James Jensen

Yeah, thanks as well for this, Nick. It's, um, first podcast. I'm pumped for this one. For 45 minutes, it's taking me longer, I can feel it. Um, yeah, um, so leadership for me, I've always been interested in leadership from even when I was a little kid. I was in like captain of a sports team and all that, and prefect school, which doesn't really...

Yeah, no, I wasn't. Absolutely, I definitely wasn't. And then, and then in the army again, I went to Duntroon, the leadership school, and all this. So I've been in leadership positions for a really long time. So it's something that I've always been interested in. Why it became something I cared even more about is because I've seen how good the impact a really, really good leader can have on a team and I've seen the impact that a really bad leader can have on a team. Um, for me, with like, I'm, I like excellence. I like people, like teams performing at their best. And I for me, leadership is one of the critical pieces that's overlooked a lot of the time. Um, you can't outperform, a team can't outperform a bad leader.

Oh, that's a big question. Um, there's... So, what, let me actually. Can I ask you a question? So I've asked this question every single, nearly every single leadership group I've ever worked with. I said, if you think about the best leader you've ever seen or best leader you've ever worked with, think about that person. And uh, yep. But what makes them stand out from being from the rest? What makes them a great leader as opposed to a good leader?

Brilliant. So, so I've asked that question hundreds and hundreds of times now to hundreds of different leaders. And I've asked, usually asked for three characteristics and I'll write them up on a whiteboard and there's a line down the middle. Everything that they say that is related to how they make them feel, that makes them, that they, they remembered everyone's names. They were vulnerable. They owned their mistakes. They cared about me. They, they, they put my growth first. They really pushed me. They challenged me. I put on the left-hand side. Everything that's technically based. They had great communication. They were good at vision. They were great at decision-making. I put on the right-hand side. Throughout the hundreds of times I've done this now, the left-hand side of that board is absolutely chockers. The right-hand side's maybe got one per group of 10. So for me, what makes a great leader as opposed to a good leader is actually taking interest in the people, being vulnerable, and not vulnerable as a lot of people sort of make it out to be on LinkedIn and things like that, like true vulnerability of owning your mistakes, admitting when you don't know, and putting people forward. That's what separates the great from the good. It's got nothing to do with your ability to come up with a great vision. That you can be a good leader and have that, yeah, but unless you care about people and can really influence people, that's what separates good from great.

Yeah, I think empathy is a really interesting one. And it does come up a lot of the time on that left-hand side. Like, this is what they made this leader, they were, they were genuinely empathetic. And you ask people what that means or what, what behaviors did they show. So a lot of the time there's a lot of leadership advice out there saying, you need to be more empathetic. Like, great. How? How do I be more empathetic? Yeah, how? So that's when you, you find people that say, "Hey, what's, what was this empathetic leader that you worked with? What did they do?" And it's usually stuff like, "Hey, they listened." They really listened to me when I, when I came to a challenge, with a challenge. They'd ask questions rather than just coming up with a solution straight away. Um, they took an interest in me. If you...

Yeah, so for, if we care about our people, and the thing is, if there, if someone's in your team, you, there's usually a lot of teams that's good teams have got someone that team that challenges you. Yeah, someone that team that is the one, you know, you, you'll give a plan, you'll give from, for what I used to do, I'll give orders. And there's this one person that's always going to come up and be like, "I don't like this plan. I think there's a better way of doing it." That's the person who's one of the most valuable people in your team. But that's the person that's really hard to be empathetic with sometimes, yeah, 'cause it's challenging.

I, so the way that it works with the army, it's a bit, when you join the SAS, you lose your rank. So when I, by the time I applied for the Special Air Service Regiment...

Yep. So I was in the army first and I spent seven years in the infantry corps.

Yep. I deployed to East Timor once as a, um, in a peacekeeping role. And that was as a second in command, so I was sort of in charge of four people and second in command of eight. And then I deployed to Afghanistan about 10 months actually with one area with the first battalion.

It was good. It was, um, it was a deploy, we were first time I was actually properly in combat. Um, first time we had casualties. Um, so it was a very different experience to East Timor. But it was also one of the, one of the my, the problems I look back on with the most fondness.

