Battle Ready Read online

  If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you, the problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. We don’t rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our processes. Creating new habits takes an enormous amount of discipline for you to have any chance of making a change that lasts for good. In the beginning, if you don’t plan sufficiently and are not focused on the goal 100 per cent, you’ll hit a minefield of distractions that attempt to pull you back into your comfort zone of safety – the no-growth zone!

  Ensure you make a plan and stick rigidly to it. I have to implement this whenever I try to change the patterns of the past or when I’ve simply fallen off track and need to refocus. Always have the goal in your mind and whenever that devious thought pattern comes to play, ask yourself, ’Does that thinking take me towards my goal or not?’ If ‘not’ then you must either wipe that thought from your mind or go straight over the obstacle that sits right in front of you.

  Remember the order of this trinity: Trigger, Behaviour, Reward.

  This is the way habits work: the trigger sparks the behaviour, which then delivers the reward or, if it’s a bad habit, ‘the consequence’, as bad habits work the same way. When you’re starting a positive habit or kicking a negative habit think of what the triggers are that lead to the behaviour.

  ‘If you don’t like where you are, make your today a tomorrow to be proud of.’

  – Ollie Ollerton

  EXERCISE: HABIT FORMATION

  Imagine a positive goal, like running a marathon in six months’ time.

  Trigger: Stick your workout programme on the fridge. If you’re planning on running first thing in the morning and you’re a bit of a sleepy dormouse come 6 a.m., place your kit and trainers right by the bed so when your alarm goes, they are the first thing you see. Use your phone as the alarm and put it outside the door so you must get up to turn it off. Do not go back to bed!

  BREATHE – RECALIBRATE – DELIVER

  Behaviour: Go to the gym/run.

  Reward: Feel satisfied with yourself, look healthier, see your mileage getting higher and your fitness level improving. Tell yourself how amazing you are! Feel the positive endorphins flow.

  If it’s a bad habit you want to change, for example, kicking smoking:

  Trigger: Don’t keep cigarettes in the house. If you’ve always associated drinking alcohol with your cigarette, avoid drinking alcohol in the first few weeks of stopping. Don’t hang out with friends who are smokers in the first days or weeks of stopping. When you ‘feel’ the urge, fall into process.

  BREATHE – RECALIBRATE – DELIVER

  Behaviour: Make it difficult for yourself to access cigarettes by walking a different route to work so you don’t pass the shop where you usually buy them. Become more Battle Ready by saving the money you would have spent on cigarettes, putting it into a savings account or on a gym membership.

  Reward: Feel proud of yourself, enjoy fresher breath, looking healthier, feeling fitter.

  If you fall off the healthy wagon and back into smoking, don’t be too hard on yourself. Think about what other triggers might have been at work to make you reach for the cigarettes – did you miss any? Add them to your list and think of any new behaviours to help deal with these new triggers. Remember the negatives smoking brings to your life, how expensive it is these days, not to mention your increased chances of developing lung cancer and the drain on the health system.

  Think back to the Purpose Pyramid: ask yourself,’ What is the purpose of smoking?’ Unless the pros outweigh the cons, reset and start again remembering all the benefits you’ll enjoy when you’ve given up. Statistics prove that asking these questions while conducting the negative habit will produce an increased chance of quitting. So, while you’re puffing on your cigarette ask the question while understanding the benefits of the smell and taste.

  Creating habits: Think of one good habit you are trying to promote, and one bad habit you are trying to kick. What are the triggers? What behaviour can you bring in to help you change? What is the reward?

  Good habit:

  What are the triggers?

  What behaviour will effect change?

  What is the reward?

  Bad habit:

  What are the triggers?

  What behaviour will effect change?

  What is the reward?

  If you go back into bad habits or don’t establish your good ones, there’s no point in bemoaning your lack of willpower or berating yourself, it just makes you feel like crap and affects your morale, which will make you fall back into your bad habits. Have some compassion for yourself, appreciate what you’re doing is hard and that it is normal to have the odd failure and relapse on the way to creating a new habit. But conversely, don’t be too soft on yourself either. Studies show that people who cut themselves a little slack when they relapse are more likely to jump back into the challenge than those who get lost in self-loathing. Remember you will attract exactly what your dominant thoughts are.

  THE THOUGHT FARM

  Imagine moving towards your desired goal as being like a rice farmer growing his crop. First, he ploughs the soil, removing any weeds that might limit future growth. Similarly, to create the best mental environment possible for your idea to flourish, your mind must be cleared of unnecessary distractions, anything outstanding or bothering it, so you can fully focus on the task.

  Next, the seedling is buried underwater in the mud, just as the visualisation of our idea is planted into our mind and subconscious.

