COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

FIRST EDITION

© Anthony Middleton 2020

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover photograph © Pål Hansen/Twenty Twenty

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Anthony Middleton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008336516

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008336547

Version: 2020-09-29

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DEDICATION

I dedicate this book to you, the positive thinkers, the positive outlookers of life, and to those who possess the power of positivity and believe that anything can be achieved if you put your mind to it.

CONTENTS

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Note to Readers

5  Dedication

6  Contents

7  INTRODUCTION: BULLETPROOF

8  CHAPTER 1: I KNOW WHO I AM

9  CHAPTER 2: TEAR THE MOULD AWAY

10  CHAPTER 3: KILL THEM WITH KINDNESS

11  CHAPTER 4: KEEP IT SIMPLE

12  CHAPTER 5: CHANGE OR DIE

13  CHAPTER 6: MAKE MANY PLATFORMS

14  CHAPTER 7: YOU’VE GOT TO GO THROUGH THIS

15  CHAPTER 8: BE A SHEPHERD NOT A SHEEP

16  CHAPTER 9: GIVE THEM ENOUGH ROPE

17  CHAPTER 10: THE GARDEN OF EDEN

18  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

19  By The Same Author

20  About The Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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INTRODUCTION
BULLETPROOF

It could be any night. We could be anywhere.

This one starts in a huge encampment out in the grim, grey, enemy-crawling desert. It’s stuffed with millions upon millions of dollars of the most advanced military equipment known to man. During the day, hundreds of US personnel hurry about with their sleeves rolled up, their berets set just so and their regulation assault rifles slung over their shoulders. CIA operatives in tan chinos and sporting Oakley shades do their best to pretend they don’t exist. All around us are massive hangars housing fully kitted-out Hawks, Apaches and Chinooks. This isn’t a massive surprise. The gyms here are bigger than an entire British base.

There’s an almost hallucinogenic difference between the US camp and my destination later tonight, a shabby, run-down compound deep in the desert. It’s difficult to believe they exist in the same world, let alone the same country. For now, though, they’re both shrouded by darkness, at that time when everything changes and objects lose the reassuring form they possessed in the day: the shadow cast by a dog is easily mistaken for a whole patrol of men, a dislodged stone sounds like a rifle shot.

We learned where we were going at a briefing two hours ago, and the following minutes have passed quickly. I’m absorbed by routines that have become deeply familiar to me. I check my kit, again and again and again. I know that if I make just one slip – a piece of carelessness in cleaning my weapon, an oversight when packing ammunition – I might as well be writing my own death sentence. I don’t want my last thoughts on this planet to begin, ‘If only …’

Once I’m sorted, I enter the coordinates of our target into my GPS. I check the map, looking for reference points. If I see a mountain, for instance, I’ll want to remember its location so that when I see its triple peaks out of the corner of my right eye in the dark, I’ll know we’re heading in the right direction. After that, I look hard at every piece of intelligence that’s come my way and stare at the buildings I’ll soon be storming into. I commit every detail to memory, so I won’t be surprised by a corridor that opens out unexpectedly or a door that leads nowhere.

I always have the same questions running through my head. What is my job? Where do I go first? Where can I expect to find armed guards? Are there civilians? When I see the target, how will I identify him? I try to break every element down until I’ve reached a point where I understand it completely. I have a visual mind. When I’m looking at a map there will come a moment when its contours levitate into three dimensions above the page.

When I’ve done all this, I run through the first plan, and for each key moment try to find an alternative in case something goes wrong. If this door won’t open, how else will we get in? Secondary options? Try an entrance round the back? It’s another form of visualisation. I try to imagine every single eventuality to the point where I almost have a muscle memory of it. When the action actually does unfold, it will be as if I’ve already experienced it.

The skill is not to overthink it or to overload yourself with more information than necessary. You need to stay nimble; you’ve got to be able to think on your feet. If you’ve absorbed too many details, your thinking will be rigid, undynamic. As Mike Tyson once said: ‘Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’ When the shit hits the fan – as it inevitably will at some point – I know that I still have the foundations of the mission in my head. Everything else can be supplied by my training.

The first few times I went into combat I had a nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach that ended up destroying my appetite. It didn’t last long. I don’t stuff my face before setting out, but I have to make sure I’m fed and watered. Carbed up. The mission could last two or three hours. It could also unfold over two or three days.

Some people seek out others. I just want to be by myself and try to grab as much time alone as I can. I want to get into the zone, run the mission through my head again. Tonight I’m calm. This hasn’t always been the way. There have been occasions when I was able to actually see my nerves. One night, before a mission that had very particular personal resonance for me, I remember how the adrenaline came on like a king tide. I could feel it in my veins, surging and throbbing in great liquid waves. I’d headed over to the hangar ahead of my comrades half an hour early, to give myself the chance to have a brew in the silence before it all kicked off. But as I dipped my spoon into the packet of sugar, I noticed it was shaking. Little granules were falling off its sides and back into the packet. I watched for a moment, focused on each crystal as it tumbled downwards, then looked up anxiously toward the hangar door. This was no good. I had to get myself under control.

I tried forcing myself to steady my breathing, slowing it down, deepening my draws of oxygen. But when I looked down, the spoon was still shaking. At that moment I heard footsteps. I glanced up. It was another soldier. Give it thirty seconds and there wouldn’t be any sugar left on the fucking thing. The other guy’s footsteps came closer towards me, echoing in the vast, dark hangar. As he approached, I felt a sudden rage at my weakness. It blasted through me, but I managed to control it. I allowed the fury to fill me up, every limb now engorged and primed, every muscle taut. A few years earlier, my anger would have taken over. Now I’d learned to use it like an injection of insanely powerful steroids. I was ten times stronger than I’d been a moment ago. A hundred times stronger. I looked at the spoon. It was almost still.

‘Making a brew?’ he asked.

‘Yes, mate,’ I said, looking up with a calm smile. ‘Have we got any biscuits?’

I know that controlling my emotions is so important. I have no problem showing how I feel to others – I don’t mind them knowing that I’m human and that I’m vulnerable – but in some situations it’s selfish to unsettle others by exposing the worst of yourself. So whatever I’m thinking inside, I work hard to make sure nobody can guess that I’m anything other than relaxed and ready.

I spend a few more minutes alone in the hangar. Even now, at the beginning of a night that I know could well be my last, it’s strange to be confronted by scenes that speak so strongly of another, more mundane kind of existence. It’s also oddly reassuring, a reminder that no matter what happens later, life will go on without me.

Take the table in the corner. It’s a sight that in all the years I’ve served in the forces I’ve somehow never been able to escape. Everywhere I go, it’s exactly like this – an arrangement as British as the royal wave. The shitty table with the foldaway legs and the shiny brown wood-effect surface. The chipped mug full of spoons with the faded writing on it: HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD or MG HOLDINGS LTD. The steel urn with the red light and the black power cord and the old taped-on Biro notice that warns ‘CARE! HOT!’, the trusty half-empty box of PG Tips, next to it the scaggy jar of Nescafe with the cracked lid. And, last but not least, the damp-stained, crumpled packet of Tate & Lyle, the sugar inside it rocky and discoloured after being dipped in by too many wet spoons. In many ways it’s depressing, but there’s something about this collection of tatty objects that never fails to make me smile.

After a while I’m joined by the rest of the team and we head out onto the night-shrouded pan. The silhouette of the Chinook is hard to make out at first, then slowly it comes into focus. Even standing idle, it projects brute power. With its rotors extended, it’s a big, ugly beast: thirty metres long, almost six metres tall, and with guns bristling menacingly on either side. The helicopter has been stripped of all excess weight to aid manoeuvrability, its walls taken right back to the outer panels. Ungainly as it is, I feel a strange affection for the vehicle that has come to play such a big part in my life. More than the operations themselves, it’s the minutes, hours even, that we spend in this machine that I remember most clearly. So much of what happens in combat is instinctive, with events often being over almost before they’ve begun. But here in the Chinook there’s always time for me to think and reflect.