Yeah, well, so one thing that the movies don't get right is that when you're deployed, you're not in combat every single day, 24/7. The combat, especially in the back then with the infantry, was quite rare. The reason that that sticks out for me is one of my favorite deployments is we had it, there was a 10-month deployment. We had no Wi-Fi. There was no social media. Facebook was starting to become a thing. Um, there was no, we had no access to internet or anything like that. So when we weren't patrolling, doing all the, doing that stuff, we were sitting around talking. I've got the mates that I've got from that deployment are second to none because we spent 10 months with nothing to do but talk to each other. Um, the guys I still talk to, probably there's guys from that team that I still talk to every second or third day, yeah. Um, and we were also doing what we joined up to do. So yes, there, like there is horrible things. We lost, we had someone killed in action. We had several people seriously wounded and we all were, we all had close calls. But to put it in into a sporting analogy, I suppose, you don't play AFL to train all the time. For us, that's what we joined up to do. Um, and it wasn't for everyone. Some people got part of the way through a deployment, said, "Look, this isn't for me." And you can...

You can. It's very rare. Um, and it's generally the person that it did happen for a couple. And that was after we had someone killed, they sort of, they stuck their hand up and said, "I just can't do it." So you got, you got a choice at that point. Do you just tell this person yes, you can keep them on and force them to put themselves potentially through real trauma when they can't process it or just at that point support them and move and let them go? And so it happens very rarely, but yes, you could, you can just say, "Look, I'm, I can't keep doing it."

Um, so I was got exposed to the SAS on that deployment. Um, I'd always wanted to be in the SAS. On that deployment had a couple of times where they just...

Um, so the Special Air Service Regiment. So the Australia's probably most elite special forces unit. They're the smallest and they're the kind of the go-to unit for the government. The equivalent to the US regiment would be, um, what everyone sort of refers to as Delta Force or SEAL Team Six is probably the equivalent in America.

Now there's, there's a lot of different special forces units in the world and they've, they've got...

Yep, yep. Um, British SAS and British Special Boat Service are kind of similar as well. So I wanted, I wanted, I'd always wanted to be in the SAS and that deployment really solidified it for me because in the regular army I didn't have a heap of autonomy. I didn't get to really contribute in as an individual that much. Whereas the SAS, it's really small teams. You are subject matter expert into whatever area you're going into, so you've got a lot more autonomy.

Um, once I got qualified, um, for me, I'd probably end up in the Middle East, so I specialized in skydiving. Um, so freefall. Um, I, and then I ended up speaking Arabic. I learned Arabic.

I was. I was fluent in the Syrian or Iraqi dialect.

Yep. It was funny though, 'cause I one of my, one of my deployments, when I was in the regiment, did a couple more deployments to Afghanistan with the SAS and then I deployed to Southeast Asia and really decided that I hated it. Um, the jungle, humid, big mosquitoes everywhere, just wasn't my thing. I love the Middle East. I love the history. Um, and all that there. So I just said, "How do I make sure that I never deployed to Southeast Asia again, um, and make sure I keep going back to the Middle East?" Um, so I put did a three-month-long army Arabic course, which teaches you a dialect that literally no one speaks. Um, it's completely useless.

There's a language school. So you go to language school, you learn in three months. No, God, no, you can learn. There's some languages you can get pretty good at in three months like the Tok Pisin, like, um, trade languages. Arabic, the 12-month language course, you're still not that good at it. So I did a three-month one with there where with them just to show interest, I suppose. Then I paid for myself and used my own leave to go to Jordan for two months and studied at the Jordan Language Academy and then came back and said, "Hey, I've demonstrated that I'm willing to put my own money and time to this and I'm committed. Will you now do it?" And then they sent me there for most of a year to study in Jordan. Um, yeah, that's a, that's a fair way forward. But, um, so I suppose my specialty was, um, was Arabic. I got I specialize in joint terminal air controlling, which is as well as all your other jobs, calling in air strikes and talking to helicopters and the, um, uh, fighter jets. So, so I had a fairly broad range of experience wow when I was there.

Yep. Um, so part, join, do you have to do the selection course? So the SAS selection course is horrific. 21-day selection course and you do 18 months of training.

Yeah, but theirs only goes for seven days.

Yep.

Yeah, it's a, it's an, it's an amazing, it's a really, really cool course. It's something I've...

Yeah, to watch, not to participate in. I, I helped out in every course, nearly every course once I was qualified. But the first about 10 days is, so you have to get selected first. So you have to pass a lot of fitness standards and all this just to make it to the door. Every year about 150 people try out. Um, first 10 days is a lot of physical training. Um, pretty much you're getting pretty, getting, getting a bit of sleep. So you're getting probably about six hours sleep a night.

Yep. First 10 days, um, you're getting food and it slowly just starts getting less and less.

Um, but you're you do a short, like a three-day, this first 10 days, you do a quick a three-day navigation exercise just to sort of test your navigation skills before you really test you. So we don't send people out somewhere and never see them again. Um, a lot of PT, very interrupted sleep.

