The Fear Bubble, page 23
Sadly, it’s not only dead versions of yourself that will want to judge you negatively for having the courage to change. People from your past will too. I hear from lads all the time who used to know me in the military and now see me on TV. It’s usually not long before the loaded comments start. They say things like, ‘You’re not the same person who you were back then. If only they knew.’ I know who I was back then. I was a fucking nightmare. I’m not that person now. I’m a civilian in a completely different headspace. And thank God for that. Can you imagine if I acted like that now? I wouldn’t be in a job. I’d probably be in prison.
But people always want to define you by who they were when they first met you. They want to believe the ‘true’ you is the most basic, least evolved version of yourself. They often try to drag you back there. I always resist this pressure because I know that it’s genuinely dangerous. I’m brutally honest about my weaknesses, and know what I need to do to stop myself from reverting to my old type and keep out of trouble. This is why I’m definitely not going out on some bender until 4 a.m. with a former soldier I knew twenty years ago just because he wants me to. So I politely and respectfully say no. And then I get the reaction: ‘So you think you’re better than me, then?’ No, I don’t. It’s just that you want me to get wrecked and get into a fight simply so you can say, ‘You see? This “new” Ant is all bullshit. It’s fake. I told you he hasn’t changed.’ Then I think, ‘Get your negativity away from me.’ I want to be around growers, people who learn. And that’s why my social circle has become smaller and smaller. It’s not that I think I’m better than anyone else. It’s not that I’ve become a ‘fake’ person. It’s just that I’m changing. And hopefully, if you meet me again this time next year, I’ll have changed all over again.
It seems to me that the main reason I make the negative few from my past so uncomfortable is that, by changing myself so much, I’m highlighting how little they’ve changed. The learning, the graft and the setbacks I’ve been through just haven’t been taken on by them. I might have been on their wavelength several years ago, but I’m not any more, and that offends them. It tells them something they don’t want to hear.
Take my experience as a warning. If you follow the advice that I’ve laid out in this book, you too are going to change. Give it a few years and you might even find yourself unrecognisable to the person you are now. And then what will happen is this. Some of the people you know now are going to resent you for it. The more fear bubbles you step into and doors of opportunity you open, the more jealousy and resentment you’ll attract. People who were once in the same place as you will believe they’re owed what you’ve earned. They’ll say, ‘How come they’ve got that? They’re the same as me. It’s not fair.’ They’ll be offended that you’ve left them behind and will take your new success as an insult. They might say you’re just putting your new self on and that you’re fake. They’ll reassure themselves that they know the ‘real’ you. They’ll talk behind your back, feeding each other with negative chatter that reassures them that they were absolutely right to stay stuck in their safe corridors, because you’ve only changed for the worse.
Deal with these people in the only way the positive mindset allows. Kill them with even more success.
GODLIKE RESPONSIBILITY
Once you become well versed in using the fear bubble technique and begin growing as a person, you’ll begin to notice some changes in the way you experience the world. As you keep on looking for new bubbles to burst, you’ll start to feel a sense of extraordinary power growing within you. Now that fear has become an ally, rather than a terrible force you just want to run away from, you’ll begin to feel as if you can tackle anything. And if you’re following my technique with a healthily positive mindset, this feeling won’t go to your head. You’ll be motivated much more by pride than by ego, pushing on not because you want people to drown you in compliments but because you’re simply enjoying the journey of testing yourself and seeing where the process can take you. If you pursue this, you’ll ultimately enter a mindset of absolute personal responsibility. You’ll feel like the god of your own fate and treat everything that happens to you as if you caused it.
And I do mean everything. Say, for example, you’re coming home late from a club and you get beaten up down a dark alleyway. The normal and perfectly natural response to this would be to feel like a victim. And it’s true, you are a victim. But what do you get out of interacting with reality in this way? Nothing but negativity. You’re feeding that voice in your head that’s determined to seek out and lock on to any sense of danger and threat. It doesn’t matter what’s true or not about that situation. Respond to it as if you caused it. What can you learn about what happened? Why were you down that dark alleyway at four in the morning in the first place? Why were you unable to fight off your attackers? What do you need to do to ensure nothing like that happens again? Forget whose ‘fault’ it was. Forget blame. That’s just part of the victim mindset. It might not have been your fault, but make it your problem. Human beings are problem solvers, and now, as if by magic, you’ve got something to solve. You’ve got something to act upon in a positive way. This is how we grow and thrive.
Whatever badness happens to you, your conclusion should never be that the world just isn’t fair. Even if that’s true, it doesn’t matter. You decide what’s true. When I was serving with the Special Forces, I knew the truth was that I didn’t have the ability to dodge bullets, but I decided to believe that I did. During firefights I acted with complete confidence, as if I had godlike control over what was happening to me. This lack of hesitation kept me alive. Other people I served alongside didn’t have that mindset. They hesitated, and many of them ended up wounded or killed. I want you to start walking into rooms as if you can dodge bullets. I’m telling you, you can dodge bullets. It’s possible. Don’t believe me? I’m someone who has walked into rooms time and time and time again with AK47 bullets flying directly at me. I know that it’s possible. It’s simply a question of mindset.