After we clamber aboard we all sit there in our team locations – our positions dictated by how we’ll deploy as soon as we step off the aircraft. We sit evenly spaced on benches that run parallel to the helicopter’s sides. It’s more comfortable than you might think. Then the engine starts. You hear a loud, piercing noise, a wail so loud that for a moment it’s almost unbearable, before it gives way to the heavy whirring of the rotors. I feel a tiny pulse of exhilaration as they pick up speed. Here we go again, I think. Then the Chinook’s hatch door rises and we’re lifted into the night air.

Whoomp whoomp whoomp.

Back at the base we were joking around, taking photos and laughing; far more relaxed, far more chilled out than you’d expect. We all know what we’re doing, we know what we’re capable of, so it creates a playfulness that often expresses itself in extremely bleak humour.

That mood is over now. The helicopter climbing up is the sign for me: shit’s happening now, we’re not turning back. I’m getting into the zone. I look around at the other men. They look back. Nobody says anything, but we exchange glances. Are we all here? Are we all good? Are we all ready?

Whoomp whoomp whoomp.

Moments pass, and when I next look up I see everyone lost in their own little zones, psyching themselves up. Some just stare into the middle distance, others have their iPods on. It’s a night mission, so the uncanniness of our environment is heightened by the fact that, inside and out, we’re flying without lights in order to try to avoid unwanted attention. Looking out the window, I can see the dark silhouettes of the mountains that we’re flying between, keeping as low – and as low key – as possible. I try to match them to the topography I’d seen on the map earlier in the evening. It’s reassuring to have even a vague idea of where we are amid the all-consuming darkness.

Whoomp whoomp whoomp.

The rotors sound distant to me now, almost obliterated by the raw aggression pulsing through my headphones. It’s cold at night. I’m swaddled in a big fucking jacket. It’s XXXL, more duvet than coat. I listen to heavy metal – Slipknot, Metallica, Rage Against the Machine – at full volume. Drums crashing, guitars distorted and dirty, voices screaming. Wave upon wave of nasty, violent music that sends my heart racing, makes every nerve in my body feel alive.

Whoomp whoomp whoomp.

Forty minutes into the flight, a voice in my earpiece. It’s the sergeant major: ‘Ten-minute call.’ My heart begins to thud. I put on my helmet, connect my night-vision goggles (NVGs) and begin getting used to seeing with them. They send me into a narrow, grainy world of green and black. When I first started to wear them they made me feel a bit like I was drunk, reeling about because my depth perception was way off and everything was tinged with a nauseous green fog. Now I can see as clearly with them as with my naked eyes. Once I get out there I know I’ll be able to judge every crack in a door, every barely visible movement on the other side of a dark room, with incredible accuracy. My enemies will be struggling in the dark; I’ll be able to see things down to the nearest millimetre.

Whoomp whoomp whoomp.

Only the briefest stretch of time separates us from the moment when we’ll have to burst out of the helicopter and into the dust cloud it always kicks up as it lands. I’ve done it many times over, but the experience never fails to get my adrenaline surging. It’s when we know we’re at our most vulnerable. Eight to ten seconds when your world is reduced to a beige haze and the knowledge that every extra moment spent in it is an extra moment of danger. Propelled by the Chinook’s downdraft you have to sprint, breath hoarse in your chest, legs burning with a sudden rush of lactic acid. You’re not thinking of anything except escaping the dust cloud.

You’re hyper-alert. It’s almost like you don’t miss a thing, as if all of your senses have been supercharged. You have to be able to absorb and assess every piece of information that’s thrown at you, and you’ve got to do it in fractions of seconds.

And yet there’s something euphoric about that time. People always say to me: Ant, you’re an adrenaline junkie. They’re wrong. I’m very calculated. I’m in control. I’m not a reckless person. But what I’ve realised is that there will always be part of me that’s in love with walking that delicate line that separates life and death. I’m most alive during those beautiful, uncomplicated fragments of time when all the noise and mess falls away and your existence is stripped back to two stark outcomes. You’re either going to live, or you’re going to die. That’s it. It’s the purest form of life: to me, the ultimate form of peace. You run like fuck to reach the other side; and then you’re through, ready to slide into a gun position.

Whoomp whoomp whoomp.

More time passes. I know how easy it would be to drift into a negative spiral. One thought leads to another. Before you know it, you’re crippled, your head filled with doubt. You’ve ceased to live in the here and now and have instead stepped into a world of what ifs and maybes. I know that lots of people suffer from imposter syndrome. I don’t. I’m here, in this helicopter, because I’m good at my job. If I start wondering whether I deserve it, if I let doubts creep in, I’ll inhibit my ability to do what I do effectively. You don’t want to be that guy who loses his nerve and pokes his head around the corner, in the process making himself the world’s easiest target. As far as I’m concerned, when I hit the ground, I’m the best soldier in the world.

The first time I came under fire, all that ran through my head afterwards, when the mission was over, was: That’s it, that’s it done. I’d held my nerve, I didn’t fall apart. Now it’s become part of my everyday existence, although being shot at during the night will always remain strange to me. You don’t see the bullets, or where they’re coming from. But you hear the whipcrack as they zip past you. The louder the snap, the nearer the miss. As time goes by you learn to tell the different weapons apart. That’s an AK-47; that’s a heavy machine gun. Fuck, an RPG.

I don’t let it affect me. I think to myself, if I do get hit then hopefully it’ll be in the head and I won’t know a fucking thing about it. If it’s another part of my body, then I’ll deal with it there and then. Worrying won’t make me any safer. Far better to focus on the way I move, the way I use the cover. I’m fast, confident and aggressive. I believe I can do things that the majority of other people can’t. Positive thinking. If I fixate on the bullets, I’ll stop or I’ll hide, and probably end up in more danger. I never go out there thinking I’ll be shot. I’ve always believed I’ll be getting back on that helicopter on the way home.

I’m sure the enemy can see my aggression. I’m sure too that it gets into their heads. If your enemy looks bulletproof, then the chances are that part of you might begin to believe they really are.

Whoomp whoomp whoomp.

The sergeant major signals the five-minute call. I switch into another zone. My hands run across all of my webbing and equipment. Checking. Checking again. Checking again. I’m still cool, still thinking calmly about what’s ahead of us. Is my weapon’s magazine in securely. Is it cocked? Do I have a round in the chamber? Safety catch is on.

My weapons feel as much part of my body as my hands or knees. There’s something I can’t fully explain to anyone else about the way I hold and nurture them. I’ve moulded my rifle with little bits of tape on its stock so that it fits perfectly into my arms; so perfectly that I can operate it with one hand. Once I go into combat I know exactly where it is at every moment. When I move, it moves. It never feels as if there’s any conscious effort. Lifting my rifle is, to me, no different to stretching out a leg. I can carry it through tight spaces – narrow doors, tiny cubbyholes – without it ever snagging or catching on anything. It’s my life. It’s everything.

Two-minute call.

Whoomp whoomp whoomp.

I can feel the Chinook losing height, the sensation of rapid but controlled falling in the core of my body merging uncomfortably with my rising adrenaline. We all stand up, face the door and stabilise ourselves for landing by placing our hands shoulder to shoulder.

