Battle Ready

by Ollie Ollerton

  There’s more to just wanting something though, you’ve got to resonate with it and experience an emotional reaction. And if it doesn’t spark genuine excitement in you when you picture it then it’s worthless to you, it must resonate. You can’t expect to just say a few words that don’t attach to an emotion, it’s about creating a visual picture of where you want to be, how it’s going to benefit you, how it will feel. If you create that emotional state around your desired outcome, it causes a chemical reaction within the body that pulls you towards the direction of where you imagine you’re going to be.

  Dave and I drove for 14 hours to Amman. We were to spend the night at the Intercontinental Hotel before picking up ‘the package’ the following morning. During that journey I had a long time to think, and what better to focus my thoughts on but the opposite of what seemed to be imminent. I thought about how it would feel to keep this contract for eternity and how already my financial circumstances had changed dramatically. How would that richness affect my life? What could I use my money for? How could it benefit me and the other people around me? I painted pictures in my mind so large that I ran out of mental canvas. I then targeted my thoughts on the journey that would take me to this goal, for unless something monumental happened, there was no way that we could influence the ABC bureau chief through mere charming conversation. My thoughts ran away and went into specific detail about what would happen the very next day. I didn’t truly believe at that point I was changing my destiny, but simply letting my foot off the brake on my over-creative imagination.

  That evening I sat at the bar with Dave and discussed the possible and likely imminent loss of the contract with ABC. I bought us both a beer and allowed him to get halfway down the glass before presenting him with my thoughts.

  ‘Listen, mate,’ I said to him. ‘This contract cannot end. You know what needs to happen, don’t you? The only way we’re going to keep this contract? We need to be attacked!’

  Dave looked at me with a rather confused expression on his face, like I was a madman.

  I repeated myself. ‘Mate, we need to be attacked!’ I bought him another beer before I delivered the detail of my statement.

  ‘So, this is what’s going to happen. We’re going to leave here, pick up the 12 of them and drive them over the border. Then somewhere between Ramadi and Fallujah we’re going to be attacked by the militia—’

  ‘What!?’ said Dave.

  ‘We’re going to be attacked but we’ll get the ABC people out of the fire-fight, and when we get to Baghdad there’s going to be a heroes’ welcome. And, when the champagne’s been popped, the bureau chief is going to sign a new contract on the spot.’

  I relayed it all to Dave in forensic detail – how I could imagine the smell of the cordite from the bullets in the shots we’d exchange, arriving at the final destination unscathed . . . tasting the champagne and feeling the bubbles tickling my nose, the coldness of the glass in my hand, and that I could see the gratitude in the bureau chief’s face, feel the grip of his handshake. Once I painted the picture, I spent the rest of the night going through the scenario in my head. I placed myself at the start and ran through the complete event as if I was there.

  I woke early the next morning and collected the ‘package’ and his entourage. We were the rear vehicle of a four-car convoy responsible for the protection and safety of all vehicles in front. Our low-profile, soft-skin (as in, bullets go through) Toyota Land Cruisers rolled out of the hotel compound. We made it to the border, which as always was a hideous and time-consuming event. Once out the other side we went to find our cache in the middle of the desert which contained our weapons and ammunition. We then set off on our monster of a return trip back to Baghdad.

  Minutes blended into hours as the infinity of parched desert, punctuated only by the odd camel, reeled by outside our windows. There was no sign of any other vehicles. Ten hours into the drive it was my turn to take the wheel, a small MP5 KURZ sub-machine gun lay across my lap ready for any unwanted encounters. At least we’d broken the back of this horrendous journey; I couldn’t wait to get to our destination. But I was tired; the combo of yesterday’s and today’s long drive, mixed with the adrenalin of being on constant alert finally took its toll and I fell asleep for a second, coming to as we passed a sign reading ‘Ramadi’. We were driving on a three-lane highway, hard and close to the central reservation at around 100kph. I noticed a sign in the dusk light to my left that said ‘Fallujah’ and as my eyes glanced at my rear-view mirror, I noticed the deliberate flashing of headlights in the distance. I immediately informed my number two and he identified the vehicle was moving fast and marked another vehicle further behind it. They were getting close, fast.

  My mind immediately focused on everything I didn’t want it to be, as I made assumptions of what it could be: ‘Was it the Americans?’ Suddenly – in two vehicles with windows dark as midnight – they became sufficiently close enough for me to realise it wasn’t the Americans. I immediately moved on to my next assumption: ‘Is it another security company?’

  I started to think I’d best get onto my comms and move the convoy over to the right of the three-way to let them past, for by this moment they were pretty much on our bumper. Then all the windows in the vehicle were sliding down. Immediately the Arab headdress gave it away, as I realised this was my worst-nightmare scenario of ‘being attacked’ that I’d sugar-coated the day before as being my perfect dream.

  I informed the convoy in front and gave the order to increase speed. It was at that point I also realised we were at the exact spot that I had described us being attacked the night before in the bar – somewhere between Ramadi and Fallujah. ‘You idiot!’ I told myself, ‘What have you done?’ For this is exactly what I had predicted to Dave would happen. It felt so familiar it was like an out of body experience.