CREATE YOUR OWN REALITY
Once you’ve adopted this mindset of godlike responsibility, you’ll understand that you have the ability to create your own reality. Just as negative thoughts create a negative life, so positive thoughts create a positive life. Whenever I talk about this subject, I always remember a young man that I met when I was serving in Afghanistan. We’d just landed at a Forward Operating Base or ‘FOB’ in Helmand Province in order to refuel. FOBs are rough-and-ready bases that the military construct in war zones, often using what’s left of bombed-out buildings. This was no exception. It was dusty and mostly open to the elements, and the hot desert sun beat down on its open spaces relentlessly.
There was a communal area in one corner made up of logs and cheap foldable chairs where the lads would gather round at night and play cards. Sitting on his own at one end was a guy who looked no older than nineteen. He was sobbing quietly.
‘What’s wrong, mate?’ I asked him. ‘What’s up? Pull yourself together, yeah? Let’s have a chat.’
‘The next job we go out on it’s my job to minesweep,’ he said. ‘It’s tomorrow.’
‘You’ve done minesweeping before, haven’t you?’ I said. ‘You’ve survived it. Why are you crumbling now?’
‘My best pal was doing it two days ago. He got blown up. It’s my time next, right?’
‘You cannot think like that,’ I said. ‘Your pal died honourably. And you’ve got to be rational about it. That means there’s one less IED out there. And I doubt very much they’re going to hit again so soon.’
‘You don’t know that, do you?’
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘That’s true. I don’t know that. But you can’t let this get to you. If you fail to get out of that door tomorrow morning, then someone else has got to take on your responsibility. You don’t want to be putting them in the firing line.’
‘So it’s me in the firing line, then.’
It was pretty clear that I wasn’t helping. Eventually, I left him to it. I felt bad for him. I just couldn’t see how he was going to get out of that door the next day. I also felt strongly that his mindset was going to significantly increase the actual danger he was in. That kid was creating his own reality, and it was a bad one. His job as a minesweeper was to lead his men safely through territory in which explosive devices had been buried by the Taliban. With that kind of mindset, rather than finding a path through the danger, he was simply going to find the danger. He would be unconsciously looking for those mines. How we think defines how we act, and how we act defines the events of our life.
This is true for all of us. Say, for example, you have a boyfriend or girlfriend who has a negative mindset about you. They’re a bit jealous, a bit paranoid, so they decide to look through your phone. I guarantee they’ll find something. They’ll zero in on the littlest thing and interpret it in that worst-case-scenario way. ‘Who’s this, then? Why has she given you kisses? And why did you give her a kiss back?’ The world is full of information, both good and bad. We’re surrounded by positivity and we’re surrounded by negativity. It’s your choice which set of information you spend your time focusing on. It’s your choice whether you build yourself a reality that’s populated by angels or by devils. Whatever you seek, I guarantee you will find.
Like that young man in that Afghanistan FOB, I also had to deal with plenty of shifts as a minesweeper. Easily my most dangerous mission was in the heart of Taliban-controlled territory. We were mounting an assault on a small town that was notorious as a hotbed of Taliban IED manufacturers. It was there that the electronics and the explosives met the technical experts, some of whom were among the most talented – and most feared – in the world. Put it like this. If you had to take your turn sweeping for mines, this was exactly the place you didn’t want to do it. The honest truth is, I have no idea why I volunteered for the role. As soon as I raised my hand I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ But when the night of the assault came, I put myself in that positive headspace. I had to find the path, not the obstacle. I had to have no doubt at all that I was going to live.
As I approached the outer limits of the location, I reached into my day-sack and took out my metal detector – a telescopic device with a foldaway head that I pulled at, clicking it into shape. Beneath my feet was dirt and gravel and the occasional shrub. As soon as the detector got within sniffing distance of the ground, it began picking up metal objects beneath the surface. I slowly and methodically began plotting a path through the electronic bleeps, planting a glow-stick behind me every thirty seconds so the lads could see the safe path I was finding for them. But the going was slow. It was extremely frustrating. All I wanted to do was get in there and get on with it. Before long I found myself thinking, ‘Right, I’ve covered 150 metres, maybe more. Up until this point, I’m still alive. Everything is fine. I don’t have a problem here.’ I quickened my pace. Soon, I was going so fast that I was planting a glow-stick about every two minutes.
A voice crackled into the receiver in my ear. ‘Fucking hell, Ant. Slow down, mate.’
I did as he asked, but quickly grew even more frustrated. I looked ahead. I still had about a mile to cover. Jesus Christ. The metal detector was going wild, boop, boop, boop, boopboopboopboop. ‘I’ve got this,’ I thought. ‘There’s no problem here. I’m not going to go boom today.’ Above the noise of the detector, there came a sudden sound like a million pieces of sand hitting the desert floor. What was it? I felt something on the back of my neck. Rain. ‘This is bollocks,’ I thought. Soon the rain began stinging my skin. It had turned into hail. A tiny ball of ice fell down the back of my shirt, then another one. ‘I’m not having this,’ I muttered. ‘I’ve had enough. I’m not going boom today.’ I stood up straight and began walking at a normal pace, across the IED-strewn dirt, straight towards the town. My metal detector was in meltdown: bupbupbupbupbupbupbpbpbpbpbpbpbpbpbpb. The noise of it only made me more determined. My pace got faster.