My mind flicks forward again, imagining those seconds before I kick the first door down. I don’t fuck around; I don’t overthink. I just commit. I know I have to get through it, no matter what. Holding back won’t help me. What you’re unbelievably conscious of in those seconds is the people around you. You’re stacked up against the doorframe, about to launch yourself into a life-or-death situation, your two comrades sweeping to the other side of the entrance. You’re all looking after each other. You need to know, with absolute, unshakeable confidence, that whatever happens to you, they’ll get the job done, or take a bullet for you. These are men you’ve trained with, kicked doors down with. You know how they operate. The look doesn’t last long. I nod, or squeeze a shoulder. Let’s fucking do this.

A lot of the doors are shitty, worm-eaten relics. One kick and they smash almost into dust; you feel like Superman. Others you have to hammer away at – the tension rising with every blow that doesn’t knock it over. But sometimes on those missions where everything is about discretion, once you get flowing you don’t even need to kick them open. Keep it simple. If the door’s already unlocked, then it probably doesn’t need your size tens being put through it. There’s you and another guy, lined up on the wall either side, whispering over our radio. ‘Try the door.’ The look … then, ‘One, two, three.’ Boom. You’re through, your men behind you.

Whoomp whoomp whoomp.

I slip the jacket off, remove my headphones and get down on one knee. Another silent check of all the lads. Seeing them fills me with confidence. They’re good guys. I know I can rely on them. I have to rely on them. I’m in that fucking zone. Whoomp whoomp whoomp. My NVGs are down over my eyes. The helicopter surges down to hit the ground, making my stomach feel as if it’s trying to swallow my heart. No matter how many times I’ve been in this position, I’ve never quite got used to the speed with which these massive twin-rotored machines can be made to move. It’s truly incredible. Their pilots hurl them around mid-air like they’re plastic toys. If they see an RPG coming towards them, they can spin them on a dime, dancing elegantly out of its path.

Ready. Ready. Ready. Waiting for the tailgate to go down. A mechanical whirr, and the world outside comes steadily into view. The cold, dry, woody air of the desert rushes in, along with great billows of dust. We launch ourselves straight out.

GO.

All of this feels like a long time ago. When I think about that part of my life, it sometimes seems as if all of these things were experienced by a completely different man. So much has happened since. I am no longer a warrior; I’m a TV presenter, an author and a businessman. I’ve experienced crushing lows, and incredible highs. I’ve been to prison, the top of Mount Everest, to places I’d never previously have believed possible. But there’s a thread that connects that version of me to the one currently writing this book: positivity.

Although I didn’t necessarily realise it back then, it was thinking positively that helped me to thrive in the armed forces. It was thinking positively that meant I could go into combat feeling as if I were bulletproof. And it’s been the same ever since. My positive mentality has enabled me to overcome setbacks that might otherwise have been fatal; and it has allowed me to seize opportunities that another person might have let slip through their hands.

I was born positive. Maybe it was something I inherited from my father or absorbed from him in the short time I was with him on the planet. But my mindset is also the result of the way my life has unfolded. Don’t get me wrong – it’s been a long, tough process. The growth of my positivity has been mirrored by the ways in which I’ve grown as a man. The missteps I’ve taken have been just as significant as the moments when I’ve looked to be flying. I wasn’t the finished article when I was in the Special Forces, and I’m far from the finished article now, but I know I can look back at key moments in my life and tell myself that I’ve drawn the right lessons from them. I’m not sure I’d have been able to attain this knowledge had I not been through trials and tribulations, shit moments and low days, setbacks and outright failures.

Usually in this kind of book the author will tell you that he’s sharing his mistakes so that you can avoid making the same ones yourself. I’m not going to do that in Zero Negativity. I want to show you that if you never make mistakes in life, you never make anything. Nobody in the history of the world has ever been perfect. Nobody. You’ll never be perfect, and that’s OK, that’s human. But what you can become is the best version of yourself. Fucking up can be as valuable to your personal development as any university course. I needed to find myself in a position where I was making the same stupid mistakes over and over again – getting into fights, drinking heavily – before I reached rock bottom. And if I hadn’t sunk to those depths, I know for sure that I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in now.

There’s nothing complex about my philosophy. If you tackle a negative situation with a positive mindset, you’ll find a solution. If you tackle a positive situation with a positive mindset, then it’s win–win: you’ll be through the clouds. So why wouldn’t you give yourself that built-in advantage? Why would you want to tackle anything in life with negativity? Having a negative mindset effectively means tying one hand behind your back.

Sometimes I ask people, ‘Have you ever been excited about waking up?’ Very often, I’ll know the answer before it’s even left their lips.

‘No.’

‘What, never in your life? Not even on Christmas Day when you were a kid?’

‘Well, yeah, of course.’

‘You were in a positive mindset then, because you were going to get presents and eat turkey. They’re feelings you’ll never forget.’

‘For sure.’

‘Then why don’t you have them now? You don’t put yourself in the right situations, you don’t grab opportunities, you don’t think positively.’

Most kids are naturally positive, whereas a lot of adults seem to have dedicated large portions of their life to deleting their capacity for positivity. We’re told to worry about exams, we’re told that we’re not bringing up our children right, we’re told that we should have a particular kind of job by a particular point in our life, we’re told that we should be climbing up the property ladder. Conformity to these sorts of ideas is imposed upon us, and its effect is often very negative. You’re expected to get in line with all these things, and you get so involved in doing so that you develop a one-track vision. We get so focused on the path that others have laid out in front of us that we forget to ever look up and take in the world around us.

We need to rediscover that excitement we felt when we were a kid, when the world appeared big and exciting, and everything seemed new and full of adventure. As most people get older, their horizons narrow; they tend to think more about what they can’t do than what they can.

I’m different. I’ll try to seize a positive from any negative situation that comes along. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes you don’t think you’ve been able to extract any benefit until, having parked it up, three or four years down the line you realise its significance or how it connects to other elements in your life. If you’re a positive person, you can leave negative experiences on the shelf, safe in the knowledge that they’ll come in handy one day. They’re there, but you don’t let them distract you.

Over time I’ve trained my mind so that I approach every situation I’m in with a positive mindset. It comes naturally, without thinking. I’ve got to the point where I’m such a positive thinker that I’m permanently convinced that good things will come my way. If I told you what I see when I look ahead towards my future, you’d think I was an absolute madman. All I see are bright lights. And that was as true when I was in my prison cell, or sitting in the pissing wet of an Afghan hillside, as it is now.

When I left prison in 2013 I had £10.52 to my name. Nothing, really. But I was excited. I was at the bottom, and I knew I only had one way to go. I’ve got a rock-solid foundation now and I’m building, building, building. Charities, tech companies, clothing brands. I want everything life can give me.

I can see how some people might think I’m delusional. But I’m a realist. I believe I can get there. I can back everything up. I know I’m willing to work, sacrifice and suffer to get to the place I want to reach. I’m willing to try and fail, try and fail, try and fail until I get it right. I’ve got so much positive energy now that I sometimes feel as if you could run the National Grid off me.

What I want to do in this book is help you tap into the same.

Everything I do now – books, TV programmes, speaking tours – it’s all because I want to help people develop and make them realise what they’re capable of. I’m fascinated by people, I’m fascinated by their potential, and also by the fact that most of us only use a quarter of our power. I find that really frustrating. Negativity is the thing that, maybe more than any other factor, will put a limit on your ability to be the best version of yourself you can be.

The good news is that you’re not doomed to negativity. There’s a way out. Everybody can train themselves to think positively and tackle negative situations with a positive mindset. It just takes a concerted effort. You may not feel positive all the time – nobody does – and yet eventually you reach a point where you’re automatically tackling every situation with a positive mindset. It takes time and it requires brutal honesty, but it’s worth it. While I’d never say that you’ll be invincible, I guarantee that not much will faze you.