  The car sped after us, engine roaring, our speedometer touching 130kph as it caught us. A second wave of panic took a grip of me as I saw AK47s appear from every window, followed by the intimidating orchestra of bullets screaming over our vehicle. I was in a state of panic, a state of shock, but the sound of the AKs’ barking snapped me into operator mode and that’s when my training kicked in.

  Breathe – Relax and be conscious of your breathing

  Recalibrate – Triage the situation to one to two things that you can control

  Deliver – Take appropriate action based on clarity of thought

  This was taking a step into the discomfort of the unknown for any chance of long-term gain – that’s to say, my ultimate survival.

  This was break point – kill or be killed.

  Short-term comfort would have been to comply to the demands of the attackers, which would have inevitably led to long-term discomfort, in this case, death.

  I aggressively swung our car over to the right and matched their speed to close in towards my number-three vehicle and block them in. They sped up to fill the gap. With one of our cars in front of them, the central reservation to their immediate left, and my car to the right of them, they had fallen for my trap and were now boxed in. I looked down to my left and the world had slowed down to such a pace I felt like I’d forgotten to breathe. I was now in flow state, this was peace in war. With the militia’s AK47s poking directly at us, their faces obscured by shimags (headscarves), I was so close I could see the whites of their eyes. The one nearest me was barely a teen.

  A millisecond passed between us. He looked at me and I back at him, my finger sliding into the trigger housing of my submachine gun, my face flat without emotion. It was a break point – act or be killed. Time to debug: Breathe, Recalibrate and Deliver. I gave Dave the order to open fire, as I lifted my weapon to rest on my left arm commanding the steering wheel. Our first few rounds cleared the glass of our closed windows as we emptied a salvo of bullets onto the attackers.

  I tasted cordite, heard the report of the guns echoing in my ears as hot air flew in the shattered window, the enemy vehicle slowing to a halt in the rear v
iew, a plume of black smoke rising from its bonnet. Its support vehicle stopped but didn’t follow us. We drove on through the burning afternoon toward Baghdad, my ears ringing from the confined space of the attack. AlI the while I kept thinking: ‘What the fuck just happened!?’ I was genuinely freaked out by how accurate the real event was with my visualised version. I’d been so close to death, but had I really ordered that? I took no pleasure or glory in shooting the youth. I radioed ahead to alert the base that we’d come under fire but had prevailed. There were protocols to observe. You couldn’t just take a life, it had to stand up to some rigorous criteria before it could be deemed as lawful and in self-defence.

  When we arrived back at the compound, the doors flew open and we were immediately greeted by the welcome party . . . of course! I opened the Land Cruiser’s door and a shower of shattered glass and spent rounds tinkled out on the floor, catching my attention. But as I looked up amid the noise of people clapping our return, someone handed me a glass of champagne. This was crazy. I glanced at Dave; he was looking at me like I was some kind of witch.

  Shortly after our arrival, we were summoned by the bureau chief who vigorously shook my hand with a look of gratitude and commended us for our actions. He was in the vehicle in front or ours and had seen the whole thing. He then slid a piece of paper across the table and I signed the contract for an immediate extension of our services. It was just as I had imagined it, so much so that it felt like déjà vu.

  Much more than another two years of guaranteed income, this experience was a defining and spiritual moment for me, as if the Universe had given me a glimpse of what could be achieved with a little willpower and persistence: visualise something with enough clarity and detail and it will happen. It also scared the shit out of me regarding how careful we have to be with our thoughts. I vowed never again to wish an attack on myself; it just might happen.

  There is something to be said about almost being killed, it tends to wake you up, sharpen your senses, you gain a heightened self-awareness. I realised that night how careful I needed to be in what I wished for, and just how powerful a tool visualisation could be in my future life.

  Thinking negatively attracts exactly what you fear. But once you are passionate about your purpose and acting on your intention, you’re no longer in a state of fear, or loss. Instead you’re in harmony with your flow. Buddhists call needing something material or feeling the world owes you a living a state of lack. A need suggests a dependency as opposed to a desire, which is a want. It’s important to understand the difference because you shouldn’t be doing anything out of need. So ‘I want this to happen’ or ‘This will happen’ will invite positive results. Needing something is the ego’s language.

  That’s why many relationships fail, because the balance is lost as soon as one person develops the need. Dependency. To their surprise, people who moan about their jobs often find themselves being made redundant or the company they work for folds, because their envisioning has created a negative vibration and they get what they’ve been asking for. Then they say, ‘I knew that would happen!’

  As we’ll see in Chapter 11, when it came to envisioning the birth and success of my company, I went into minute detail, visualising exactly how it would look and how I would feel. I had already begun this process during my epiphany while flying over the Outback while working for the oil company, when I saw in perfect clarity the uniforms of my staff and the corporate participants on our training course. The success I focused on with such detail and conviction soon resulted in the phone call from my friend Foxy to tell me about the opportunity of a new series called SAS: Who Dares Wins. Setting up the company when the series was released was such a golden opportunity, as it provided a brilliant launchpad to give Break-Point the PR wings it needed to fly.