The radio buzzed again. The voice pleaded: ‘Ant, fucking hell! What you playing at? Slow down!’
‘No, there’s no need,’ I said. ‘We’re fine. Plus it’s fucking hailing. You can get to fuck if you think I’m going to get wet. Let’s just breach this place and get into some cover.’
I knew everyone was freaking out behind me, but I’d created my own reality. I’d decided I wasn’t going to die and nor were any of them. And we didn’t.
THE MISSION IS YOU
What is mission success? What exactly does that look like? When I was in the Special Forces, the idea of ‘success’ was tightly defined. As point man in a Hard Arrest Team, a typical mission that I led was successful if we arrested our target. But sometimes we’d get on location to find the target wasn’t there. Does that mean our mission had failed? That all depends on your mindset. You can define success in any way you choose. Success could be catching the bad guys, or it could be me and my pals getting out of there alive. It could be me finding a mobile phone or a laptop that’s going to get us into a terrorist network. It could simply be me continuing to learn how to become a better soldier, mission by challenging mission. There were plenty of operations that didn’t go as we’d hoped or planned, but there were never any that I’d describe as a total bust. If you have a fully positive mindset, you can never really fail.
This is why tightly defining your life’s mission, and judging yourself strictly on how close you’re coming to achieving it, is a mistake. In particular, you don’t want to define your primary mission as ‘getting rich’. Success isn’t money or cars or jewellery or a big house. I know millionaires who aren’t happy. All the signs and signals from the outside world are telling them they’re a ‘success’, but they’re miserable. Cash is often something that comes as a result of success, but it can never be the mission itself. Human happiness is completely separate from material objects. Go back sixty years. Go back six hundred years. People were no less happy then than they are today, although they generally had much less. Wealth and bling are not directly related to well-being.
But whether it’s cash or a particular job or some qualification, it’s incredibly easy to get caught up in thinking the mission is some external thing. But the main mission – the one that you should never lose sight of – is you. As long as you’re stepping into those fear bubbles and opening those doors, you’re succeeding. Every experience you have fine tunes you a little bit more. It grows you. It’s inevitable that such growth sometimes feels like failure. When things don’t go as you’d planned, that negative chatter will kick in, telling you, ‘I told you so. Don’t ever do that again.’ You might feel humiliated. You might feel bitterly disappointed. You’re in the fire. It hurts. But that fire is forging a new you. No matter how it feels, it’s not a moment of failure. It’s a moment of change.
You know this, because when you ignore that chatter and go for it a second time, you’ll find that you take on your challenge in a subtly different way. Your principal mission is not the little shiny prizes that you’ll pick up along the way, it’s simply to keep on growing. It’s to overcome the power of that voice in your head that’s calling you a failure. The reality is, it doesn’t matter that you didn’t win this contract or that race, or did or didn’t get this or that job. None of these things negatively affects your main mission. The beauty of life is that you can’t unlearn it. As long as you’re changing, you’re winning. You’re part of that universal process.
You cannot fail the mission of you because that mission doesn’t end until the very moment of your death. A well-lived life is like an Everest with no summit. You never get to the top of your mountain, and therein lies the joy. The summits that you’re aiming for always turn out to be just ledges, bumps on the ridge. There’s always another bit to climb. But whenever you reach those false summits, it’s important to take the time to stop and enjoy the view. The other day a pal of mine said to me, ‘I came home from work last night after a shit week and my two-year-old son, who’d been asleep, woke up and smiled at me. That smile made me feel like the king of the world. I realised that all the sacrifices I’d made to give my boy a safe home to live in and put food on his table had been worth it. All the anger I’d felt about my shit week instantly vanished.’
We don’t acknowledge these moments enough. If the ultimate human fear is ‘I shouldn’t do this because I’m not good enough,’ then there’s also the opposite of that feeling, the one that my pal felt in that moment: ‘This is exactly what I should be doing.’ Moments like these don’t come often enough, and when they do, it’s important to sit on that ledge and breathe in the beautiful air. It’s telling you that all the effort and pain has been worth it. This acknowledgement allows you to free yourself from negative feelings like resentment and regret and blame and anger that might have been building up. And, make no mistake, if you’re experiencing these moments, you’ve earned them. You don’t get them without pushing through fear. You don’t get them without being brave.
These moments are waymarkers on your route to growth, reference points in life that tell you you’re doing the right thing. They recalibrate you. They allow you to think, ‘I’m glad all that sorrow happened, because look at me now.’ All those moments in your past that felt so much like failure suddenly turn into success.
COMMIT TO GIVING YOUR LIFE TO YOURSELF
Your mission is you. As long as you’re opening those doors, it’s mission success. When I was in the military I vowed to give my life for my country. I want you to make the same commitment to yourself. Stand in front of a mirror, look yourself in the eye and make an oath: I will die in service of myself.
