Battle Ready
Page 2
I closed my eyes, relishing the air-conditioned cool of the plane, then started to nod off again. In the dark of my mind something moved, a pelt so black it gleamed almost purple in the half-light, hands leathery and huge as baseball mitts. Statue-still the huge ape waited patiently, eyes fixed on me like amber fires buried deep in the sunken sockets of her face. I fancied I could smell the diesel of circus generators mixed with the tang of animal faeces and candy-floss. Then she opened her mouth, her upper lip peeling back in a hideous grin to reveal yellow incisors sharp as hunting blades, and I almost screamed myself awake. Maybe I wasn’t ready after all.
INTRODUCTION
I consider myself lucky and count my blessings every morning and before I go to sleep at night. I have a wonderful woman in my life, a thriving business that I built from scratch with her, a fine son whose friendship is something I cherish, and a black lab called Murphy. But it’s not always been hunky dory: if life is a box of chocolates, there have been a fair few razor blades hidden among the orange cremes and strawberry delights I’ve swallowed on my way here. I’ve been a delinquent, soldier, Special Forces operative and by turns a drunk and an addict of adrenalin, war, and substance abuse. My highs have often been clouded by dissatisfaction. My lows? Let’s just say I could write you a guidebook on how to self-sabotage your life.
In a life spent on the edge of death, be it anaesthetised at the bottom of a bottle or looking down the end of a barrel, I’ve been the architect of my success as well as my own wrecking ball. And in my obsessive drive to quieten the restlessness that has been an unwelcome spectre throughout my life, I’ve rattled desperately from one external fix to the next, plastering over the void of emptiness with excessive drinking, adrenalin-seeking in the Special Forces and material acquisition. None of these Band-Aids have worked.
Fortunately, I survived my best efforts to push myself off life’s precipice long enough to experience a call to change, a moment of clarity when a voice within me said softly but firmly, ‘Enough of this shit! You need to get your life in order. It’s now or never.’ And at 48 years of age, I can honestly say I’m happier than I’ve ever been and the reason for this is simple: I found my inner purpose and followed it. Once I discovered it, I nurtured it like I would a precious seedling, and with dogged self-belief and discipline I carefully grew it into my training company, Break-Point, whose MO is to help others. That’s my purpose, and I needed to go through the bad shit to find that pearl. A student of life, I’m no intellectual and never went to college, but I love some quotes from thinkers like Nietzsche, the German philosopher, who once said on the subject of purpose: ‘A man with a why can tolerate almost any what.’ Without an inner purpose – a why – we’re as redundant and unfulfilled as a sailor in a boat with no planned destination.
I reached my lowest ebb when I left the Special Forces and went to work in Iraq, travelling back and forth from my home in Australia. At best I was a functioning alcoholic, earning silly amounts of cash in a war zone, forever haunted by the scars of a broken marriage and guilt-ridden about leaving my son behind. From my first breath to the last sip of booze before passing out most evenings, a death wish was sewn under my skin. At the time I remember saying over and over to myself, ‘I don’t believe it, how can you have gone from hero to zero so spectacularly? One minute you’re an elite soldier, the next you’re a failure.’ I was running wild without the structure of the SBS to ensure I kept disciplined and operating at a standard of excellence. I had no one that I was accountable to but myself. Without self-discipline you can’t achieve anything.
Once you hit rock bottom and decide to stick around, I guess the only way is up. My ascent from the pit of despair didn’t happen overnight, and my life today isn’t perfect, but looking back over the last ten years at my experiences, the mistakes I made and the steps I took to eventually deal with them, I hope that perhaps some of the lessons I learned might be useful to you.
The start to my recovery might seem like a small step for mankind but it was a massive step for Ollie Ollerton, and that step was getting out of the situation I was in. I devised a holistic programme that governed my mindset, exercise and nutrition. For three months I locked myself away in a Cornish cottage and swallowed books on neurology, philosophy and psychology; positivity, nutrition, anatomy and Ted Talks galore. In the Special Forces you plan everything in minute detail in order to deal with intense crises, and getting myself back on track was the most important crisis I have ever faced. The processes I put together to rebuild myself are the basis of this book, and will, I hope, be of use to you in your life. We all need structures of discipline.
For ease of reference I’ve divided this book into four parts:
• The Call to Change – the moment you decide to do something different
• Barriers to Change – likely obstacles that will block your way
• How to Change – the techniques I used to get myself out of that pit and start living the life I wanted
• Sustaining Change – how you can keep the positivity afloat so it becomes a solid, established part of your being
I spent the early days of my working life in elite military units, surrounded by like-minded positive individuals. When I left the military and over a period of years, that positivity became diluted as I integrated back into society. My thinking and foundation of this book comes from being at the two opposite sides of the spectrum throughout my life, and the ability to analyse everything I think and feel, allowing me to become an emotional observer and not the victim of my thoughts. We are not defined by our thoughts but the actions we choose to execute from our thoughts. It’s a choice!
