But the star of the show for me was former Chelsea and England footballer Wayne Bridge. Footballers aren’t really known for their toughness, with good reason. You’ll see them get a nudge in the back and they’ll be rolling about on the floor as if they’ve been shot. But Wayne was an absolute legend and hard as nails.
Because we didn’t want to treat the celebrities (although as sportspeople Wayne and Victoria aren’t strictly celebrities) any different from our normal candidates, we spoke to Wayne in depth about his former girlfriend’s alleged affair with ex-Chelsea teammate and England captain John Terry, which opened a few old wounds. But there was more to Wayne’s story than that. He’s very frustrated, because he doesn’t know what to do with his life. He had a great football career, won the Premier League, the FA Cup and played in a World Cup. But he’s still only in his thirties. He’s got plenty of money, a beautiful wife and kids, but is struggling to find a purpose. His situation is not dissimilar to military veterans, shorn of the buzz and the brotherhood. I really hope that his showing in SAS: Who Dares Wins proves to be a defining break point.
21
THE BUSUNESS
As soon as I signed the contract for SAS: Who Dares Wins, I knew the business would follow. It dovetailed perfectly, we started getting traction from day one. I bought domain names, got busy marketing and Break-Point’s first course took place while the first series of the show was being broadcast. It had been a very slow process, there had been a lot of doubts and every penny I earned from the show had gone into the business. But it was finally happening.
When Laura walked into my life, it was further proof that the stars had finally aligned. I met her while we were both working for the hostile environment training company. And although I wasn’t actively looking for a new partner, it soon became obvious that we shared almost identical visions. At the time, Laura was seeing another guy from our team. But one night, we were all having a few drinks in the pub when she asked about a tattoo on my forearm. When I told her it represented the children we’d saved in Thailand, me and her were pretty much a done deal. Her bloke went to the bar to get the drinks in and by the time he got back, him and Laura were pretty much history.
I wasn’t everyone’s idea of an ideal catch when we met. When some work came up in London, I had nowhere to stay, so ended up living in a tent. One of Laura’s friends put me up at the bottom of their garden. To be fair, I couldn’t stay in the house, because it was full up with kids. And they probably thought, ‘He’s SAS, he’ll love it out there!’ And while it wasn’t where I expected to be living in my mid-forties, it was nice and peaceful and meant I was able to continue with my planning and visualisation. And when Laura managed to get a council flat, it was there that Break-Point finally came to fruition.
Laura had been in the training world for a long time and loved the idea of Break-Point. She shared my passion and vision and was everything I’d ever wanted in a girlfriend. She has such a beautiful way about her and I struggle to pick a fault with her. She’s almost flawless, like an angel that has been sent specifically for me.
After we met, I gave up drinking. Laura didn’t really drink much anyway, but when she realised I wanted to stop, she said she’d do it with me. That was a drastic departure from anyone else I’d ever been out with. And who knows, if I hadn’t met Laura when I did, I might have met yet another boozer and it would have been mayhem all over again.
Giving up the booze was such a huge thing for me, although it wasn’t easy, because I’d been waging a mental battle with it for such a long time. I knew alcohol wasn’t for me, but I kept on drinking it anyway. That led to self-loathing, which manifested itself as anger. I’d tell myself I’d quit for a month, but after a week the battle would be on again. I just couldn’t understand what I should have been doing instead. And it was only really during filming for series two of SAS: Who Dares Wins that I finally managed to get on top of it. When the eight weeks of filming were up, I’d found so much clarity and focus. And I thought, ‘This is amazing. Why would I want to stop feeling like this? Why would I want to corrupt the chemistry?’ My mum tells me that since I stopped drinking, I’m a completely different person. I’m her son again – the soppy boy who loves a hug and a kiss – not that angry, disconnected person who was masquerading as him.
Not drinking made it so much easier to visualise the business. Your brain is like a farm. It can get overgrown and you have to keep weeding it and planting good thoughts. But as soon as you hit the bottle, it’s like a hurricane howling through, tearing everything up before you’ve even had the chance to harvest. I’ve got a short amount of time to push Break-Point globally, and if I looked back in five years’ time and thought, ‘I made mistakes because I was too busy on the piss’, I’d be in a world of hurt. I blew all the money I made in Iraq on booze, houses and failed relationships. But now was the chance to get as much traction for Break-Point as possible, so that when SAS: Who Dares Wins comes to an end, the business will have the momentum to keep going for a long, long time.
From being a soldier who conformed to the drinking culture in the military, I’ve now gone to the other extreme. Everything is extremes with me, nothing is middle of the road. I try not to judge people, but whereas I used to say to people, ‘Why the fuck are you not drinking?’, I’ll now find myself thinking the complete opposite. I did get a bit holier than thou in those early stages, to the extent that I wouldn’t go to the pub with my mum and her husband Simon when I visited them in Cornwall. But now I’m happy to go along and even have the odd beer.
