E2: What Doesn’t Break You: The Making of Resilience

Yeah.

And I suppose

when you were, because you performed to a very high level as a musician.

And what point did you start throwing everything at that? Was there a turning point where you were you naturally very good? Or was there a point where you decided I'm going to commit a lot of my time and effort into this and focus into this? I mean, it's a

bunch of lucky breaks, I suppose.

And I don't remember being involved in the process to apply to become a cathedral chorister, you know, age seven or whatever I was at the time.

Clearly, I'm not making a huge number of decisions about the future.

But I do remember going for a music or a singing test for that choir and then being selected and they saw potential there.

And then in the choir, we just, because we were a well-known choir that sang internationally quite a lot, we ended up getting selected for a bunch of interesting opportunities, which sort of led into more interesting opportunities.

Everything from, I remember singing in Vienna with the Vienna Boys Choir in an amazing musical called the Musikverein in downtown Vienna.

And then our choir was selected by Andrew Lloyd Webber to be the one to perform his, at the time, his new piece called the Requiem.

And he flew us all to New York to do the world premiere.

We sang live to 60 countries and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

And you just, as a child, you're kind of like, this is kind of cool, but you didn't really appreciate the enormity of, you know, if I'd really messed up live to 60 countries, if I'd realized quite what that meant at the time, I'm sure I would have probably freaked out.

But as a kid, you know, I talk in the book a lot about beginner's mind.

You know, you don't know any... better and everything is sort of you're taking everything as a lesson and you're learning as you go rather than having preconceived kind of ideas fears or um or sort of um you know scar tissue from previous experiences everything is fresh and new so um yeah there wasn't really from my side anyway a conscious decision but we were lucky to do those kind of live performances we made a bunch of records did a bunch of tv um you know appearances around the world singing and entertaining people.

And that was an enjoyable feeling.

I definitely remember that feeling that, you know, seeing people come to hear you sing and, you know, as part of a choir generally.

And that was quite an interesting sort of moment to realize that performing that other people get or doing serving, I suppose, really where other people are the beneficiaries of your service was something that probably did in a maybe tangential way, you sort of align with with my life then later on in the military where you know it was all about service and I learned that probably very early on in the choir because we as I said we had to board and that meant that when the rest of the school broke up for school holidays we didn't we had to stay on to sing all the way through to the afternoon on Christmas day and Easter day and you know so we would have many more weeks at school not at home doing sort of fun holiday things and that and therefore sort of subliminally you were learning service without it being kind of ran down your throat hmm

and you've you've probably got a well you have got a a long list of things which people would dub as high performance was this your first experience of being part of a high performance culture um and service and i suppose there's an element of discipline you're working very hard in order to deliver that level of quality what what What lessons did you draw from that beyond that service point, which you think you took into later life?

I mean, much of this wasn't learned at the time, right? As I said, it was all just new and you were just, you were going through things in real time as kids' brains do.

You're not thinking, excuse me, too much about the future, about the past.

You're living in the present.

So that was kind of, at the time, I'm pretty sure how I approach things.

Again, much of this was in hindsight, therefore.