We’re not stuck in moulds; we can become whatever we wish. Nobody is forcing us to stick at that job we’ve been doing for the last ten years and secretly hate. Nor is anybody going to thank us for staying in a loveless marriage that makes us unhappy. Certainly not the other half, they’ll silently despise you even more. So many of us are living in unnecessary prisons of our own devising. Russell Brand in his book Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions, paints a vivid picture of modern-day dysfunction:
If you’re chugging through life in a job you kind of dislike, a relationship that you’re detached from, eating to cope, staring at Facebook, smoking and fruitlessly fantasizing, you can sit glumly on that conveyor belt of unconscious discontent until it deposits you in the grave.
One of the most common regrets from people on their death-beds is that they wish they had taken more risks in life and made those changes their inner spirits were yearning for, but at the time they were too wrapped in fear of the consequence of leaving their comfort zone. Nobody but ourselves constructs those invisible bars and ceilings that limit us. Humans are extraordinary, and when we put our minds to it, we can do amazing things, burning bright trails of benevolence, creativity and generosity. Conversely, we are equally capable of spectacular sloth and a tendency to be sheep, to accept less than we should from our lives and stay where it is safe. To cap it off, we are instinctively prone to negativity, to expect bad things instead of good fortune.
Battle Ready is a war cry against procrastination. It’s about you taking control, creating new positive habits, identifying your purpose and setting meaningful goals; building inner resilience, deliberately changing your life for the better, picking yourself up and recovering when things go wrong, and squaring away needless crap that weighs you down – be it debts or outgrown negative self-beliefs – so that you have the mental bandwidth to start realising your passions rather than worrying about stuff that can be sorted out with a bit of focus. If you never find the time to free yourself up, you’ll never give yourself a chance to evolve into the person you hoped you would be. It’s about acting in the moment of opportunity and allowing momentum and persistence to be the conduit of your every success.
This is a book for all of us who come unstuck and lose our way from time to time, and for those who want to grow into better versions of themselves. I’m going to teach you
how I helped myself find what I really needed, how I visualised it and turned it into the life I live today. Humans experience between 70,000 and 100,000 thoughts per day which dictate our emotional state and thus our behaviour. The brain, wondrous a thing as it may be, is eminently lazy. We’ll learn about the way it works so we can better understand ourselves, as well as spotting the thinking that holds us back, and identifying how our own ego can get in the way. We need to start looking at ourselves in a different way if we are to be more in the driving seat, becoming our own observer, rather than a puppet yanked by unseen strings.
In the following pages you’ll find simple exercises to help you to focus on what you want to achieve, and how to stay positive and get in flow with your real self. The resources to achieve what we wish for are within each and every one of us, but sadly they are sabotaged by a set of ego-driven, socialised behaviours that aren’t helpful to us. And then there’s our tendency to sleepwalk through ever-repeating cycles and comfort zones, which though familiar are stagnating to future growth. The self-styled techniques in this book saved me from a life of addiction and depression and enabled me to become a contented human being (something I never thought possible) and a successful entrpreneur with multiple businesses. Now it’s your turn to try.
– Ollie Ollerton, April 2020
PART I
THE CALL TO CHANGE
CHAPTER 1
AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD
I stood watching the clothes tumble monotonously round and round in the industrial washing machines like sodden corpses. I was working in a gloomy, dingy sweat shop where they washed and pressed laundry en masse for hotels. The pay stank as much as the dirty washing, there was an asbestos roof and many of the sorry souls who punched in and out were struggling single mums. Hanging myself was out of the question – too disturbing for my family to think of me ending my days like that. Slashing my wrists was also out of the question – too much mess for a tidy person like me to leave for others to clear up. No, it would be a warm bath and a load of pills.
‘Are you going to do it tonight or just talk about it?’ hissed the voice in one ear. ‘You’ll fuck it up, everything you touch fails . . . like your attempt at rescuing kids from brothels in Thailand. You’re finished, put yourself out of your misery. Then another voice said softly in the other ear, ‘That’s not how it ends, Ollie. You’re going to get yourself together, you’re going to run a successful business one day.’
On the face of it, the first voice was more on the money. I was drinking and smoking enough to singlehandedly keep Queensland’s alcohol and tobacco industry afloat. And while a part of me continued to believe there was something better waiting for me, I had no idea how I would ever escape the bottomless pit I’d wound up in. I’d achieved great things before this point, and had a history of success, so the path wasn’t completely unfamiliar, I just didn’t know how to find my way back to it.
To the outsider, I probably appeared like a sad loner whose face told a story of despair, pickled by booze that I could no longer mask with hilarity. I kept myself to myself, maintained the washing machines with surgical precision, and stared through the paper-thin walls with dead eyes. I was a husk of a man. And if I ever got talking to someone and they enquired about my English accent and wanted to learn more about me, very rarely I might admit I had been in the Marines, but so meekly it was embarrassing and unconvincing. I’d certainly never tell them I used to be a soldier in one of the most respected highly trained fighting forces in military history. They would have looked at me and laughed. And maybe I would have laughed too. Half-heartedly.
This was 2012. To understand how deeply I’d fallen to reach this place I need to give you a bit more context. Let’s rewind a few years.