Once you’ve mastered a positive mindset, you’ll be excited to take on negative situations because you’ll be desperate to see what their outcome will be. You’ll see them as opportunities to discover where the limits of your potential lie and as chances to learn new skills, experience new things.

When a positive situation comes along, and you dive into it with a positive mindset, you’ll feel like you’re flying, or as if you’ve been transported to another dimension. I often experience extended phases of complete euphoria, riding the clouds with Zeus looking down on the world, endorphins racing through my veins. It can get to the point where I can’t even get to sleep because I’m so excited about getting up the following morning and re-attacking life. This mood can last for weeks, each day speeding past in the blink of an eye.

Living a life with zero negativity has many physical benefits. It will encourage you to follow a healthier, more productive lifestyle. Studies show that positive people get more physical activity, eat a better diet and are less likely to smoke or drink alcohol to excess. In addition to this, current research shows that positive thinking can confer many health benefits, including lower rates of depression and psychological distress, greater resistance to the common cold and reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease. They even think it will help you live longer. And the more positive you are, the better your relationships with everyone around you will be.

Being negative is isolating. Negative individuals don’t tend to have many friends. By contrast, positivity attracts other people. When you’re positive, you’ll find that others just want to be around you – it’s as if you’ve become magnetic. And being around somebody who exudes positivity is the most powerful thing. It can feel tiring at times because they’ll be a mass of whirring energy, but you’ll come away with excitement and inspiration pumping through your veins.

These are all good things, but it’s the mental advantages positivity can offer that I’m most interested in, and which will be the focus of this book. In the chapters that follow I’ll show you how to embrace failure and use it to your advantage, how to learn to see change as the foundation of your future success, how to develop resilience, how to deal with bullies online and offline, what it means to be a positive father, how to make and seize opportunities for yourself, and how to live a life with no regrets. I’m not here to tell you who to be, where you should live or what job you should do. All that is up to you. What I do want to do, however, is to give you the tools you need to become the best possible version of yourself.

One last thing. My voice isn’t the only one you’ll hear in these pages. Each chapter will feature my wife Emilie’s take on whichever subject I’ve been talking about. My life has been improved a million times over by her kind, measured, no-bullshit perspective. I’m sure that yours will be too.

CHAPTER 1
I KNOW WHO I AM

Ahead of Series 4 of SAS: Who Dares Wins, one of the producers asked me in for a meeting. ‘Ant,’ she said, ‘how do you feel about us changing things up a bit?’

Not long before we met, the British Army had announced that, from that point on, women would be allowed to apply for every single role in the military, including combat roles, with the Royal Marines doing likewise. For the first time in its history, recruitment would be decided by ability alone, and gender wouldn’t have anything to do with it. The producer had suggested that we should follow suit and include female contestants.

Initially, every instinct told me to steer clear. ‘I’m not sure,’ I told her. ‘This isn’t for us to do. It’s going to be complex – maybe it would be better if we left this to the army and Marines?’

I could see my producer was still thinking about it. Then she surprised me by asking me what it was I looked for in recruits for the show.

This was an easy one to answer: ‘I’m looking for all-round, balanced individuals.’ As soon as I said it, I realised something: that last word. It doesn’t matter if it’s a male or female – it’s about an individual. What’s most important is that they’re somebody who knows themselves better than anybody else; somebody who knows their strengths, but who also acknowledges that they have weaknesses and insecurities. Within hours of the start of filming I saw how tough, driven and resilient the female contestants were. It was eye-opening to watch the way they threw themselves heart and soul into every challenge. They fought as hard as the men, maybe harder. I instantly regretted my original reluctance. Having women alongside men added a completely different dimension to the programme.

The whole show is about putting all the contestants under a microscope, exposing them to such high levels of stress that they’re forced to confront elements of their personality that they’ve tried to keep hidden. Many discover talents within themselves that they never knew existed, others are surprised to find fault lines that, under pressure, start to crack apart. There’s no contestant, no matter how far into the competition they get, who comes away without a greater understanding of every aspect of their personality. What I realised was that I still had lots to learn too.

If there was any positive to be gained from the upheaval and distress of my early years, it was that during that period I picked up the habit of self-reflection. Like the men and women trying to get through to the end of SAS: Who Dares Wins, an intense period of disorientation and discomfort helped me gain a new knowledge of myself. If I’d had a more normal upbringing, I bet I’d have continued on a happy, oblivious path, like most kids.

Instead, there was my father’s death, and its unsettling, disorienting aftermath, when within days my mum married a new man, Dean, and every detail about Dad was wiped from our lives. Even his picture was taken off the walls. There were some days when it could seem as if he’d never existed at all. Or, at least, that’s what the adults in our house appeared to want us to pretend. His money was still good, though. The family lived it up for a bit in Portsmouth, using his life insurance payout, which took us from a council house to a big fancy home and private schools. Then everything turned upside again in the blink of an eye.

It was never actually clear to me and my siblings what prompted the sudden move to another country. There was a feud of some kind between my mum’s and late dad’s sides of my family. We were mostly protected from it, but we could all tell that something was going on off stage. So perhaps that had something to do with it.

One cold, damp winter’s day when I was nine, my mum picked me up from school early in the afternoon. I was a bit surprised as she didn’t normally come at this time, so I asked her what was going on. She said, ‘Dean’s patio firm has burned down.’ She was strangely calm and matter of fact. Even at that age I was knocked a bit off balance by this.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s all gone, burned to the ground.’

We drove over to the factory. Cinders and ash were everywhere. The fire brigade had already been and so some things were only half-burned, just about standing. In the middle of it all was my stepdad Dean. He was clearly distressed, picking up horribly stained patio slabs and then throwing them down in disgust. He kept on saying, ‘All that work. All that work.’

Apparently there had been an electrical fault. With the business literally up in flames, Dean and my mum decided that when the insurance money came through, they would move the whole family off to rural France.

Portsmouth is a working city. It’s busy and vibrant, full of builders, bricklayers and scaffolders. And it’s as British as they come. Going from there to a small village in Normandy was a lot for us to take in. All of a sudden we’d swapped the densely packed bungalows and villas of England’s south coast for rambling open countryside. I’d been used to crowded cul-de-sacs, bustling high streets, the chatter of passers-by. Now we were surrounded by endless land, space and quiet.

Our new home was an ancient farm with a huge barn next to it. Dean threw himself into remaking the whole house, which was in a fucking state, almost a wreck. In those first few months while he tried to make it liveable, we slept and ate in caravans that were parked up in the barn.

That was when it all hit me. I remember asking myself: where did the good life go? How come we’re living in a barn? You can deal with change when it’s a question of moving two streets, even two towns, away. But starting your whole life again? That’s something else, especially when, like me, you’re still grieving for a dead father. There were other strange things that I couldn’t get my head around. We were eating pasta and sweetcorn for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I was being dressed in hand-me-down shoes and clothes from my brothers. And the adults were driving a shitty old car that occasionally would simply refuse to start. But on the other hand, the house Dean was working on was massive.

To begin with, this strangeness was compounded by the exhilarating freedom my brothers and I discovered in our newfound isolation. We’d moved in summer, and since Dean and our mum were so focused on getting things up and running, we were given the run of the fields around the house. Nobody told us what we could or couldn’t do. Even sleeping in a caravan was like an adventure after suburban Portsmouth.

And then it all came to an end. The threat of going to a French Catholic school had hung over us right through July and August, but we’d managed to shove it to the backs of our minds. I didn’t speak a word of French, not even stuff like bonjour or au revoir. We were also going to be the first English children to ever attend the school. New kids are always treated like they’re carrying a disease – surely the fact that we were foreign would make that even worse.

