First Man In: Leading from the Front

‘Who the fuck are you?’ he said, taking a step towards me.

Seeing what was about to happen, Ivan spoke up. ‘All right, mate, he’s only trying to help you out.’

‘And what’s your fucking problem?’ said Neil.

‘You’re the one with the fucking problem.’

‘Do you want to sort this out then?’

‘All right.’

‘Once we’ve knocked off tonight, I’ll see you behind building 2D.’

I couldn’t understand it. Why was Neil being such a dick? Did he feel, coming into a new troop, that he had to dominate people to get respect? Maybe it was that he’d clocked up a few weeks’ more experience than us prior to his injury, and so when I told him where to stand he felt insulted. What was the point of reacting like that? I’d been polite and respectful to him. If I’d have said the same thing in France, I’d have been thanked. But the UK was a completely different culture and these kinds of situations would probably be solved with aggression or outright violence.

‘It’s dog-eat-dog over here’, I thought to myself. ‘It really is every man for himself.’ The cheeky and helpful manner that people found so charming at my mixed-sex French school were getting me nowhere quickly in this hardcore male-only environment. Rather than it winning me friends and allies, as it had over there, I was being met with an attitude of ‘Who the fuck does this prick think he is?’ I sensed there was something else going on too. People were defining me by my appearance and my polite cheerfulness. Neil, for one, had seen I wasn’t a big lad and was reacting to that, judging me as beneath him. ‘You little gobshite,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘I’m not taking orders from you.’

There was only one thing I could do. Everyone thought I was a soft lad, so I had to prove them wrong. I knew there was going to be a confrontation that night, and given the size differential between Neil and Ivan, my new pal was going to get pasted. As the dark silhouette of the corporal marched towards us, I silently decided I’d join him in the fight. I’d defend him as he’d defended me.

That day passed slowly. When the time came and I saw Ivan slip out of the accommodation block, I trotted after him down the dark path.

‘What you doing?’ he said.

‘You were sticking up for me,’ I explained. ‘I’m part of this.’

‘This is nothing to do with you,’ said Ivan.

‘I’ve got to stand up to this guy,’ I said. ‘I’m going to help you out, aren’t I? Otherwise, who am I?’

I liked the way that sounded. Loyal. Tough. But Ivan just laughed in my face.

‘It’s just not you, Ant, is it?’ he said. ‘I’m not being funny, mate, but go on. Get back there and get your tea down you before it gets cold.’

I was furious. All my anxieties about what the others thought of me had been summed up in that one dismissive comment. Maybe it was Ivan I should be fronting up to, not Neil.

‘How do you fucking know it’s not me?’ I said.

‘Because you’re better than that.’

Now that really did hit me, harder than any punch I might be about to take behind the kitchen block. The thing was, I could tell he meant it too. And he was right. What was I doing? Trying to prove I was one of them by turning myself into someone I wasn’t? If they thought I was a soft lad, that was their problem. By trying to prove myself to them, I realised, I was actually submitting to them. I was letting them control me. But what was I going to do now? I could hardly leave Ivan to take a beating. I had to ask myself who I was. I was someone, I hoped, who was a bit smarter than the average green army recruit. I was someone who wasn’t going to let ego and temper ruin my career. I realised that the only way to deal with this while remaining true to myself was to try to prevent the fight from happening at all.

‘Why do you need to fight this guy anyway?’ I said.

‘You don’t get it, Ant,’ he said. ‘It’s not like it is where you come from. It’s alpha male. It’s who’s got the biggest dick. You’ve got to step up to the plate.’

‘We’ve just joined the army a few weeks ago,’ I said. ‘If word of this gets out or you tip up to parade with a black eye or a broken nose, they’re going to know what’s gone on.’

Ivan said nothing.

‘You’re risking your entire career to prove something to this idiot,’ I continued. ‘That’s not very smart. Do you really care about what he thinks of you that much that you’ll put everything on the line?’

He still said nothing.

‘You’re going to lose your career. You’re sacrificing everything you’ve worked for, for Neil Porlock. You’re letting him win, just by turning up.’

After that, it didn’t take long to grind him down. He stopped, turned around, and instead of a fight, we went and had a cup of tea and a biscuit.

I can’t help but look back on that incident with a bit of pride. Even at that young age, and in that tough environment, I was able to keep a grip on who I really was and sense that the alpha-male bully-boy culture was trying to mould me into someone else. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that I managed to maintain that strength of character. As you’ll soon discover, I eventually let the worst of the army get the better of me. I became someone who couldn’t have been further removed from that polite and gentle young lad.

