In those early years, are there any lessons you would draw out from training specifically within the military, which you take forward today?

I think the main thing from the training aspect of being in the military was try and make any training you do in business or in military or anywhere as realistic as possible.

If you make it just a tick box exercise, it's absolutely pointless.

I've been in so many situations, both business and personally, where you face something challenging and novel that nobody really knows how to get through if they've never done it before.

And if you've never been tested or you've done training that is pushing you to the point of absolute discomfort in taking you out of your comfort zone to see how you react and then arming you with the tools to know how to frame a problem or discuss a problem or try and overcome a problem, then there's no point in doing it at all.

The challenge we have in business particularly is that everyone is so busy that making time is the hardest thing to say, right, the entire team is going to go and do this particular scenario.

It's a crisis scenario.

Could you talk us through that incident?

Yeah.

Now, it was probably how many years in after leaving military training, probably five or six years, I suppose, after joining, uh, maybe, maybe a few more.

But, uh, despite all of the realistic scenarios and training that I'd gone through with bullets flying and explosions, et cetera, when you are actually shot for the first time and people are being wounded around you, that is shocking.

I mean, there's no way to put it.

It's-- other than that, it's just very, very shocking.

And what was going through my brain was, "What is going on?" My, my brain wasn't able to really compute exactly what had happened.

It, it was all such a surprise.

Is there an aspect of leadership across the Army, not rank-specific, that you think is a bit of a blind spot currently, and what should the Army leaders of the future be focusing on?

What happened that day?

So this was, this is the first chapter, it's called Bees and Bullets, where it was quite a busy, um, shocking day for me.

[laughs] Uh, it was Halloween, and we were in, in the Middle East, um, with a coalition group looking to, uh, stop some bad guys doing some bad things, and we'd actually achieved our mission already earlier in the evening.

And I'd made the decision as a, as a, the assault commander or the junior commander to just, with all the, the assets that we had available to us, a lot of people had made a lot of effort to get us to where we were, that we would just go down the street and knock on doors and just try and speak to locals.

And, um, most of them had never seen anything, of course, uh, bad that was happening in their street right across from their houses, but you had to go through the- ... dance anyway.

And we got to a house that looked like it was empty.

Long story short, we opened the gate, kicked the gate in, and we were ambushed by a bunch of very heavily armed fighters.

After everything that you've been through, personal, in and around the military, what does mindful actually mean to you?

This is an extraordinary story.

Yeah.

So I, I try and end the book with some really positive, uplifting tales, as it were, uh, in the community chapter, the power of community and kindness.

And this was an experience that just reinforced that those with the least often give the most.

And I traveled as part of my, my work with the Gurkhas, who I was a, a soldier with, and we were going around, as you said, Gurkha Welfare Trust, looking at various projects.

And we had been to a village the day before to look at a school that was being built for them, first school they'd had.

And I was very self-conscious about being treated like I paid for it myself, and I [laughs] you know, obviously hadn't.

So have you used this, and who did you pick when you were thinking, Just like me?

Now, tell me about the bank account of resilience that you say can help build a tolerance towards uncertainty or a to- a tolerance for uncertainty and adversity.

Yeah, this, this idea is not my idea.

There's a book that I read many years ago called The Anatomy of Courage by, uh, an author called Lord Moran, and it was after the First World War where he was seeking to understand why it was the case that people who'd exhibited extreme acts of bravery one moment could then suddenly be accused of cowardice and in some cases shot for cowardice.

How can that be that you could be so brave in one moment and then a coward the next? And in that book, the hypothesis is that we're all born with a bank account of courage, and nobody tells you the balance, which is the kicker.

And so you don't know when your account is gonna run out or go into overdraft, and some people are born with incredibly large balances, lucky them, others less so.

I've tried to sort of take that idea and replace courage for tolerance of trauma, that each of us is more or less able to cope with trauma.

And as we explore in the book, to build resilience, you have to go through hard things.

Is that-