On the first day of school we were late – the fucking car wouldn’t start. I can vividly remember going into the classroom. I walked in and there was a moment of silence. Every single pair of eyes in the classroom bored right into me. The way those rows of kids were staring at me – it was as if I’d murdered somebody. My cheeks went red, but it was going to get worse. On the way in, once it had become clear that we were going to be late, I’d asked my two older brothers how to explain that we’d had the problem with the car. They told me, ‘Just say, “voiture kaput”.’ This would have been good advice, but what they hadn’t told me was that you have to pronounce ‘kaput’ as ‘kapoot’. If you say ‘kapot’, people will think you’re saying ‘capote’, which is a French word for condom.

I went into the classroom in the middle of a French lesson being taught by Monsieur Laurent, the headmaster, who was bald, with glasses and a polo neck – he looked as French as you like – and who ran the school along with his wife (because it was a Catholic school, the majority of the staff were nuns, something that added an extra layer of weirdness as I walked in). Madame Laurent was known as the good cop, while her husband was the bad cop. The tradition there was that if you were late, you had to stand up in front of the class and explain why. Schools are stricter in France, especially religious ones. I was dragged up in front of the blackboard, and then Monsieur Laurent spoke some words in French to me. I looked blankly back at him. I had no idea what he was saying. He repeated his question, in English this time: ‘Why were you late?’

That’s when I said the only French words I knew: ‘Voiture kaput.’ Except, of course, not knowing any better, I said ‘kapot’. The whole class burst into laughter, and I just stood there, bewildered, with no idea what was going on. Then Monsieur Laurent put me out of my misery and escorted me to my chair. I sat there humiliated and angry, and increasingly anxious about what was to come next.

It was the longest day of my life. Everything was strange. Everything was a challenge. Going into the playground that very first break time I found that I was an object of fascination. Most of the other kids crowding around me had never met anyone from England. This was La Manche, Normandy, a place where a lost cow or a surprisingly big chicken could end up as the talk of the town. It was two hundred miles in distance, and about a century in time, from Paris.

To them I was a freakshow. One minute they were all laughing at me, the next they were firing a million incomprehensible questions in my direction. One thing they kept asking me was if I wanted to play ‘babyfoot’. I now know that this means table football, but at the time I thought they were warning me that we’d be having baby food for lunch. So when it was time for the rest of the kids to go to the cafeteria, I just found somewhere to hide. Going hungry seemed to me a better option than cramming mush down my throat.

I remember crouching down, asking myself again and again, ‘What the fuck is going on?’

When we got back to our home later that afternoon I went straight to the den we’d made in the massive conifer trees at the bottom of the garden. I crawled in there in my school uniform and curled up, watching cars whooshing past on the main road from Caen to Saint-Lô, counting them, thinking, ‘How am I going to get through this? What is the solution?’

Ultimately, though, there wasn’t a solution. Or, maybe there was one, but finding it was way above my pay grade. My mum and stepdad might have been able to choose to go back, or change things up again, but I didn’t have that power. I was just a kid

What I realised was: you just have to go along with things. You’re at that school, whether you like it or not. You’re living in France, whether you like it or not. You’ve got to fucking adapt to it – or you crumble. If I didn’t get on with it, I’d have never gone back to school again. And it wasn’t like I could escape it for long; there were even classes on Saturday mornings. But if I couldn’t change the situation, I could change the way I perceived it.

In the process I developed a habit that has stayed with me to this day. The magnitude of the situation was so overwhelming that I could not possibly begin to understand it, although I did comprehend that there was a new man in my family’s life and that we were in a new country where they spoke a different language.

I remember thinking: don’t try to understand what you can’t. The only thing I could understand was myself. I began self-reflecting. I couldn’t control anything about being in France, I couldn’t change the sheer fact of our location, but I could look inside myself and see what tools I had to face the situation.

I say this to my children even now. ‘What makes sense to you? What can you understand?’ They’ll tell me what they can understand, and I’ll say to them: ‘Everything else, don’t even try. At this time in your life it’s too much to take in. Wait until you’re older.’

That’s what I did. When I couldn’t understand why my father had died so young and had been replaced so quickly by another man, I cut it out and focused more on myself. I could control what I was doing and feeling. You cannot expect to have the answers all the time, so why torment and confuse yourself by pretending otherwise? It will all make sense in time, when you’re ready. Don’t waste years of your life.

Sitting there, in my den, I asked myself: do you want to be that boy hiding from lunch every single day? Why not just embrace being that country kid? The moment you start fighting against it rather than looking for opportunities, that’s the moment you start to go under. I began to list my strengths and weaknesses to myself. I knew I was good at getting on with people, I was good at football (a handy thing for helping you fit in with other kids at the best of times, and even more so when you had no common language), I was resilient. These were all strengths I knew I could draw on and develop. But I couldn’t speak French and I didn’t have much leverage over my circumstances. These were both weaknesses. As I thought about it, I understood that while one of these could be fixed the other couldn’t. Just acknowledging that fact lifted a weight from my shoulders.

The next day I went into school almost without a care in the world. I stopped worrying and my attitude became far more, ‘Let’s just see how this goes.’ I went into lunch and realised that the food was actually decent, and went into what was called the foyer and found out what babyfoot really was. I played football in the yard with the other children and began to form a connection with them. My first and second days were like chalk and cheese.

I worked on the things that lay within my power, like getting to school on time, and I didn’t stress about the things that weren’t. I knew I wasn’t going to learn French overnight, so I didn’t allow myself to get dispirited by getting bad results to begin with. It wasn’t that I didn’t care; it was more that I was aware of what I could and couldn’t control, and so realised that there was no value whatsoever in beating myself up about stuff that wasn’t in my hands.

This habit of self-reflection was just what I needed. I’d go to school during the day, mix with the French kids, sit through all the lessons, then I’d come home and play in the den. It was almost as if I had two lives. On the one hand I was like a young Robinson Crusoe, running wild in the countryside, on the other I was receiving this really old-school French education.

And it worked. Back in England, school had never interested me and I never took lessons seriously. I didn’t play up in class; it was more that I was a daydreamer with the attention span of a gnat. But because I’d been plonked down in a French school, I picked the language up pretty quickly. I was surrounded by it, so I didn’t really have to try. Within three months I was holding perfect conversations without any trouble at all. Within six I might as well have been French. I had a Normandy accent. Some people refused to believe I was English. Years later, when I was in the military and doing work with the French Foreign Legion, the guys there thought I was some sort of undercover agent.

It was there, in France, as a lost and confused kid, that I began the process of really understanding myself and the world around me. I felt alone, and knew that I couldn’t rely on anybody else. I learned that everything starts with yourself. To begin with, that responsibility was daunting. Now, I realise how exciting and liberating it really is.

‘Ant, who are you?’

One thing I do sometimes when I give talks is get somebody up on stage and ask them, ‘Who are you?’ The answer is always something along the lines of, ‘I’m John. I’m a software engineer. I’ve got four kids and a wife.’

So I ask the same question again: ‘Who are you?’ They’ll be a bit less sure this time round. ‘I’m John, I’m a software engineer, and I’m a loving husband.’ At this point I flip it around.

‘Ask me who I am.’

‘Ant, who are you?’

‘I’m an emotionally connected, positive, driven individual. That’s who I am. What you told me are only the labels other people have given you. You’re John. Somebody has given you that name. Software engineer? That’s a job title, it’s not who you are. However, you saying you’re a loving husband; that’s closer to the truth. Are you an emotional person? Are you empathetic? Do you think positively? Who are you?’

Sometimes they’ll still struggle to articulate who they are outside of the names other people have given them. Others will be different. They’ll say, ‘Well, to be honest, I’m pretty negative. I worry I can be selfish.’