It never ends, though. People always want to define you. Because these days I’m best known for the Channel 4 show SAS: Who Dares Wins, strangers try to define me all the time. They assume I’m this chippy rogue who deals with everything through violence. When they meet me, they expect me to have some hard, judgemental persona. I get people approaching me in the street and talking about my size. They imagine that I’m six foot eight, not five foot eight, and I always get, ‘You look bigger on TV.’ Or they say, ‘I don’t know what everyone’s so worried about, I reckon I could have it with you.’

They’re joking around when they come out with stuff like that … but also they’re not. Otherwise, why would they say it? I just laugh it off. I’ve got nothing to prove. I’m in competition with no one, especially now I’m in the TV world. I mean, it’s not as if I feel the need to compete with someone like Bear Grylls, is it? So I banter back with them. ‘Yeah, mate, you probably could have me. Don’t listen to all that TV stuff. They’ve got special lenses on their cameras that make me look bigger.’ I’m happy to do that. I don’t feel threatened at all. I know who I am.

But being an approachable guy doesn’t mean I’m a pushover. When I work, I work. I think it’s important not to mix business with pleasure. When there’s a job to get done, I want to get it done and to the best of my ability. And I want to do it my way. This might sound arrogant, but in my field I genuinely believe that I’m the best at what I do. So while I think it’s important to listen to others and not surround myself with Yes men, at the end of the day I’m the leader. I’ll make sure the job’s done properly, the way I want it done and to my standards. And I expect everyone else to be in that mindset. People know, when they work with me, that they need to snap into a different mode. There’s no messing about.

But then when I’m not working I’m a loving father and husband, and I like to think I’m a relaxed guy to be around. That no-nonsense persona is completely gone. It’s like I’m two different people. That’s why I think it’s crucial that you don’t define yourself as just one person. That, to me, is the sign of a fake. It’s the sign of someone who has this fantasy model of who they want everyone to think they are and just tries to act up to it all the time. When you’re true to yourself you know that you’re a different person in different situations, and you’re totally relaxed about it.

I believe you can only get so far by trying to put on a persona. People who do that always hit a ceiling. They find themselves thinking, ‘Right, I’ve got this far, now who do I have to be to get to this next stage?’ If you’re yourself, that won’t happen. You’ll find your own place. You’ll get the job done the way you want it done. If you try to be someone else, you’ll get lost, because the person who’s got you to where you are is a total stranger. He’s a fantasy. You don’t know who he is. So when new challenges arrive, you’ll have to suddenly come up with a different game plan, a different strategy, a different person to be. And that’s not a sustainable pattern.

If you’re yourself, you’ll get to where you’re going on your own instincts. There’ll be no need to constantly second-guess yourself, thinking, ‘Who do I have to be in this moment? How do I have to act? What do I have to say?’ You’ll be constantly rebooting yourself from scratch. You won’t be growing and learning, you’ll be panicking. You won’t be giving yourself the chance to optimise. When you start on the first square of the grid of being yourself, with every new square you strive to get to you improve who you are. Every struggle you go through will make you a better player. That’s what growth is. That’s what life’s journey is all about. It’s about taking who you are and making you a better version of yourself. It’s not about trying to be this person or that person. It’s not about trying to be like Neil or Ivan. It’s not about letting other people define who you are.

This is why I always tell people, don’t try to better your life, don’t try to better your work, don’t try to better your relationships. Don’t try to be rich, happy, successful. Don’t do any of that. You’ll be wasting your time. It doesn’t work. Nothing will change, and you’ll get disillusioned and burned out. Instead, you should work at trying to better who you are as a character. Be the best version of you that you can imagine, and I guarantee that all the rest of it will just fall naturally into place. Why? Because you’re arming yourself. You’re giving yourself the tools to be honest with yourself and therefore to be honest with other people. If someone in your life has messed up, you’re not going to sit there being too nervous to talk to them about it.

What’s not honest is always trying to be the person other people either want you to be or think that you are already. Back in Basic Training, because of the way I looked and spoke, everyone thought I was weak. I could have let that influence me and become weak. For a while I fought against it. There are always going to be people who want to define you by your worst qualities. They pick up on your flaws, zoom in on your most embarrassing and shameful mistakes, and decide that, deep down, that’s the person you really are. What makes this especially dangerous is that it’s so easy to believe. The trick is not to deny what these negative people are saying. If you do that, you’ll look dishonest and inauthentic, and you’ll lose the respect of anyone who does admire you. The best response is to accept what they’re saying, but know it’s only a small part of the truth. Everyone has flaws. Just be up-front about them.