Uh, physical training. Sorry. So workouts that will go for two or three hours and just be absolutely really intense training. Doesn't matter how fit you are when you turn up, we'll break you. We'll get you to the point. If you can do 500 push-ups when you turn up, you'll have to do six.

So no, it's actually we, there on the, on the selection course, there is no feedback to individuals, positive or negative. So if you do an assessment and we, we teach you skills and we, we test you on them, you do an assessment and you nail it, you know that you've absolutely kicked this out of the park. The feedback you're going to get is "Next."

Yep. But if you stuff it, you 100% know that you've stuffed it. You couldn't have done anything more worse. The feedback you get is "Next." We, the reason that, and that's, that is the biggest negative thing that happens to people on selection is they don't get any feedback. And then we leave them alone for so we give them 10 days of really, really hard stuff, no feedback. Never let them go on their own for three days where they won't see anyone for three days. And that's when we lose. I think actually, I think that one's 48 hours. So they won't see anyone over that period of time.

Are navigating around. We've got a series of checkpoints they have to get. So the other thing with the selection course, we don't kick anyone off. It's very, a handful of people get kicked off usually for integrity. They've lied about something and we've caught them or if it's not safe. But do they give up? That's so the only way most people, 90% of people pull off that course. So there's get a slip of paper on day one that's got I you fill in your name, "Voluntary withdraw from the SAS selection course." Something along those lines. So for someone to pull out, pull off that course, they have to sign that slip of paper and hand it to instructor. And that's how nearly everyone pulls off. So it's got nothing to do with, um, yeah, we don't, we don't yell at you. We don't tell you you're incompetent. We'll leave you, we'll leave you alone for two days and you'll go, "Stuff that."

It's and and it's, it's amazing how it is because a lot of the time people who are, so we're trying to look for people who are individually brilliant, but work incredibly well as a team. Yeah, so that's the real challenge is we find people that have to work well as a team. There's a lot of people out there that are individually amazing soldiers, but they're not suitable for the SAS because the culture that they'll bring and so on. So we need to find that. Um, if we sometimes people turn up to selection, they've been given, if you're if you're 6'4" in the infantry and you're 100 and something kilograms, you can do 200 push-ups, run this in this time, you are constantly getting reassurance.

Everyone's always going, "You're a weapon, you're awesome, you're great at this." You turn up a selection, you do 100 burpees, finish before everyone else, and all of a sudden people start going, "I'm not good enough."

Um, throughout the whole course, everyone pulls themselves off. And it's something that it's not just the selection course is brilliant to see it, but it happens business world, personal world as well. Most people, a lot of people give up at things, not not because they're failing, not because they're not good enough, because they think they're failing, because they think they're not good enough.

Then you get about, then we put you out on your own for five days in a, there's a huge, a couple of huge training areas in Perth. They give you food. You get about food for three days. So you get about three days food. Um, but then you and you're you've just given these, so we're not you carry, you've got your own carry, um, sleeping bag with a, uh, waterproof liner over it and a tarp, you that's what sort of everyone in the army carries. Um, so we give you for, for us, we did the Stirling Mountains in Perth and you've got five days. You get given a series of checkpoints and you have to use a map and compass to find them. For us, the navigation on that one was quite easy because it was pretty much the top of every single mountain in the Stirling Ranges. And over that time, you sort of cover a couple, maybe a couple hundred, I think it's, well, it's well over 100 km, um, carrying 50 plus kilograms on your back, um, and walking up these massive hills. That's again, that's we lose another third of the candidates from that course a lot of time because they're spending so much time alone, they just get in their own heads or they get lost, um, and that pulls them off. And then after that's what we call, for the SAS, that's when selection starts after that. All of this we consider like pre-work.

For some people it is. I found it much easier 'cause I didn't have anyone wasn't watching me all the time. There, there was no one assessing me all the time. So I for me, I actually quite liked just being able to walk for...

I liked that bit. Um, and then you get a couple about, you come back to camp for a day and you start lucky dip. And for us, this is when selection starts. It's five days, pretty much no sleep, no food, except for one halfway through to get a meal, which is awful.

Um, you're in a team now, you've got about 10 people per team and you're you've got tasks. You do one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one at night. And you and they're all really, really physical. They involve a lot of, um, lateral thinking as well, problem solving, and teamwork. And this is when, for us, you start seeing how people really work in a team. If someone's been really good in this point, but all of a sudden they're under pressure, they just start yelling at their teammates all the time. They can't regulate their emotions. They take the easy jobs all the time. That's when we really start assessing people. Um, and yeah, it's so I started selection, I had 106 kilos. I was a bit, I had a couple of, I put a few...