  A rice farmer sleeps close to his crop in a shaded hut to protect him from the sun. Like the farmer, don’t risk over-exposing your goal to others. It’s easy talking about it but there comes a point

  where action speaks louder than words.

  Throughout its growth the rice is vulnerable to bugs and birds. Throughout the lifespan of growing your goal, water it with positivity, clear processes and positive habits; it’s at its early stages of growth that it’s most vulnerable; people may tell you your goal is too difficult/not needed/been tried before, or you may be plagued by negative memories of previous failures, which further your self-doubt. The Mind will tell you anything to keep you in your familiar comfort zone. Can we get rid of these negative memories for good? Only if we stop holding on to the past and dwelling in our comfort zones; only if we stop projecting into the future and start living in the now.

  Every farm has waste and weeds and we must ensure these are regularly cleared otherwise they will affect the new and positive crops coming to bear. You must also invest in waste management and ensure that the rotting crops are kept in an area that does not risk any contamination to the new and flourishing fresh crops. If contained properly they will actually produce good compost which when broken down will offer assistance in the growth of new crops. Even rotten old crops have something good to offer when it comes to the birth of something new.

  The farmer is guided by the timeline of the seasons, planting his seedlings during the monsoon season when there is an abundance of rain. Planning is everything; too early or too late could render the idea worthless. When is the best time to realise our goal?

  MISSION SUCCESS CYCLE

  The Mission Success Cycle is a tool similar to what we used in the Special Forces as an easy but effective means of ensuring each mission follows a process that gives it every chance of success with minimal casualties. It’s designed to follow a process as opposed to opinion and feelings, and ensure that regardless of what’s going on in your head, you have a systematic routine to follow to get you where you want to be while maintaining momentum. It helps deal with a large amount of complex info in a very digestible, time-efficient manner. And I can verify it works like a treat. How? I’m still breathing! It is also transferrable to pretty much any situation you can imagine, not just hostage rescues and drug raids. It can also be used in team meetings, putting o
n a rave, setting up a safari in your back garden . . . Okay, now I’m being silly but you get my drift. It can be as simple or complex as you wish.

  There are four parts to the process.

  Plan – Look at all assets and resources available. Is there any intelligence based on past operations or on new information from current intelligence sources? The question is, ‘What do you have to play with, and what’s for and against us?’ Ask yourself the following questions:

  • What is your objective?

  • What are you looking to achieve?

  • When are you looking to achieve it?

  • What are the potential threats or obstacles that might stand in your way?

  • What capabilities have you got to deal with these?

  • What are your physical, financial and intellectual assets and how can you best use them towards your goal?

  • Do you have any relevant experience that you can draw on? If so, what worked and what didn’t in the past?

  • Who in your team will be best suited to execute different stages of the plan?

  Brief – All four aspects of the MSC are equally important to the Special Forces during operations but success stemmed mainly from the Briefing Phase. The brief is the delivery of the mission, verbalised using the information taken from the plan. This is a walk-through of the mission in slow time and a time for anyone to voice any concerns as to why it won’t work or indeed anything that can increase chances of success. It’s when you check your kit while the instructions are delivered in a clear and succinct fashion. It’s also when any internal conflicts among the team can be ironed out, or any possible confusion sorted so when the real event happens there is no procrastination. Everybody involved has to be present so each of you knows exactly who is where and doing what at any given time during the delivery. Make sure you are prepared for worse-case scenarios.

  Delivery – Provided the plan and the brief have been done correctly and all people involved in the delivery have contributed, the delivery should be seamless! But remember ‘No plan survives first contact!’ or, as Mike Tyson said, ‘Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face!’ When it gets noisy everything can change. However, providing your plan and brief are done correctly, you will have enough bandwidth to deal with contingency planning. This is in effect the ethos underlying the concept of being Battle Ready. If you’re in a shit state when the shit hits the fan, there’s a lot of shit flying around! This will fracture your efforts to counter any unplanned events, taking you off course.

  Debrief – the Mission Success Cycle is not just about having a brief before your crucial meeting/event/challenge, it’s also about following it up straight afterwards, while it’s still fresh, so you can identify what wasn’t working and what can be finessed.

  Unlike in the business world where teams and companies don’t make time to capture the learning points after a project has been completed, in the Special Forces we would go into a ‘hot’ debrief straight from the theatre of engagement, no matter the hour. It gave us the chance to learn and improve, regardless of whether the mission had been a success or not, and was an open environment where any of the team could say: ‘Yeah, Ollie could have covered the other door when we breached the compound.’ And someone else might say, ‘Yeah, well, Foxy did really well by covering that for him.’ the debrief is rank-less and a good team is made up of individuals that welcome positive as well as negative feedback.