Here’s a scenario you might find it useful to think about. Imagine that your particular weakness is physical fitness. Someone has told you that you need to run five miles with a sixty-pound backpack on. If you were to turn around and say, ‘Yeah, yeah, no worries at all,’ nothing good’s going to happen. But what about if you said, ‘Actually, I’m going to struggle with that. Physical fitness is not my strong point. I will do it, I’ll get the job done, but I need to let you know this is going to be a bit hard for me. I might need a push along the way’? When you’re honest like that, I promise you that magical things will happen. People will think, ‘This guy’s comfortable with himself. He’s not trying to be someone he’s not. He’s a person who is steadfastly defining himself. He’s an honest person.’ And they’ll naturally want to help you out. They’ll want to say, ‘Do you know what, mate? I’ll give you a hand.’

People don’t get annoyed so much when you struggle, but when you fake it, that’s when their walls come up. They get defensive. Then you’re in conflict with that other person. There’s friction and the job is not getting done. People think, ‘If I admit my weaknesses, others will have less respect for me.’ But it’s actually the other way around.

But there’s an exception to all this. Sometimes it’s a good idea to let someone else define who you are. There are times in your life when someone will see something positive in you that you didn’t realise was there. This is exactly what happened to me when, at the age of twenty-four, I was going through Royal Marines training. I’d got to week fifteen of the thirty-two-week course, at which point a new officer came in at the top of the hierarchy. He was an older boy, and everyone respected him. He’d only been there for a couple of weeks when he summoned me unexpectedly to his office. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted: I was coming first in everything and keeping myself to myself, so there was no personal trouble with anyone else, at least that I knew about.

‘Middleton,’ he said, ‘you’re in danger of losing grip.’ Losing grip? No I wasn’t. I took a moment to make sure my face wasn’t betraying my irritated confusion. ‘I’m not quite sure what the problem is,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’re getting a bit too big for your boots or perhaps it’s just that you’re thinking about yourself too much. Well, whatever it is, I’m coming to the conclusion very rapidly that you’re not a team man. You need to understand something that’s crucially important if you want to achieve your full potential in this organisation. The Royal Marines aren’t here to provide you with a pyramid to stand on top of. You, Middleton, are a part of that pyramid. You’re just another brick. Do you understand what I’m getting at?’

‘I think so, sir,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to prove that you’re the best. That’s not what all this is about. I think you have a lot more to offer than merely being number one. You’ve got to think about the bigger picture. You might be leading all the scoreboards but you’re not actually leading. The kind of men we prize here are the ones who bring the others with them. I think you have that in you.’

There was absolutely nothing I could say. He was right. All I wanted was to be the best at PT, the best at exercise, the first man at map-reading, and so on. I used to study alone. If tests were coming up about fieldcraft or map-reading I’d be in my corner, getting my head down, making it clear that no one should disturb me. I’d assumed that that’s what success in the Forces looked like – dominating as many scoreboards as possible. My conversation with this officer was my first inkling that there was more to leading than simply being first. I realised I could afford to take a little bit of a back step and allow myself to be second or third at some things – to go for ninety per cent rather than one hundred.

At the time, all the lads were preparing for an important test that would assess our knowledge of everything we’d learned to date – fieldcraft, marksmanship principles, camouflage and concealment, the whole lot. I was aware that one skill a lot of the guys had struggled with was a particular way of identifying the cardinal directions. It was known as the ‘stick and stone method’. You’d put a stick – a length about a foot and a half would do it – in the ground and mark the tip of the shadow it made with a stone. Then you waited twenty minutes. By that time the shadow would have moved. You’d put another stone where the new tip of the shadow was, and you’d know that the line between your two stones ran east to west.

After my meeting with the officer, I went back to my block, gathered my thoughts for a bit, then approached a gaggle of guys who were chatting in the corner. ‘Are any of you lot struggling with the stick and stone method?’ I asked them. About five men said yes. Then I went to the next block and asked them. When I’d been round all the blocks, I gave a demonstration outside to at least a dozen lads. This was my first experience of true leadership. And I loved it. The amazing thing was, it began to change me. The more I approached people, the more approachable I became.

I’d only been vaguely aware of it beforehand, but my being on my own all the time had been putting noses out of joint. Back in my army days I’d done the same thing and, as you’re about to learn, it had led to disaster. But now, in the Marines, my problem had been picked up through effective training. Not only did that leader give me a new definition of success, he allowed me to enjoy my Marines experience more. Up to that point I’d just been pushing, pushing, pushing, my rev counter constantly in the red. But where can you go from there? And who’s with you? You’re up there by yourself. If you’re alone, who’s going to be there for you? Nobody. In the battlefield, that’s not a trivial problem.

But all these essential lessons I’d learned with the Marines were still a long way off when I was that still all-too impressionable young lad doing Basic Training at Pirbright. The next chapter of my story wouldn’t make itself known until I was in the final fortnight.

I was in my accommodation cleaning my boots when I heard a shout: ‘Middleton!’ I ran to the door and stood to attention.