That’s when I know I’ve got them. Fucking hell. You’ve come to the right place. Most people don’t really know themselves. Worse than that, they’re not even interested in getting to know themselves. They’re perfectly happy just bobbing along on autopilot.

If you do that, you’re depriving yourself of the possibility of becoming the best possible version of yourself. It means you’ll never be able to be properly honest with yourself, and you’ll lose out on so many opportunities and possibilities. Life is just going to pass you by.

There’s so much about the world that you can’t control, it can feel overwhelming. That’s certainly how I felt on that shitty first day at the French school. What is in your hands, however, is your ability to look inside yourself. When you take the time to get to know yourself better than anybody else on the planet, you’ll be building the foundations of positivity. It’s not always easy, and it can sometimes involve ripping yourself to pieces in the most brutal way possible, but, fuck me, when you’ve done that you’ll know it will have been worthwhile. When you’ve identified your weakness and strengths, you can then begin to focus on the positive parts of your personality. And when you do this, everything else, all the negatives, will just get dragged along behind you.

CELEBRATE YOUR STRENGTHS

If you’ve taken the time to identify what your strengths are, then make the most of them. Don’t give in to doubt or fear. There’s no trait more positive than believing in your own abilities. If you’re good at something, then celebrate it. The confidence you gain from knowing that you have a particular skill, or excel at a particular sport, or are just adept at getting on with people, is a tangible force; it infuses everything you do, makes you more decisive, your movements more sure. The more confident you are in what you can do, the more likely you are to succeed.

When I was in the Special Forces I respected the enemy, but I also knew that I was a hundred times more dangerous than them. There weren’t many in the British armed forces who were better at their trade than me; what chance did an untrained insurgent – most likely a country boy – have? Most of the time it was like a duck shoot. Even the hardcore militants we sometimes came across, who had a bit more about them – the guys who knew how to move, who could aim their weapons – there was nothing they could do that I couldn’t do better. That’s not arrogance. It was a fact, backed up night after night, in operation after operation. That’s why, when I went out there, I genuinely never thought I’d get hit. Knowing my strengths, and being confident in them, made me a better soldier.

By contrast, if you’re plagued by doubts and don’t have faith in yourself, the chances are that things will go wrong. There was a guy in my unit who got shot every time he went into combat: his leg, his arm. He got blown out of his wagon one tour, and on another he got hit in the arse while trying to crawl behind cover. On one level, it was just rank bad luck. On another, I knew that he was a real worrier, enough to make me wonder whether he was attracting that negativity. It happened too often to be a coincidence, and finally reached the point where he simply didn’t want to go on tour anymore.

All of this is just as relevant in day-to-day life. If you’ve been offered a great new job, celebrate that fact. Use it as an opportunity to remind yourself that there’s a reason why that company chose you over all the other applicants. The moment you start telling yourself that you don’t deserve the job, or that they made a mistake giving it to you, is the moment that you allow negativity to become the dominant force in your head. When you convince yourself that you can’t do the job, you’re likely to make that fear a self-fulfilling prophecy. Almost before you know it, you’ll have turned a great positive into a crushing negative.

THE HAMMER OF THOR

I always get people asking me what’s the most frightening situation I’ve been in. I think they expect I’ll tell them about a time when I’ve been under fire, or in hand-to-hand combat. But it’s not.

Courage isn’t about walking through a door with bullets flying. That was just a question of top-level training and being good at a job that I loved. No, courage is the ability to be honest with yourself. The most frightening, exhilarating place anyone can be is a space in which they’re being entirely, brutally honest with themselves. It’s the hardest thing you can do. It’s also the best thing you can do.

If you’re honest with yourself, you can be honest with other people and about the situations you find yourself in. If you’re honest about the situation, you’ll be able to identify whether it’s a positive or negative. When you’re able to identify something as a negative situation, you should also be able to step back long enough to realise that the only way to deal with it is with a positive mindset.

Don’t get me wrong. Being open with yourself is tough – it involves ripping yourself to bits, pulling and pulling and pulling until you’ve found all of your weaknesses and insecurities. You might want to pretend that your weaknesses don’t exist, but that’s you. Do you want to be 60 per cent of yourself for the rest of your life? There might be 10 per cent of your personality that will remain forever negative. The rest, though? Isn’t it worth trying? If you don’t challenge your weaknesses, how will you ever find out whether it’s possible to turn them into strengths? You don’t want to be one of those people who just do what they’re good at until the day they die. That’s the equivalent of only eating McDonald’s; it’s easy, relatively cheap and immediately satisfying. Ultimately, however, it’s not as nutritious and satisfying as a meal you’ve spent hours preparing. Honesty is maybe the most powerful tool you have in your toolbox. It’s also unquestionably the hardest one to use. It’s such a direct way of confronting negativity.

So many people say to me, ‘My problems would be solved if only I could be honest with my wife’ … or my husband or my boss or my mother. They see the risk of offending people as outweighing the positivity that would come with actually fixing a negative situation.

Honesty is the skeleton key that can open so many doors, but people – and I can understand why – are unwilling to use it. They’d prefer to find other means to pick locks. My view is that you should see it like ripping a plaster off. It will be painful for a short while, but just do it.

Precisely because it’s so powerful, honesty can be detrimental in the wrong hands. There are some people who will try to use the truth to annihilate you. They have no intention of bringing you back up; all they want it to bring you down. It’s a bit like Thor – that hammer won’t come to him unless he’s using it for pure reasons. When he does get to wield it, though: wow, think of everything he can do!

EMBRACE CRITICISM

One of the challenges that wrongfoots a lot of the recruits on Who Dares Wins is when we invite them to identify the weakest members of the group. It’s a brutal exercise, one that’s as much of a shock to them as some of the gruelling physical tasks. We do it halfway through the course, so that they’re no longer strangers and have had the chance to assess each other’s weaknesses and strengths. Calling others out like that is something that most people aren’t used to. It’s almost a taboo. I watch incredibly carefully to see how they respond.

The negative contestants will find an excuse to block that criticism out. They’ll get back into the room and pretend to be untroubled by it. They’ll say, like Louise in Series 5, ‘Oh, I knew that it was going to be happen, it’s all part of the game. It doesn’t bother me. I know who I am.’

In my eyes, that’s a mistake. If you’ve got five or six rivals telling you that you’re weak, you should take it as a positive. If they’re saying they think you’ll be the one to let them down, why is that? If it were me, I’d want to know exactly why they’d picked me out. Is it because I get overwhelmed by nerves? Is it because I’m not mixing properly?

What they should do is, first off, not let that criticism overwhelm them. They’re in a really unfamiliar situation, one that they’re desperately trying to figure out as they go along, so of course they’re going to get things wrong – the whole point of the show is to put them under so much pressure that their fault lines emerge. Once they’ve done that, it’s time to be honest and take that criticism on board – no matter how harsh or hurtful it might be – and change themselves accordingly.

Now that I’m in the public eye, I’m exposed to a lot more criticism than I’ve previously been used to. For instance, I have to make decisions about whether, and how, I’ll respond to press stories about me, especially those that twist my words out of context. The first emotion I always experience on reading the nonsense that gets written is anger. This is followed very quickly by a strong desire to turn up at their offices and call them out for a bunch of lying twats. It’s entirely natural to want to do that. It would also be entirely counter-productive. It wouldn’t achieve anything apart from causing more trouble.

That’s why I’ve learned to listen to another voice. This one reminds me that while I know what I’ve done and what I’ve been through, and that I know who I am as a person, the people criticising me or twisting my words don’t. So why should I care what they think or say?