6'4".

Yeah, so but start as 106, I usually sit about 102. I put, I had more muscle, but I also put on a couple of extra kilos of fat. Um, finish at 90 kg in 21 days.

16. 16 kilo loss.

Yeah.

So we had, on the year I did it, we had I think about 30 finished. And of that, just under 20 got selected.

Because we've seen that sort of behavior. We've seen them, they're emotional. They can't work in a team.

It's, um, there's a lot of, there's quite a few interesting things research about showing how individual high performers can be really detrimental to a team. And I questioned that a lot when I first saw it because I was like, "Well, we're going against that." But we're what we're actually selecting people for isn't just that individual brilliance. It's about how well they can work as a in a team. But yeah, I think that it, you're absolutely right. You've got, you've you, you would have worked with people that are brilliant individually, but just because they're interpersonal skills, you wouldn't hire them.

They just, they bring the wrong dynamic to the team.

Um, so I was lucky within probably two weeks of getting qualified, I was deployed again. Um, on a, again, a seven-month tour of Afghanistan.

This was, um, this one of the, I've got to be a little bit careful with what I talk about with this one, but it was hands down one of the craziest deployments I've done. Not because of the amount of combat we're in, but because of how high risk what we were doing was. We were operating in, um, Kandahar City in Afghanistan, which is what probably one of the most dangerous cities at the time. And we were, we're in a low profile sort of thing. So it was just six of us, usually two people in a car. We were driving around local cars into the city trying to locate people and and work within the city. And I can't, I can't explain...

Yeah, yep, yep. Um, and and the enemy wasn't there. It wasn't just the Taliban. Like the Afghan army, if they could, if they could get away with killing a couple of Westerners, they absolutely would have. So going through checkpoints and all that sort of stuff was really high risk for us.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We got pulled into checkpoints and taken out of the car with guns pointed at you by like Afghan soldiers. So you're not in a position where you can really engage them until they, if they decided to. So...

Very cool, calm, collected. Very, very calm. You keep your hands just low and just... I could speak a little bit of Pashto, which is the dialect there. Yeah. I could speak that and just try and and you just go them...

Yeah, sometimes.

Oh, some of those ones are big checkpoints. There's probably 30 or 40 people in there. So you can't shoot your way out of there like...

Yeah, it's you've got to talk your way out. You can't, you can't rely on um weapons get you out of there.

Ah, no, usually people just carry US dollar um fifties and you hand out a few of them. The the money, US money there's worth a hell of a lot. Yeah.

Seven months. That was seven months trip. That one. Um, that was, it was really good one. It was, it was really interesting also with um leadership I suppose with that one, but just going from now being exposed to regular army leaders now being exposed to SAS leaders, which was great.

Um, probably more with what I started noticing a lot more with the training even was reaction to, for example, reaction to combat. In the regular army, there's about, the leaders need to be like getting loud, getting aggressive, get people pumped up to to move and take the next pit or to move and try and close with the enemy. With the regiment is like, and that happened in Afghanistan. Like with people be in combat and there people shooting at random directions and people yelling and there'd be so much confusion. SAS this, and probably more for the second tour I did with the SAS, we get into combat and it just got, it got calmer. It got slower. Um, leaders and everyone operated very, very cool, calm, collected. Information was passed along. Decisions were made and we just flowed. Um, it was a very different vibe to...

Absolutely. 'Cause everyone, if you if the leader is level-headed, hopefully the team will stay level-headed.

Emotions are contagious, especially if you're a leader. So if if everyone's already at a one and the leader turns up at one, it bumps people to two. We could see that with how we, what one thing you encourage with leaders is you only speak on the radio. Never yell into the radio. When you yell into the radio, people hear that and it's all of a sudden, next thing you know, everyone's yelling, everything's faster and it's much more reactionary.

Um, I learned some, I learned some that were good, some that were bad. And that's what I've probably done with my whole career. Where else, where I sort of you asked that a question about where I learned most of my leadership from early on. So I was in a leadership with position with a regular army. I'd led a team on a tour. Um, then joined the SAS and you're the lowest rank again.

Yeah, so then which is, which was really, really good because it forces you now to you've looked at what was working for you, but now you you get a chance to sort of start again and to emulate. Like some lead leaders got good thing aspects, leaders got bad aspects. Work out which ones you do want to emulate and and take that. But a lot of leaders I've worked with, even with the SAS, had like areas that I definitely wouldn't have emulated.

