, and there was pauses, and there was you know, what's going on here, and so it was sort of I've said that exact same thing a number of times when people have said you know what looks most like real. I think that movie probably portrays it the best.
I'm so glad you guys said that, because I love that movie so much. But I noticed that, unlike most Hollywood blockbusters, there's no music in the raid. It's very quiet, yeah, which makes your senses heightened to them breathing and what you would imagine they would actually hear, which is nothing just the wind or each other's voices, just saying numbers and codes like It was just so interesting because usually that wouldn't fly in a Hollywood movie because our attention span is so short.
We'd need like color and black hawks all the way.
But it was dead quiet for like twenty five minutes, which I liked about the movie.
I thought it was really great.
Wells and I have had this ongoing discussion the fact that we did need soundtracks, Like you know that our actual raids in Afghanistan would have been so much cooler if we had all this track, And unfortunately, the sort of upshot of that is it would probably be more like the Benny Hill than music.
We went through.
I think the one I wanted was the immigrant song by led Zeppelin, Come out of the Dust with the big biking will cry and dumping guitar, Like, yeah.
You should be able to choose your own song as well.
That just comes on every time you like come out of a cupboard or something.
When you come out on your rollerblades.
Hey, I lived in Paris, I went to UNI.
It sounds po for a year.
And the cops there's it's a quarter called the Murray, which is like a very flamboyant artie, you know, and the cops only in that suburb roller blade in the tightest uniforms, but they're legitimate police on roll blades.
I'm like, what if they go on the lawn.
Downstairs.
It's funny you say that because when we're having that rollerblade discussion, and I must admit I have not thought about roller blades. But then I realized, the only adult I've seen rollerblading in the last about that time.
Is a French to that Lucy. His kids are at our school.
Cops. There you go.
It could be an ex cop, but he genuinely looks like he's loving it. It kind of looks fun. But I think you have to be French to get away with it.
Yeah, maybe I think you guys can get away, but That's the other thing. It's so interesting when people talk about fear of failure all the time. We talk about a lot on their show, imposter syndrome, blah blah blah. I always say, if I told you no one would ever know that you failed, would you care about failing? No? Their worth isn't questioned if they fail at something in private, which is the same as like, once you give yourself permission to look like a complete idiot, you.
Enjoy life so much more.
Just own that you're a dag, and then you don't care what your plata is because you don't care that you look like an idiot.
I feel so much more fun.
And paradoxically, you look less like an idiot when you're able to own it and not pretend you're just cool.
You know, like, yeah, it's funny totally.
When you get rid of the dreadlocks and you drop your pant length a little bit, you're just a whole new person.
It come back, ironically, photos of I've got a great one of you standing with your back facing each other at one of your parades and you're in you know, you're in uniform.
You're high and tight down at RMC or it must be an RMC.
I think iron.
Haircut wise, and I've got this shoulder length just horrid looking Raddy hair. It's not in Dreads at the time, but it's shoulder lengthy earrings in I've got these gaudy white sonnies and yeah, it's good.
It's a good contrast of.
Probably fake Oakley's. Remember those fake oakleues.
Yeah. Nice.
You got to unearth some of these for the episode. I'm not going to use your like proper fancy headshots. They're going to be all old, cringe worthy photos just for the dad. Second last question, which I think you should answer for each other, what are the most weird quirky things about you that don't normally come up in conversation and that you didn't let slip in the book?
They're more embarrassing.
The better tread lightly here.
There's probably embarrassing stuff from our youth that probably doesn't need to be dredged.
Up, or it absolutely does.
This is the best part of the whole episode, the random ship that comes out when you just dig a little deeper.
I think Dan's his story ends well, but I think Dan's love life, the ploduc of his love life, has
been quite interesting, as fully declare. It started off with me looking very jealously at the fact that that A, I think you jumped before you got expelled, but you basically left under a bit of a cloud from our boys' school and went to a co ed school and discovered that you had a bit of game and tore it up ahead of you and still hopeless and so yeah, and it's paradoxical, Sarah, because this was the role blading phase.
It seems that you were getting a lot of girlfriends while you were dreadlocked roller blading through something in that. I think the French get a lot of girlfriends too. There's a there's a connection there French.
And sensitive new age guy. That's what we all want.
When immediately they're Sarah to a shoplifting incident when we were in our.
Teens, And.
Yeah, I've forgotten up.
At Ben's wedding, actually I reckon just his early forays into clandestine operations that.
Were not showing.
Yeah, it was specially school more than special ops. And yes, so there was I think it may have been a contest if I'm remembering this correctly.
Ben Ben had to mate his age.
I had to mate this mate's brother was was my agent, and we'd gone in to see what we could liberate from this shop. And anyway, well, I think the only reason me and my mate didn't get busted is because Ben and his mate were just so overt and had caught the attention of the store detective first. And from a memory, you got busted with a dozen golf balls, a Gumby doll and maybe distraates brothers something along those lines.