It’s the same for me with social media. If it’s some keyboard warrior who’s never met me, I don’t care what they say. It’s their negative thoughts, not mine. I’m not going to allow my mood to be dictated by the opinions of someone who knows they’re a safe distance away from me and therefore feels entitled to run their mouth off. If they’re somebody I used to know a long time ago but is no longer part of my circle, again I won’t let it trouble me. They’re probably right, I probably was a fucking nightmare back in the day. But why’s that relevant now? Is it who I am now? No. I ignore it. I don’t need another reminder of how many people are riddled with negativity. I went to prison because I tried to help out somebody I’d never met before, and where did that get me? Nowhere. So why would I ever rise to something that could potentially rile me up or put me into a negative headspace?

And yet when it’s somebody whom I do care about, who’s in my circle, then of course I listen. The people who love you will offer you constructive criticism, because they want you to be the best version of yourself that you can be. They know you’re better than that. They know what you’re worth. They’re not having a pop because they want to bring you down a peg or two. It’s also worth remembering that not only will they have a different set of life experiences to you – and so have a different way of approaching things. They’ll also have that little bit of distance that means they can give you a different perspective on your behaviour, or the way that you come across.

You owe it to yourself to be honest when those closest to you and those you most trust pick you up on something. My attitude on those occasions is, ‘Right, I need to fix this, need to concentrate on it, make sure I don’t do it again.’ You should see that sort of criticism as a positive thing, because it should lead to improvement.

LISTEN TO THE VOICE IN YOUR HEAD

The voice you hear in your head is the true ‘you’ ripping yourself to shreds. It never lies to you. If you’re already brutally honest with yourself, then nothing that this voice says will come as a surprise. Instead, you should treat it as motivation. It gains its own power when you use it as a spur to action. If I do something stupid at work and everybody else tells me not to worry, nothing that bad has happened. But the voice in my head is harsher – ‘Ant, I’m not sure about the way you behaved today. You could have approached this whole situation completely differently’ – then that’s the message I’m going to take away. Of course, it’s no good if you don’t follow through, because that’s when it will leave you feeling negative, or low.

There was a night at an awards ceremony recently when, without having made any conscious decision to do so, I found that I’d slipped into the role of ‘chief instructor’. I’d been a bit nervous beforehand, so I’d had a couple of drinks. Then, when the people around me started discussing the show, I responded by being loud and talking too much; boasting, talking about violence. I was trying to be the person that I thought that they wanted me to be. Even then, though, I could see a couple of people saying to themselves, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ The next morning, when I looked back on it, I knew I hadn’t been myself. I knew I must have sounded like a right knobhead.

When I hear my conscience speaking to me, that’s my cue to say, ‘Fuck, right, I better do something about this. Why did I behave like that? Because you had too much to drink last night, Ant, and you hadn’t drunk for six months before that, so you acted like a twat. Next time, you’ll do things differently. You’ll be cool, calm and collected, the person you really are.’ Once I’ve been through that process, then that’s it, I don’t dwell on it. First, because the damage has been done, and there’s nothing I can do about it now. And second, because I’m using the cringeworthy memory of me behaving badly as motivation to make sure I’m never like that again.

The voices in your head are only saying what you already know. You don’t have another being living inside you; it’s you, and you’re the only person who can change the script that voice is reading from. It can be fucking horrible, but listen to it; it usually has a point.

WORK ON YOUR WEAKNESSES

If you’ve got a weakness that’s stopping you from getting to where you want to go, it’s up to you to work on it. Don’t just use its existence as an excuse.

There are lots of hard things about being a sniper, such as staying switched on and not falling asleep during the endless waiting, and the difficulty of calculating wind speed when you finally get your target in your sights. But the hardest thing for me was staying still. I’m a fidget and I’ve got an overactive mind. What’s next? What’s next? What’s next? I can’t sit still.

I’ve always been like that. Every basic training I’ve ever been through I’ve got into trouble at some point during the drill stages. I couldn’t stand still. I’d have to move, I’d have to look, I’d have to do something. Too. Much. Energy.

I remember when I was still a seventeen-year-old, nine-stone whippersnapper about to pass out through basic training. We were on the parade square going through the rehearsal for the following day’s ceremony and I’d just gone up to the front to pretend to accept the awards for best recruit and best PT. There was so much emphasis on the way we looked, the way we stood, even the expressions on our faces. For the NCOs who’d been tasked with bringing us up to scratch, anything other than a perfect performance was an outrage. And a perfect performance involved staying stock-still in those moments when we were supposed to be standing at attention.

It was during one of these moments when I was standing there, happy, thinking, ‘Tomorrow we pass out, this is fucking great. People are going to be really proud of me.’ That was when the drill corporal loomed over my shoulder. ‘Middleton, if you fucking move again, I’m going to march you to the fucking guardroom and you’ll spend the night in a fucking cell. And then you’ll go straight to the parade from the cell, looking like a fucking reprobate who has spent the night in a cell.’

I must have been moving some part of my body without realising it. Fuck. ‘Yes, corporal!’ What else could I say? I tried. I really tried, but I couldn’t help myself. I moved again. Just a tiny little flash of my eyes from one side to the other, but that was enough for the drill sergeant.

‘Fuuuuuucking Middleton, stand to attention! Left wheel! Follow me! You’re sleeping in the cell tonight.’

I stood to attention. Then marched off. That was when the troop sergeant spotted us, and called me and the corporal over. It was as if he couldn’t resist getting in on the ‘Shouting at Middleton’ game.

‘What the fuck are you doing? Why can’t you stand fucking still? If you weren’t such a good fucking soldier I fucking promise you that you’d spend the fucking night in that fucking cell. Don’t let yourself down, you’re a fucking fidget.’ At that point he stopped bellowing, and in a quieter, almost confiding voice, he carried on. ‘Fidgets are good in the military, just not on my parade square. File back in. You’ve got five minutes left. Do not. Fucking. Move.’

It was uncanny. Almost exactly the same thing happened during Royal Marine training. Once again I’d been awarded best recruit – they called it the King’s Badge – and we were having an inspection of our Lovats, one of the two uniforms we’d be wearing during the next day’s ceremony.

I was standing there, proud about the wings I’d earned during my time in the Paras and the diamond I’d been given during the course I was just about to complete, and as the CO stalked around the lines of Marines he kept looking at me. Couldn’t take his eyes off me, it seemed. I thought it was because he knew that I was going to be awarded the King’s Badge. Of course, it was because while every other Marine there was motionless, I was practically running on the spot. As my wife said to me later, ‘Ant, you might as well have been breakdancing.’

Then the CO came up to me. ‘Middleton, you’re the King’s Badge, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Are you excited?’

‘Not really, sir. I’m more proud, to be honest.’

‘So why are you moving so much? Every time I turn around you’re wriggling about. You cannot stand still.’

There are worse weaknesses to have. But it’s still a weakness, especially for somebody who wanted to train as a sniper. Sniping is hardcore soldiering, a lethal, physically and mentally demanding game of chess. A sniper who knows his trade can use the fear he inspires to stop an overwhelming force in its tracks. Yes please, I thought. This sounds cool. This sounds exciting.

When the course began it was clear that I was good at the bits that others found tricky. I loved the stalking and crawling around, because it meant I could move and be active. The fly in the ointment was that I was shit at the thing that the rest of the guys found pretty simple. Staying. Fucking. Still. I had to admit to myself that if I indulged in the temptation to keep moving at all times, I’d put my chances of being allowed to do a job I desperately wanted at risk. I’d put so much into getting to this point, I didn’t want to throw all that away.

So, in response, I was relentless in developing the discipline and willpower I needed to be able to lie still in an observation post. I told myself: Now is when the hard work starts. Make this count. I practised it over and over and over, until even the idea of being motionless made me feel sick. I’d get into my lay-up position, stay still for a couple of minutes, then my knee would jiggle or my arm would twitch. Caught again. Back into my lay-up position. Ten minutes this time, then the smallest movement of my head. Fuck, caught again. But I improved every time I tried. Eventually, after failing more times than I could count, I got there. What helped me do this was my mindset. I had a positive motivator, and this meant I could keep on pushing, even when, at the beginning, it seemed as if I might never get there.