I honestly think I’ve got some kind of PTSD from drinking, because when I have a beer in my hand, I start getting flashbacks to all the trauma it caused me. Drinking messes with my head and makes me spiral out of control. I tried to have a drink at a function recently and couldn’t even force it down me. It irritated me, because I’d spent so much money on alcohol in the past and now it was only when I was getting it for free that I realised it was pointless.
If I’d been with Laura when I was in the Special Forces, I probably would have stayed in, because she would have supported everything I did. She would have gone through all the hardships without moaning and making me feel bad. All the time I was away, she was the person I was wishing for, even if only subconsciously: somebody who is spiritual and interested in the development of the mind. She’s got a little boy called William to raise but has made so many sacrifices for the sake of me and Break-Point.
Laura is creative and has loads of ideas, some of them nuts, most of them great. When I get stressed about the business, she calms me down. She often puts me first, but not all the time. That’s crucial: when you’re on a plane and things go wrong, you have to put on your own gas mask before you can assist anyone else.
I sometimes ask myself, ‘If I hadn’t met Laura, would I have achieved what I have with Break-Point?’ It’s a difficult question to answer, but also irrelevant: it’s been great doing it with her, which is all that matters. Laura has been there every step of the way, and I’ll always be there to support her. That’s how any relationship should be.
On the first Break-Point course, Foxy and I wanted people to experience exactly what took place on the show. I’d bought a load of gear from the programme makers – Bergens, fatigues, boots, the lot, including a load of shit I didn’t end up using – sold 15–20 tickets, but had no real clue what we were doing. We were throwing more and more kit at it, which was costing us more than we were bringing in. It was all about survival, which, luckily, I’m quite good at.
I’d pulled in staff I used to work with from hostile environment training, because we thought we’d have to give people quite a hard time to teach them the skills. But because some people were there as fans of SAS: Who Dares Wins, we had to compromise a little. We were seeing pictures of girls with orange tans and long fingernails on the medical forms. People were turning up with pyjamas and hair straighteners. We had a girl called Michelle working for us at the time, and she was ex-army and like a l
ittle terrier. I left her and Laura in charge of the processing tent, where people had all their home comforts taken from them on arrival. And when I walked in, there were bottles of make-up and nail varnish remover on the table.
I said to Michelle, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘We’re stripping them down to their bare bones.’
‘Stop! People are paying for this, you’ve got to let them enjoy it!’
We were overstaffed and disorganised, but that first course was brilliant. Most of the people who turned up were the type who lived in a box, travelled to work in a box, worked in a box, went home in a box and repeated the same journey from box to box to box every day. So just staying out overnight and eating army rations was an eye-opener for them.
I think the fact that we were real-life Special Forces veterans helped. They soon realised that we weren’t just killing machines behind masks, we were people who genuinely cared about them and their development. Not only that, we believed that the stuff we learned in the Special Forces, and life, also applied to them.
There was one guy on that first course who clearly demonstrated the difference the company was going to make. He was virtually homeless, living in his car, but had scraped together enough money from a carpentry job to pay for the course. A year later, he sent us a message saying how that course had saved his life. He’d got himself a full-time job, a house and started exercising again. I had no real idea the business was going to touch people so deeply, but we’re now inundated with similar stories of transformation and positive growth.
We were soon inundated with emails from people asking for help. One girl, who had done 18 years in the military, emailed to say that she was suffering from PTSD and thinking of killing herself. She had the rope ready. She needed help and the conventional methods weren’t working for her. A lot of help that charities provide is process driven, involving filling out forms and assessments, and people with PTSD can’t face doing things like that.
I replied to the girl, saying that I would try to help and please not to do anything rash. Break-Point is a business that needs to make money. We can help people with PTSD and other forms of mental illness, but we’re not a charity. But we’ve had strong relationships with charities from the start, so can refer people on. So I put the girl in touch with Rock2Recovery, which was co-founded by Foxy and provides help to serving soldiers and veterans suffering with mental illness. Rock2Recovery didn’t have any long-winded processes, so they could start trying to deal with the girl’s problems immediately. That girl now says that without that happening, she wouldn’t be here anymore.
Break-Point does a lot of stuff on facing fears, whether of confined spaces or heights. We put people in challenging scenarios and help them through. Breathing is a major factor, because it provides clarity and prevents people from being overwhelmed by the situation. We built a 40-foot tower for people to abseil off, and to see the girl in question on top of that tower, talking people down, was incredible. Afterwards, people were telling me how amazing she was. This was a girl who came close to hanging herself, who found it too stressful to drive or even catch a train, and now she was driving from Birmingham to Sussex and providing emotional support to others. Seeing things like that convinced me that Break-Point was making a difference.
Break-Point’s mission statement is: to create a globally identifiable brand recognised for the positive growth and development of others. As such, since those early days, the courses have tended to be less physical and more focused on mindset, how we work as humans and personal growth. We’ve had to create a horrible course, called DENIED, which is as close to Special Forces Selection as we could design – ethically and legally – because there are people out there who want to be thrashed beyond belief. But that’s not really what corporate groups are after. Some request to be tested physically, but essentially they want to have fun, while learning transferable skills from the world of Special Forces that will be of value to them in their work and everyday life.