Yeah, probably, look, it's a good question. The probably the biggest one that and the big thing with the SAS leaders is every single one of them was competent. They were really good at what they did. They knew tactics. A lot of them had done like a handful of tours already. They were really good. But where the difference is, and this is something that the army teaches is, and I've heard a lot in corporate world as well, they get taught, "It's not your job to be liked." So and most leaders have come across this at some stage in their career. I find that a really, really dangerous statement if it's not explained. So if we say, "It's not your job you like." The reason people are saying that is because as a leader, you have to make tough decisions. You have to make decisions that are about the the benefit of the business, not the individual.

But when people get told, "It's not your job to be liked," they use that as an excuse to communicate poorly, not explain the reason why.

Um, I have to fire someone. "It's not my job to be liked. You're done. Get out." As opposed to actually sitting down with someone and saying, "Look, empathizing with them, listening, connecting." Yeah. With even a couple of the leaders I had with within the regiment were technically excellent. Yeah. But when it comes to actual leadership, like how you actually get someone to give give 110%, you can't demand that. People give that voluntarily. And if you aren't taking time to actually connect with people and be liked, like being liked isn't in the job description, but it makes every aspect of leadership more effective if you like.

Exactly. Yep. You can't demand loyalty.

So it's a, so that I found was, there was a lot more of that old school leadership back then. And these were people who had been in the army for 20 years at that point. And they were that's that's where they've been trained the whole time. As you look at what how SAS leaders are trained now, they are it's you could take an SAS leader, put them into any situation. Some some of the junior guys and young leaders that are in the unit right now, you could put them into any situation and I'm guaranteed they'll thrive eventually. I'd have some technical knowledge, have to learn, but because they've learned how to influence, how to connect with people, and how to build trust and loyalty, that's what employ SAS people moving forward.

I've got a plug for the non-commissioned.

Probably three months later. Um, where back to Afghanistan. And that was much more of a a typical conventional, not conventional, but a typical SAS role where we were there to hunt, um, kill, capture the Taliban leaders. So I spent that was a shorter tour, so that's turned out to be about a four or five month tour. And that was us on helicopters most days. Um, we knew roughly where the enemy were trying to fly as close with them as we could and kill or capture the commanders in the area.

Yep, it was a, that was a really successful tour for us. It was actually a winter rotation. So Afghanistan's traditionally got a fighting season, which is when all the crops are high. Um, there's, there's a lot of greenery. Everyone thinks everyone pictures Afghanistan as a desert.

Yeah, but it's in your, no one fights in the desert really. Like all the people are in the green zone along the rivers, which is very thick. You're lucky to get visibility out to 50 m. So the fighting time is during the winter, probably, yeah.

No. Um, yes, yep. But then when during winter, sorry, during winter, all the crops are dead. Okay. So then it's really, really exposed. And people don't fight then also 'cause it's, it's cold. Um, so what's and what there was a sort of tempo that happened over quite a few years whereas especially with the SAS would have couple of tours during the fighting season and then it was just like a keepers um like a tour of people just to keep presence over the winter and not actually do any targeting. So for whatever reason that was the case for our one and we decided we actually targeted. So we went out hunting over the and caught leadership completely by surprise. It was also made it a lot easier because they couldn't we didn't have to search through hundreds of meters of cornfield to try and find people. If they tried to run from their buildings, they'd get into an aqueduct and they'd have to fight from there. Um, which was our strength. Um, so for us, it was a very successful tour. I think we we got as many high value targets on that trip as we did on pretty much any other one, even though it was a winter tour.

I guess it's killed. Either it's...

Yeah. Killed. It's satisfaction. If it's in a firefight, you've killed someone, it's satisfying because you're, you're alive at the end of the day. They've been trying to kill you. Um, and you've won. Um, there's not too much. Um, I haven't ever really like regretted or anything like that. Um, the people that I've, I've been pretty clear with, the people who I've killed has been, um, they were the enemy. I'm 100% sure of that or that. And they were trying to kill me at the time. So it hasn't really been something that I've overthought. But for me, yeah, it's at the time, it's satisfaction. You've done what you were there to do.

Yeah, yep. Um, so I think, and pros and cons of each.

So I've, I'm lucky 'cause I've deployed with both now. So I've deployed with the Americans, so I deployed with the British as part of the British SAS and then was um attached also to the Americans. And again, this just my perspective. My perspective, the British SAS are the best. They're the best in the world at special operations. They're the best at unconventional solutions, um, thinking well and truly outside the box and doing things that no one else would think about doing. Um, they don't have the as much equipment and they don't have as much money as what the Americans do. So they're more resourceful.