  In the Special Forces you’re grown-ups, you don’t have egos getting in the way when lives are on the line. You also develop trust. So, I suppose, 360-degree feedback (judgement from everyone around you, not just those in command) is not a difficult thing if your life or someone else’s might depend on it. Once you create that environment of honesty, this is where you learn; you achieve growth through the advice of others.

  Make sure that any key info gathered from the debrief is shared among the whole team as just one piece of information might affect all of them. Keep a record of what worked and what didn’t to save time and energy for future projects. The Mission Success Cycle is a brilliant tool for its thoroughness, simplicity and transparency.

  EXERCISE: MISSION SUCCESS

  Think of an objective that you’d like to achieve.

  Objective:

  Plan:

  Brief:

  Deliver:

  Debrief:

  Once you’ve achieved Mission Success, learn to create a process where you learn and grow from every experience both good and bad. By doing this, you don’t have to recreate the wheel every time a new project or opportunity is presented to you.

  CHOOSING THE RIGHT TRIBE

  Success in life comes down to many factors, one of which is the kind of people you have around you. Do they inspire you, or encourage you to do things that are bad for you? A positive and trusted sponsor, friend or mentor goes a long way in helping you achieve your purpose and can spur you on at those low times when you question your ability and your goal seems a long way away from being achieved. Similarly, at these times when you’re vulnerable it can take just a few negative comments from the wrong person to make you doubt yourself and send you scurrying back to your comfort zone.

  There are also people who do want you to succeed, positive people who will inspire and support your every move. But, unfortunately, there are also people who don’t want you to succeed because they feel threatened by your success, or perhaps they are projecting their own fears on to you. There are the needy energy vampires, the false friends full of schadenfreude who relish things being bad for their friends, and there’s those who dampen your self-belief with their negativity. Should you tolerate someone who questions your ability and rubbishes your goal? Faced with the option of having a negative friend or none at all, I’d go for the latter. It’s better to keep your own counsel and spur yourself on rather than have someone else transfer their baggage on to you. I think a major part of success in life is learning to navigate around people you need to avoid.

  When starting out on something new and intrepid (remember the seedling with the rice farmer), it’s important to protect your idea. Often it will be someone in your family or a close friend who knocks you off course. And while they may not be intentionally trying to stop you achieving and are just trying to defend you from what might go wrong, they can be the most damaging, as we trust and listen to them the most.

  When making changes to your life you must choose your tribe carefully. You need like-minded positive types who are going to support your journey, not take you off course. Aristotle, the fourth century BC philosopher, once suggested there are three kinds of friends in life: the familial – a blood tie that binds you but doesn’t necessarily blossom into real friendship; the utility friendship – work colleagues with whom you share a common goal, a bit of banter but wouldn’t trust your deepest fears with; and finally the close friend – those people you choose as an extension of yourself, reflecting your values and interests. What makes them special is a chemical reaction of mutual connection; they just seem to get us and all our idiosyncrasies, and we them. Time is precious, a commodity most of us have less of than we need, so it’s important not to carry people who are not good for us, or who drain or diminish us. Positivity breeds positivity.

  As we grow up, we realise it becomes less important to have loads of friends and more important to have real friends. The success of friendship is based on a healthy two-way street of give and take. If you were to conduct a cursory audit of all the current colleagues and friends in your life along the criteria of how supportive they are, how happy they make you feel, how loyal they are, and how much give and take there is in your relationship, how would your balance sheet look? Certain relationships will probably have grown lazy or lost their shine because you’ve both gravitated to different things and have lost the common thread that once held you together. Like the energy of money passing from one person to the next, the people in your life are also a fluid thing and relationships always need to be ma
intained in order to thrive. But the older the friendship the harder it is to be objective about what you get from one another; after all, you’ve been friends so long and shared so much history you can’t imagine not having that shared memory resource any longer. Past experiences bind you together, true, but a relationship should continue to grow organically, not rely on things that happened decades ago.

  The state of our friendships and the way others treat us reflects how we view ourselves; a person of low self-worth will allow themselves to be surrounded by people who are negative and think little of them. An addict will seek other addicts. A bully will seek weak people who will support his actions.

  When we think about it objectively, how many of our friends are good for us, and how many are not? Gradually as we age, insubstantial relationships fall away, as circumstances move us in new social circles or perhaps to different countries, and individuals get left behind. I left for distant shores in 2003 and returned eleven years later. My good friends like Foxy were still there and meeting them was like I hadn’t been away. It was a natural culling and I lost a fair few friends but in turn had more time for the ones that deserved my investment and gave me an ROI. That’s life. If we’re lucky, after all of life’s vagaries, we’re left with a pool of people with whom we share our troubles and joys, hopes and disappointments. The law of attraction suggests that it’s only when we make a change and create a vacuum that it is filled with something new. And yet sentimentalists that we are, we tend to hold on to toxic relationships which are draining.