  EXERCISE: VISUALISATION

  Here are two exercises. Try the first before you attempt the second:

  1. Imagine you’ve got a million pounds. Picture it inside a bank vault, the cash piled up in a neat block of pristine £50 notes tightly wrapped in plastic.

  2. This time imagine the experiences and the things you could do for yourself and other people if you had a million pounds to play with. Imagine buying a dream house, your favourite car, or taking your parents or loved ones on the trip of a lifetime, seeing their faces smiling, tears of happiness in their eyes; maybe it’s a charity you’d like to give the money to and make a real difference.

  What did you notice about the two different visualisations? Hopefully, the first left you cold and lacked depth, while the second gave you a positive emotion. It’s that emotion you need to engage with. You’ve got to have the vibration that matches the desire. When you don’t have that vibration it’s worthless.

  CHAPTER 8

  CREATING POSITIVE BEHAVIOURS

  BATTLE READY

  Being Battle Ready is more than just a state of mind, it’s a sense of being ready for anything that hits the fan and making sure that everything in your life is squared away, eliminating the Shortcut Syndrome and not cutting corners. When you’re Battle Ready, you don’t defer dealing with shit that can hurt you. Why put off till tomorrow what you can do today?

  When we plan an operation in the Special Forces, we think of any possible curveball that might be thrown at us, we sweat the small stuff, the minutiae, so when things go south, we have a contingency plan. You plan and you breathe. When you come to the big execution, if you haven’t done the planning properly then you’re carrying through stuff that’s going to affect what you need to do. It’s about being ready for anything, so that when something surfaces that’s unpredicted, you have the bandwidth and the ability to deal with it, not leaving stuff unactioned, letters unopened for weeks etc. We only have a short window of opportunity. If you don’t react to your impulses, your brain will talk you out of it. Our brains are wired to avoid stress, although if you continually do that in the short term, the long term effects are far more severe.

  When you make too many shortcuts life becomes mayhem, and because you’re not dealing with it, it fogs the clarity of your purpose. When you think of an idea you must act on it, even if it doesn’t suit your circumstances right now. I know that if I don’t action something immediately, because my life is so busy, it’ll get left to one side and it’ll be another thing that is not squared away. Especially with my business, if an idea pops up in my head, I’ll send the email or make the call to whoever I need to help get the ball rolling right away. Then I’ve offloaded it, it’s hit the other person, and it will come back to me. Action creates reaction. I’ve dealt with it instead of saying, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea, I’ll do it later . . .’

  Regardless of how small it might be, you must take an action, as that will cause a reaction from someone else. Ideas are worthless unless you make them physical and tangible. I hear so many people saying, ‘I thought of that’, and I say to them, ‘But you never took any action on it.’ It’s much easier to claim the idea, than to action it.

  Actualising my ideas only happened later in life because previously I was dealing with so much stress. Before I woke up I was so consumed by my financial and emotional situations that I didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with anything creative. In odd moments of clarity I would think, ‘That would be a good idea’, but before you could say ‘prevarication’, I would be sucked into the issues of the day, too busy earning a living to think about anything else. When you’re Battle Ready, your home life is organised, your relationships are balanced and squared away so that you can start releasing your true potential. It’s about facing up to your finances, ensuring you’ve got something put away for a rainy day. That’s when you have the bandwidth and clarity to create. Stress and instability mustn’t affect your plans.

  I don’t go to work in the morning and distract myself with chatter like, ‘Oh shit, my relationship with my girlfriend Laura is in trouble . . . I said this, and she said that.’ If domestic trouble is a constant in your life, then you need to either resolve it or if
it’s a damaging relationship then you need to think about whether it is in both of your best interests to continue. Does it provide you with more positives than negatives and give you more energy than it takes away? While you’re in a mindset of stress and instability you’ll never be creating, you’ll never achieve anything much. Fortunately for me, in my current relationship, I’m 100 per cent supported, so I don’t need to waste time worrying.

  Our minds were meant to be creative, but we spend so much time in the survival default mode, worrying and obsessing with what has happened in our lives, what isn’t happening and fretting about the future, that the delicate seedling of our ideas gets choked before it’s even made it to the page.

  CREATING POSITIVE BEHAVIOURS

  ‘The quality of our lives depends on the quality of our habits.’

  – James Clear, Atomic Habits

  Forty per cent of an average person’s daily actions are based on habits that happen automatically, as if they’re sleepwalking, while the remaining 60 per cent are governed consciously. The brain looks for shortcuts and ways to be lazy, so anything that we repeat on a regular basis soon becomes assumed as a habit, be it driving a car, running in the morning, playing an instrument or speaking a new language, and the brain then allows itself to relax once again and switch off.

  So let’s consider some typical behaviours many of us would like to change, bad habits if you will: smoking, opening a bottle of wine the same time every evening, losing our temper, eating too much fried food, hitting ‘snooze’ and sleeping in, or leaving things till the last minute: even if they are lazy they are all learned behaviour. The good news is you can unload these unhelpful behaviours and create positive new habits in their place in a very short space of time. However, if these new traits are to become embedded as routine, they demand self-discipline and a keenness of intent from you. Building a better version of yourself starts through building those habits until they become second nature.