And they are also supported and backed 100% by their government. They get given a hell of a lot of autonomy. So I think when it comes to actual thinking outside the box, the British. Um, the Americans are the best in the world at war. Have got the reason, so we'd go on a patrol and we'd be lucky to have one drone ahead of us to provide us support. You go on patrol with the Americans and there's like three or four lines of fighter jets above you.

At achieving a mission.

All the resources in the world. It's unbelievable. You wouldn't, like, it's absolut absolutely astronomical. We've seen them build a a full-on air base in within in 48 hours. How much money they spend? Billions. Yeah, my last, my last tour with, I was on one of their bases. They had, there was two saunas and an ice bath on the base and a gym that went over the base was the size of two tennis courts. And still have that. But and the American soldiers, yeah, they, they're good. They're really good at fighting. Um, and they're really, really well resourced. And I still, obviously loyalty here, I think SAS, some, the Australian SAS have probably got some of the best soldiers in the world because we've got, we still are out there a lot. We still got a lot of work. We're a very small unit, a very small defense force. Um, so we have to make up for. We don't, we can't rely on having all the ISR above us or the all the um fighters and the aircraft above us. So for us, I think that's what separates us.

They are, they are really, really good soldiers. They just don't get as much opportunity to put into practice. Okay. Um, they were, they were brilliant in Afghanistan.

No, no, 'cause it's such a small, such a small army and they, yeah, they don't get too many opportunities. But they are brewing soldiers as well.

Yeah. And we'd, we'd even Afghanistan. We'd go out on a mission, we'd go out for four or five hours on a mission hunting and potentially fighting. Then we come back and probably go to the gym. Um, there was a a squadron of SAS got sent to the Australian Institute of Sport for a heap of testing. And it blew their minds that the AIS, they ended up, they were saying, "You shouldn't be able to do what you're doing." Like the levels of cortisol that you guys have is insane and how low your adrenals must be.

Yeah, yeah. 'Cause if you overtrain, your testosterone drops, plummets. But we were outperforming the metrics that of fitness, endurance and strength. They were train that were training the guys were outperforming.

It does. Yep. And we've got like sleep's a huge issue in the unit. There's a lot of people aren't sleeping well. Um, injuries of the we, we have a lot of soldiers out due to injuries or we used to anyway. Nowadays, there's a much more smarter approach when it comes to high performance. Um, but yeah, how far I was on. I've been on a deployment where I've been out like I was decided to do heavy with my mate, do heavy deadlifts and couldn't, couldn't put my shoe on without lying on the floor for like three days and still having to work.

Um, so I really struggled for quite a long time. I had about 10 years where I had absolute insomnia. Um,

Yeah. Pro, my first deployment to Afghanistan, soon after that's when it kicked in.

It would have, it would have been an element of that. I think due to Afghanistan, my everyone awake. Everyone comes up, wakes up during the night because but they, most people comes to a very, very low level and they fall back asleep and then never even consciously aware that they went, they woke up. For us, our level of alertness probably got to the point where when I was waking up, I was waking wide awake. So then there was an element of that. Too much cortisol. You can't sleep.

Yeah, well, so that that's, I think that's how it started. Then for me it became a mental thing. I became like, "I'm a [expletive] sleeper." That's how I saw myself. That's when that's when it's all goes south. Yep. And then like, I wouldn't, there was nights where I wasn't falling asleep until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and then I was getting up at 6:00 to go to work. Like I felt drunk. I'm going into work. One. And this is I started telling you this outside but um a lot of the time I was getting sleeping tablets and that sort of stuff, which just didn't help me in the slightest.

Yep. They are great for certain things when like, not like, not like, not like, not like, not like, not like.

Yeah, you can use them to reset your circadian rhythm. Like reset if you're especially switching time zones and things like that. So I got to, and I, I remember this day 'cause I was had and going to bed for me became something that was so frustrating. I just and I knew that what was going to happen, I'd fall asleep for about half an hour.