On our courses, I talk about the survival blueprint, which is the tendency to look for things to go wrong, which in turn leads to people living in the repeat cycle of yesterday I’ve already mentioned. That’s how humans have evolved, because so much could go wrong when we were living as hunter-gatherers. Everyone struggles with mindset, and if you don’t find out how your mind works, you’ll constantly think there’s something wrong with you. If you do find out how your mind works, things that were previously stressful become easier to deal with.
At Break-Point, we work with companies from the corporate world. And whatever the industry, the people are a company’s roots. That’s why we concentrate on the individual, how they can improve themselves, and therefore the company they work for. Never mind piling loads of training on your employees, you have to start at the bottom, which means developing them as people. If a company neglects its workforce, it will wither and die.
So many workers in the corporate world don’t even know what their company’s mission statement is. I couldn’t get my head around that. How can you not know why you’re getting out of bed every morning and going to work? So, at the team and leadership level, we put a lot of work into creating mission statements. If the company already has an overarching mission statement that is vague or meaningless, individual departments and branches should create new ones, tangible goals that can be broken down into milestones. If you don’t have that in place, your office will be like a grown-up crèche. Our clients that have adopted this have witnessed amazing growth.
Mission Success Cycles are a military thing and there are hundreds of them. One of the basics is SMEAC: Situation, Mission, Execution, Administration/Logistics, Command/Signal. But all Mission Success Cycles boil down to: Plan, Brief, Deliver, Debrief. In military and business environments, processes deliver results, not emotions. But processes don’t happen in a lot of offices.
While I was working for the oil and gas company in Australia, I didn’t have one team meeting in two years. Employees hadn’t been set any objectives. If you don’t have objectives, you don’t have a purpose. And employees without a purpose are just working the payroll. Money should be a by-product, but if it becomes the focus, your company will under-achieve. I just couldn’t understand a billion-dollar company not investing in its workforce. It was a massive organisation but the whole team ethic had got lost somewhere along the way.
Employees had no idea what good or bad work looked like, because there were no debriefs. The leadership debriefs we have on SAS: Who Dares Wins mirror what takes place in Special Forces Selection. They’re called ‘prayer meetings’, apparently because during the Aden Emergency in the 1960s, the only time the SAS could get together for a debrief was while the locals were praying, including the bad guys. Prayer meetings are about reflecting on the day’s work and pooling opinions. During Selection, that information isn’t fed back to the soldiers, they’ll just be shown a red card if they’re not performing. But in a corporate environment, that information should be discussed with employees, so that improvements can be made.
You could have the best people in the world working for you, but if they’re not motivated, goal-driven and focused, they won’t do the job to the best of their ability and produce results. But people have come on our courses, come back and told us their company’s culture has changed because of Break-Point. For that reason, they’ll tell us it’s the best training they’ve ever done.
A Special Forces team will consist of many different characters. There will be someone who’s particularly driven, someone who’s particularly analytical, someone who’s particularly creative or someone who’s particularly empathetic. So before they come on a course, we have the corporate employees do something called PRISM, which is an online assessment tool created by neuro-scientist Colin Wallace, a former member of army Intelligence and psychological warfare expert. PRISM defines which kind of character you are, because unless you understand what kind of character you are, you’ll struggle to develop.
When I did my first PRISM test and received my results, I thought they’d mixed me up with someone else. They said I was really creative with a good deal of empathy, which didn’t ring true to me. I thought I was more of a driven type. But because the test asks questions in so many different ways, it prevents you from delivering your own perception of yourself. You’re unable to trick it, there’s no escaping the truth.
It’s a bit scary suddenly discovering who you really are and that you spent years trying to be a person you weren’t. What’s even scarier is that I actually knew who I was – consider my love of music and clothes as a kid and my artistic streak – but had buried those inclinations. The fact that so many people never find out who they really are explains why they spend their lives doing the wrong things, and spending your life doing things that don’t suit your true personality can lead to serious frustration, anger issues and mental illness.
The PRISM test results help us build project teams for corporates. You can’t have a team that consists exclusively of people with the same characteristics, you need some of everything. And you don’t make someone who’s creative do hours and hours of analytical reports. A good manager will pick the right people for the right jobs, which requires a good understanding of each member of staff’s strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes you won’t have a choice, so you have to also be able to adapt. An ideal Special Forces team will consist of individuals with particular roles – a medic, a demolitions expert, this, that and the other – but who can do everything extremely competently.
One of the beauties of the Special Forces is that we’re a group of leaders within a team, all sharing the same goal. The traditional view of leadership and hierarchy doesn’t exist in the Special Forces. Everyone is encouraged to speak up, say what they think might be wrong or could be improved. Effective businesses will have a similar ethos, but it’s a hard thing to change in the corporate world. And, to be fair, that hierarchical system also exists in the conventional army, for good reason. It’s very easy to say, ‘Let’s flatten everything out and get rid of hierarchies’, but you have to have a strong team to be able to implement that policy. If you can’t be sure that your recruits are dependable, you have to crack the whip.
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