In 2000, I left the British Special Forces, itching to do something different. For all the adventures during my six years with the Special Boat Service, and there were many, I felt unfulfilled, like an actor who has turned up at the wrong job but stays nonetheless and muddles through a part he’s not entirely suited to. My behaviour, even by the standards of the maverick regiment, often raised eyebrows, but I was good at my job and so my best attempts between missions to get fired were tolerated. I had a drinking problem to rival Oliver Reed’s, but like that old hell-raiser who after a monumental night on the tiles would turn up on set punctual, word perfect, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I too was a successful working alcoholic. After I quit the SBS, and tried a few different jobs in Blighty, I went to work in Iraq as a security consultant. It wasn’t just the money that appealed, the main allure was the chance to escape the corrosive relationship with my then wife.
In 2003, I met Nat, a gem of a girl who worked for the firm that employed me in Baghdad. She and I were inseparable from the moment we met at a work’s Christmas party in London, and for a time we lived happily together in Chiswick, before relocating to Brisbane in 2004 where Nat became a full-time psychology student. I worked six weeks on and six weeks off, shuttling between a war zone and the comparable peace of Brisbane. But there was a problem: without the close-fitting wetsuit of the SBS to keep me in check with its demands of fitness and exactitude, my drinking had become untenable. I found no real purpose in the security work or anything else. I drank to forget my broken marriage and blanket the guilt of not being the father I’d dreamed of becoming. It was a wrench being away from Luke and not seeing him grow up. So, I binged on a diet of Valium to quieten my escalating panic attacks and drank industrial amounts of booze to take me to the numb place where I could black out. Naturally, Nat eventually had to throw the towel in. Jesus, she was a saint for lasting as long as she had.
Scared of being single and independent, plus the fact I no longer qualified for Australian residency without Nat, I was immediately on the hunt for another girlfriend. I didn’t have to wait long. The next day I was invited to a baby shower on the Gold Coast, and two days after a drunken detour I was on my way to San Francisco with my new soon-to-be wife. Her birthday was the same date as mine, it was written in the stars that we should be together. How wrong was I? I knew the marriage was as steady as a house of cards, and that I was taking short-term comfort for what would be long-term pain. And although it was a beautiful ceremony on top of a mountain overlooking the Nevada desert (with not a clichéd Elvis impersonator in sight), even as I stood there at the altar I knew there was only one impersonator present, and that was me. I’d made a very big mistake. By now I was having panic attacks so severe I thought I was dying. And that’s when I first thought about intentionally ending it. I’d had a death wish sat on my shoulder for years. Maybe once or twice I’d tried to appease it, pushing the envelope of danger a little too hard. But this was different, it wouldn’t be a case of ‘Ollie Ollerton, Special Forces soldier died bravely while engaged in a clandestine operation’, but by my own hand. Better to leave this life than go insane, which is what I thought was happening to me.
I got back in touch with my ex-girlfriend Nat, who fortunately for me is a psychologist. I told her everything. Nat had no reason to help me, but she was brilliantly supportive and told me, ‘Your life is not over, so don’t think like that, Ollie. You can change anything you want to, but first you need to put a process in place that’s going to get you out of this marriage . . . for a start get in touch with a lawyer.’ I followed her advice and had the marriage annulled. When you’re confused, depressed and stressed you don’t want to deal with paperwork or a process, you just want to wallow in the depth of your problems. It’s so hard to get out of that pit of self-loathing. But Nat helped me figure things out and start to make a plan to move forward. Unless you face whatever it is that’s dragging you down and start looking at each of these issues individually, you’ll end up with a mind-cocktail of negativity and destruction.
In the interest of losing any sanity that remained in my life, I went back to Iraq for one final job. By the time I eventually left that troubled country in 2008 and tried to settle permanently in Brisbane, I’d been twice div
orced and, if it was possible, I had become even more of a wreck. Having briefly got back together with Nat on my return, we soon split and I predictably sought escape in another woman rather than endure the solitude of my own company.
Sarah had received a healthy settlement from her ex-husband and lived in a million-dollar house complete with swimming pool. They might have been palatial surroundings I found myself living in, but I couldn’t have chosen a worse place for my mental stability and self-worth if my life had depended on it. Still, I threw everything into this relationship, sold my house and even cashed in my pension to furnish her newly secured million-dollar property. On the surface it was perfect and an off the shelf relationship, but she drank like she had hollow legs and could become the nastiest of drunks, possessing that same easy capacity for cruelty as my first wife. She’d target my vulnerable spots, pouring acid into them with her barbed tongue: What a loser I was . . . what a bad person for abandoning his son, what kind of a father does that? In many ways she was a female reflection of myself, equally fractured, unpredictable and on a path of self-destruction.
I worked in property for a while and did well at it, but I was soon bored and unfulfilled, and so I quit.
Then, just when I thought it was over, I caught a break out of nowhere. An old mate called Denny who I’d worked with in Iraq and who now lived down the road in Brisbane, introduced me to a guy called Simon. Despite it being a fancy-dress party I recognised him at once; he’d been involved in my Special Forces Selection. Yet another freak coincidence in a life that had been full of them. What were the chances that having last seen him in Hereford I’d now meet him on the bottom of the world?