But I knew there were limits to what discipline and will-power could achieve. When I got back from Afghanistan they wanted to send me on a course designed to transform me into a surveillance operator. I told them, ‘Sorry, no, I can’t do that.’

I knew myself well enough to be aware that I could summon up the brief stretches of discipline necessary to control myself every now and then on a sniper mission. I’d worked on it relentlessly and I could suck it up. But although it was a skill I’d trained myself to develop, it never came easy. Am I a door-kicker? Yes. Could I sit in a car and go unnoticed for days on end? Absolutely no fucking chance.

STEERING CLEAR

You don’t need to fix every flaw. I suffer from claustrophobia – not an ideal condition to have when you’re in the Special Forces.

It’s not a crippling problem. I’m OK in crowds, but could you put me into the boot of a car without me flipping out? No. Could I spend any meaningful time in a small caving tunnel? No.

A small lift is enough to bring me close to a panic attack – those moments when you find yourself taking long, deliberate breaths to try to keep yourself calm. I hate the lack of control. When I get into those situations, I’m immediately looking for the exit route. If I enter a lift and I know I’m completely locked in, that’s when I say to myself, ‘Fuck, if something goes wrong, I’m going to have to prise those doors open. Breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe: whatever you do, don’t stop.’ If there’s a little cubby hole, something that gives me more space to escape, then I’m OK with it.

If I’m crawling through a tunnel and I can see a light at its end, I’m fine. I know there’ll be enough air. If it’s bendy and I can’t see the exit, then I’m in trouble and I know I’ll have to work really hard to calm myself down.

I’ve got better and better at coping with claustrophobia over the years. In my old life there were times when I’d no choice but to put myself through it, and on those occasions I was able to exert the self-control needed to succeed. Now, however, I’ve reached a point where I ask myself: how much of my life am I really going to be spending in these sorts of small, confined spaces? The answer is: not much. So is it worth expending vast amounts of my time and energy confronting this fear? Probably not. It doesn’t affect my career, it’s not stopping me from being a good husband or father and it’s not preventing me doing anything I love.

When I struggled with fear and found myself not wanting to go back to Afghanistan, I had to confront it, because I risked losing everything I loved doing. I had to ask myself if I was willing to sacrifice my training, the belonging I felt as part of that unit, to the fact that I was scared. No, I wasn’t willing to abandon any of it, so I worked on it, I challenged it until I had defeated it. Claustrophobia is different. At the time, it was manageable and I knew I could just drag it along with me. Now I simply steer clear of any situation where I think I’m likely to feel that discomfort.

My mate’s a fireman and three times he’s said to me, ‘Ant, I’ve OK’d it with the boss. You can go down the rat run and we’ll pump smoke through the little pipes as you crawl through them.’ Every time I’ve been really enthusiastic for a little while, and every time I’ve put it off. There are better things I can do with my time. Much better things. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything worse than being trapped in a smoked-out room, wearing the whole firefighter’s apparatus, and trying to squeeze through a series of tiny holes. With people in front and behind me? Fuck. That.

With other people, I can see that it might be different – I know that there are huge variations in the fears and emotions experienced by everybody. If you’re afraid of flying, you’ll probably be able to live much of your life quite happily without that fear impinging on you. But what if you want to go on holiday abroad? It’s going to be something you’re going to have to deal with. Especially if the alternative is a week away in Grimsby.

FIND YOUR POSITIVE MOTIVATOR

Your positive motivator is the thing that will drag you through even the toughest of times, giving you the inspiration you need to make the most of your strengths and overcome your weaknesses.

People have come to me so many times and complained about how much effort they’ve wasted on a particular situation and got nowhere. The answer is usually obvious – the missing ingredient is almost always positivity. They’ll say, ‘How the fuck am I supposed to think positively when I can’t dig myself out of this hole?’ My answer will invariably be, ‘You’re stuck there because you’re not thinking positively.’

They’ve got all these other elements, which are great; but they’re running on negative fuel, and they’ve got nothing to give them a positive motivator, a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s only positivity – the positivity that only you can provide – that will tie all your effort and drive together, and keep you bouncing back.

My positive motivator is my family. I want to be the best version of myself so that I can be a good role model for them and provide a secure, happy foundation for them to go on and thrive. I have to work hard for this – eighty-hour weeks, months at a time away from Emilie and the kids – but having this positive motivator means that I’m willing to endure whatever sacrifices I need to make. I know I’ll constantly need to evolve and change to get there; but that’s fine, because I know it will be worth it.

Take time to work out what you really want from life. It’s by looking inside yourself, interrogating your priorities, really examining your ambitions, that you’ll find your positive motivator. Above all, you have to be honest with yourself. Success for some people is a big house and a nice car. However, you should be wary of reducing your positive motivator to a shopping list. The material things that have come my way are great, and I appreciate them; it’s just that I see them as the by-products of success rather than an end in themselves. Do you really want the sole aim of your existence to be acquiring a new Mercedes? Will that provide you with the fulfilment you need? Only you can answer that question.

POSITIVE THINKING IS SMART THINKING

Positive thinking is also, to a large extent, smart thinking. It’s not about indiscriminate, undirected energy. People think that resilience is all about grit and determination. They’re big parts of it, but as I see it, a willingness to run through walls is, at best, only a start. If you don’t inject positivity into that it will soon wear thin. It will run out or, worse, curdle into negativity. You’ll tell yourself that you’ve tried and failed, so what’s the point?

There was a good example of this on the latest celebrity edition of SAS: Who Dares Wins. I’ll always give people a chance, no matter how negative they might appear at first glance. It’s stupid to write people off immediately, and everybody deserves another go. It’s a principle that I try to put into practice in the show. If we gave up on contestants when they first made a mistake or disappointed us in some way, then by episode six it would just be us instructors griping at each other, and nobody wants to watch that. I want to give them space to work things out for themselves, be honest with themselves. Am I doing this for the right reasons? If the answer is no, do you want to prolong the suffering, because you know the outcome? I can help them towards their decision, but I can’t make it for them. Carrying on regardless, slamming your head against a wall, isn’t always right. That’s why sometimes when contestants do hand me their armband, I’ll congratulate them.

In this particular series, Anthea Turner was always at the back of every task, along with John Fashanu. I called them grandma and grandad. After day three I let all the others go in and hauled them out onto the parade square and stood them in front of me.

‘Why are you two always at the fucking back.’ I looked at Anthea: ‘Do you want to hand your number in?’

‘No, staff.’

‘Listen, all you’re doing is prolonging your suffering. It’s inevitable. Fucking think about it; I’m doing you a favour here. Think about why you want to be here. You’re hanging out of your fucking arse, you’re always last. I think it’s time for you.’

I said the same thing to John, who responded by standing to attention and bellowing back: ‘I will improve, staff!’

We were all, what the fuck? While we were trying to compose ourselves, Anthea piped up again. ‘Do you know what, staff, you’re bang on. It was an absolute pleasure to be on this course, thank you for the experience.’

I don’t think I could have given her more respect if she’d passed the course. Next day, John had gone. It turned out that he didn’t improve. Not even close. Only one of them had been honest with themselves. She wasn’t lying or bullshitting herself; instead she placed the problem squarely before her eyes, made an assessment of the situation and in doing so was able to appreciate how far she’d come. She emerged with a positive from a negative situation. In her eyes and mine she’d succeeded, and she could go out on a high.

Emilie

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