I would like.
It to have been brothers in arms, because at least that it gives some credibility.
No, it was a dozen golf balls and a company. So two things I love. What are you doing with a dozen golf called? I didn't play golf.
And these are stupid things to steal. And the second thing is they're really all good.
Things to steal.
Like a dozen golf was in a box and this is two foot Gumby doll.
This so the cops, the cops were involved. He's busted that the parents have got to be involved. So the next step here to now let's you know, why not double down. So Ben had a bike which was our old man's old bike that he inherited and being done up, he'd get ridden to the shops.
So they to justify this theft, they make up this cover story that they'd gone out to get their bikes before all the shoplifting had occurred. Someone had their bike and said, mate, you are going to go in and steal me some stuff otherwise not getting your bike back, and so this was the cover story.
Get down the cops station.
But the two of them get split up and your mate things like a canary. If I'm remating, I think I think he had not done resistance to interrogation, or maybe neither of you had those skills at the time. And and there was different stories that came came apart.
It was that, but no, let me finish.
You had aitch good bike in the local lake to get rid of it, and so the story.
Went, you're not mean to blog.
These things had been busted, had come back out, bike was gone, so need to get rid of bike. You threw the bike in the bloody lake and then went home and ran the story on the oldies brilliant.
Because the album was so much tied. We wanted to commit to Yeah, it was ridiculous.
Committed so committed a lot.
It's funny.
I think we both broke we had the breaking strength under interrogation.
You only got busted because you tried to play your led Zeppelin music as you walked into the store behind you, like big explosion.
It was thought experiment called the prisoner's dilemma, where you know, like you know the story, you know if you both admit, you get something if you're out on your mate.
And yeah, I think we lived that prisoner's dilemma. We both went straight to write on your mate.
Oh my god.
So you don't have to be good at interrogation or your story or captivity or alibis or anything to be a special operations guy.
That's great.
Needn't hope is out there. Don't give up hope you could end up.
Very last question, guys, what is your favorite quote?
I got to go with It's not the Critical Accounts, so being the first line of the Theodore Roosevelt. I know it's it's been done to death, but that just really has resonated.
With me, particularly for my adult life, just that trying to.
Let go of that external perspective and like you said before, Sarah, just you know, owning it, going with it, doing what makes you feel happy. But you know you mentioned Harry loves the cave dive and people don't get that that's a weird thing to do. I don't get that, but I get Harry. He's a magic human being and he's just owned it. And like you said, that put him
on the front page of national international newspapers. But yeah, that letting go of criticism and just doing what you truly believe in is aligned with your values and what you feel is going to make you happy, and not listening to the critics, I think is probably for me.
That's the number one.
That's such a good one for me.
I mean, we spoke about it all throughout this episode. That always a look further.
I mean it comes from that Flecker poem which the scene is a caravan of merchants heading in Biblical times on this treacherous journey, and the master of the caravans asking each of the merchants, you know, the spice merchants and the jeweler and the person with the rug and the embroideries, you know, how are you going? And what have you got to take to this destination? Samacant And it comes to this group of ragtag people and he goes,
who are you in rags? And rotten shoes, you dirty bed and blocking up the way, and they respond, we are the pilgrim's master. We shall go always a little further, and that is inscribed on the Clocktawer of the British Essays Regiment, alongside the names of all their units fallen.
So it's really powerful for people within the Special Operations community and has become, like I said, a mantra for me personally, and I think, a wonderful way to sort of encapsulate the kind of secret to what we're preaching in resilience. It's nothing big, it's nothing flashy. It is exactly as you said, Sarah, just that one step in front of the other towards a worthy destination.
Oh well, what a perfect way to end.
I feel like you've passed that on to now Vimi mantra and hopefully many many people who have sold out the book, and also hopefully our reprint is very quickly on its way so that more people can start to build their own resilient shield. Thank you so so much for joining guys, and I'll pop a link in the show notes.
Absolute pleasure.
Awesome, Thank you, Sarah's being great to chat.
If it wasn't conveyed clearly enough in this episode. I'll reiterate now that I took so much out of Resilient Shield, particularly as Lockdown continues to drag on, and hope that some of you get yourselves at copy too. I'll pop the link in the show notes to wherever there are still copies available at the time of releasing this episode, along with links to Dan.
And Ben's socials in case you want to know more.
Very big thank you to our former guest fellow ex sas soldier turned NBA graduate and dear friend Mark Wales, who introduced me to the Pronk Brothers for the show. I'm continually blown away by the platform this yighborhood has created for me to discover and meet new and fascinating people every week. I sometimes feel like these chats give us a little taste of exploring the world and meeting new people from the comfort of our own homes while
we can't go out and do it in person. So I really do hope some of you enjoy that escapism too.
I hope you're having
A wonderful week and definding ways to seize your ya