And then you'd be awake until 4:00 in the morning and I'm just like, "So this week of week," I was, I was in the squadron leadership role at the time. I was running training, um, for and it was close quarter battle training with live ammunition. So this is where you've got going through a building where you can shoot live ammunition, you're shooting close proximity to your mates. It's very fast, it's very high risk. I was driving to work and I felt drunk. Um, so tired. I was so tired. I I'd probably got maybe an hour and a half sleep that night. I went and I went straight to the doctor's thing. You're supposed to army, you're supposed to have an appointment and everything like that. I just walked straight into his office. He was in with someone else. I just, I said, "Look, I'm, I'm about to run live training. I'm about to shoot within a foot of my mate's heads and I feel like I'm drunk." Um, 'cause what I wanted was to go to a sleep academy. I wanted to go to some like to see sleep specialists, which wasn't supported by the army at the time. The doctor we had there was really good. He looked after the guys. Um, and he went after after that little outburst, he got me to go see a sleep specialist. Did that one year. Get connected to all the wires. Um, and also saw a sleep psychologist, um, who was brilliant, really in in WA at the time. Um, he's moved since moved. But that was a really good process. So 'cause so it was a lot of it was mental for me. So what, how the sleep psychologist did it and what would happen, I'd be exhausted, so I'd go to bed earlier. So I'd go to bed at 8:00. But you actually know, you compound the issue by doing that.

So this guy made me do the opposite. So for, so to sleeping, yep. So half an hour off each. I think it was about every week I had to take a half hour off each one until. So wake up now half hour earlier, go to bed half an hour later until I slept through the night. Even if it was for 2 hours once. So I got to the point where I went to bed, slept until my alarm went off. Then you start started bringing it out again. Took months. But that's I went from not ever sleeping throughout the night to actually getting a full night's sleep.

I think that that mean the mentality of it matters so much though. I found as well. Like when I was like, "I'm, I'm a terrible sleeper." I tell you into it. So then you go to bed anxious or frustrated. Cortisol's up. You'd wake up throughout the night and you'd be like, "I'm bloody awake again." So spikes again. Um, so it's, yeah. And sleep's again, it's critical. I genuinely think that I operated about 80% of if I'm lucky, 80% of what I was capable of for years simply because I wasn't sleeping that well.

Um, yeah, towards the end of my time in one and selection probably didn't help either because it, it takes apparently takes well over a year for you to fully recover from selection.

Yeah, your body's not supposed to lose that much weight.

About 14 years in the end.

I remember. So one of the, I remember one of the jobs we went out on. So we always put ourselves at advantage. So we, we never fought fair. You're fighting fair, you're, you're stuffed up. You're not supposed to do that. There was one job we went out on after a target had been hunting for about two months. The previous rotation before us had tried to, tried to, um, kill, capture him and he'd fought them out of that valley. So it actually defeated effectively defeated them. They had a couple of wounded, at least one person wounded in action. They weren't able to get in. They had to pull out of that, pull out of the valley. So he was our biggest target. Um, so we, we were hunting him for quite a long time. And I remember when we went into that valley, when we actually got the briefing about this, we were sitting there, got briefed up about how many soldiers he had available to him and tactics that they used last time. Um, so I remember sitting that helicopter going, "[expletive], this is, this is going to be intense." Like last time there was a a wave of bullets coming at people and all that. So we end up striking at night. Um, and we had the advantage the whole time. But there was just that many. There was quite a few people managed to move away from that building. And then we're sort of out in the aqueducts around us as individuals. Just like you would never never knew they were there until they started shooting at you. So that was that was quite hairy because it wasn't as such that there was a huge amount of fire going around. But each black, we've got night vision goggles. Um, and trying to hunt through this, it was a fairly short area, but it was quite built up where you weren't actually sure where these guys were.

No, not back then they didn't. Nowadays, so my last couple of deployments was Biden did leave a lot of tech there. Yeah, they probably do now. They're killing it right now. I've seen footage of their training as well. So there's, I think they're getting foreign assistance there as well. Um, whereas even ISIS, um, my last couple of tours were against ISIS. They've got a lot more technology now. Um, there and you're sort of getting close towards peer-on-peer with them.

Yeah, absolutely. Yep. You look at the ISIS drone technology when I was there in 2017 at Mosul, ISIS's drone capabilities were is probably in par with what ours are now.

'Cause they just had no, they just pump it out. They can it needs to get done. They get it done.

Um, couple of things. Probably a really big contributing factor for me was married the girl of my dreams and I didn't really want to, um, didn't want to keep doing that. Even when we were together. So we were together four years. I probably spent two years that away. Um, I proposed proposed to her and then um got told two weeks later I was going to Afghanistan for seven months. So I went from being very popular to being very unpopular very quickly. Um, and I didn't want to. Lots of lots of guys do it. Um, but I just didn't want to do that. Um, and I'd already ticked a lot of my boxes. My body was starting to really fall apart. Like my knees, my ankles. Um, I really noticed. Um, I couldn't run without regretting it the next day. Especially when you're running with body armor on the rifle. Um, my last tour was again, I had in 2020, 2020, I think it was May 2021. Um, again against ISIS. I'd be, you'd get the adrenaline surge and I was like, "I'm 18 again," running around with that body armor on. And then I'd wake up the next day and barely be able to move. So that was that was a contributing factor. Um, and yeah, there's probably a few other things when it comes to like the investigations that happened and how the SAS has been treated for a few years. I sort of lost faith with the defense force, not with the SAS. They um has always looked after their people and had some brilliant leaders in there that did that.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And I, I just just misunderstood and a lot of things taken well and truly out of proportion. So just with how that process went, I lost faith. And on my last trip, I was there thinking, if I, I was double, I was overthinking some decisions. Not because I thought it was the right or the wrong thing to do, but I was considering like, "Am I going to get thrown under the bus for this in five years time by someone on an armchair?"

Absolutely. In certain situations, time to move on.

Mhm.

Um, for me, 'cause I really want to run again. Running's always been my, uh, fitness activity of choice. I love doing it. So I've been doing, um, knees over toes for a couple of years and I've quite I found that really useful. Um,

Yeah, it's, it's so I found him, I think it was on Instagram after I got out.

And a few guys in the SAS had started doing that stuff. A lot of it is a principle that you're when you're, we're designed that our knees are supposed to go forward of your toes, which I know when a long time when I was training was the opposite, quite the opposite. Um, so it's about, it's it's all about just purely strengthening your knees and your joints around it, sorry, and the um muscles around it to be able to run again. And he's, he's a basketball, it's I think he's in his 40s. He's in his 40s. I can see him like doing slam dunks and all that business.

Yeah, yep. Yeah, pretty much. Or not moving is really what the goal used to be. Um, and yeah, so I spent a lot of that. Heel elevated squats, um, a lot of working, walking backwards.

Um, sled, sled pulls. I don't, I do them at home.

Because it's I find that and sled push, I love as well. So nice. And I found that really useful. And I'm doing a lot of doing a lot of time hiking and all that as well at the moment, which has been. I don't know if that's helping or hurting, but I'm doing it.

Yeah, with like, with what I do when I work with leaders, I'm not, I don't like telling people what to do is on how to do it as well, which I think is where's a big gap. So I still will say, and I know this is something that you hear a lot is, I think vulnerability is one of the most important ones. But what it really means, not what people. It's not about being able to cry in front of your team or anything like that. Like being able to own your mistakes, being able to say when you don't know, um, and being able to seek out constant improvement. Being a, say to your team or say to your peers genuinely, "How do I get better? How do I constantly improve?" Um, so I think vulnerability is a huge one. Your ability to another one. I think is something as critical as being able to separate what's in your control and what's outside your control and to act accordingly. A huge amount of leaders end up getting caught up in things that they've got no ability to control. The fact that especially something's happened in the past or something they're worried about is going to happen in the future. Um, being able to see like, at the end of the day, all we can control is our thoughts and the way we, the way we think, the way we behave, and we can influence a few things around that. Um, with the SAS, we used to teach in combat. When things started getting hectic, when it's, when we've had a casualty or we've something's gone horribly wrong. "What now? What next? What can I?" When you, so when I say, when have you catch yourself catastrophizing or ruminating about the past, what's important now? What's important next? So right now I need to do focus on doing this. And once I've done that, bam, I'll move on to the next task. Um, trying to avoid being caught in that, um, in the worrying about things that we can't control.

And last one, I'm going to, I'm going to lie awake tonight going, "I should have said this other." But I'll go with there's definitely others. But I'm going to say being able to regulate your emotions. I think that's a big one.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm guilty of doing this sometimes. And it's just regulating your emotion. Stay cool, calm, and collected. Identify the problem and then solve it.

Yep. And it's not about suppressing because you're when you feel frustration, when you feel anger, even when you feel excitement, that's good. Like if I feeling, for me one of my biggest values is fairness and justice. So if I see inappropriate behavior, I get it gets frustrates me or makes me angry. For me using that emotion, that the purpose of that is to make me actually go there and deal with that situation. If I don't regulate my emotions first, I'll go over there. I'm going to yell at someone and that's not helpful. But having tools, and there's tools you could, we, we train soldiers to be cool, calm, collected in battle. We can train leaders to be cool, calm, collected when you're dealing with pressure, when you're dealing with change.

It is. Yeah. And it's something that absolutely can be taught. Um, so I think that's really, really important because you can, we can teach you how to have a difficult conversation. We can teach you how to lead through change. You keep losing your temper. If you can't just be cool, can't collect it, it's wasted.

Thanks. Thank you.