The Fear Bubble: Harness Fear and Live Without Limits

And then I returned home. By the time I left the Special Forces, the fear bubble technique had become something that I’d do almost subconsciously. It was just how I handled myself and the various challenges that life threw up. I never considered that it would be transferable to other people until one day I received a message from a sixteen-year-old boy called Lucas who was doing his GCSEs.

After the first series of SAS: Who Dares Wins was broadcast, it became normal for me to receive hundreds of messages every week, many of them from young men with various questions about mindset. Often they wanted to join the military or were simply looking for advice on how to cope with certain difficult situations they had coming up. Sadly, I’m only able to respond to a small fraction of these appeals for help. But Lucas sent me a message via social media that I couldn’t ignore.

‘I just don’t want to be on this planet any more,’ he wrote.

‘What’s wrong?’ I replied.

‘I’ve got my GCSEs coming up. I’m stressing out. I’m better off not being here. I can’t deal with it.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m at home.’

‘If you’re at home, why are you in that bubble of fear? If you want to get up and have a can of Coke and talk to your parents, you can do that. At this place and time you’re in control. You don’t need to be in that bubble now. Don’t put that pressure on yourself. Even the day of your exams, when you’re on your way to school, you don’t need to be in that bubble. Even when you open the classroom door and you sit down with the exam paper in front of you, you don’t need to be in that bubble. The moment control gets taken away from you and the clock starts ticking, that’s when you need to get in the bubble. Attack Question 1 with a bubble. Once you’re done with that, come out of it, enjoy the adrenaline, compose yourself, and attack Question 2 with a fresh bubble.’

After I’d properly laid out my own method for dealing with fearful situations, he asked me, ‘But why don’t I just stay in that bubble for all fifty questions?’

‘Because you’ll be in it for too long,’ I explained. ‘What happens if you only know 50 per cent of Question 1? All you’re going to do is drag that bubble over to Question 2 and then it’s going to negatively affect your performance on that question. And what if you don’t know Question 2? The fear will build and build. The negativity will build and build. I guarantee you won’t get to Question 10 without your mind starting to frazzle and you losing the plot.’

A couple of weeks later Lucas got back in touch. He had tried my fear bubble technique. And he’d nailed his exam. But it was what he told me afterwards that really got me excited. He said, ‘Ant, I loved going from bubble to bubble. It actually made me enjoy the exam.’

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I thought, ‘So did I! I used to run around the battlefield looking for the next bubble to get into.’ Not only that, but Lucas’s performance was dramatically improved by his use of the technique. He reported that his time appreciation was much better and that he actually finished the exam ten minutes early. He came out of his final bubble, looked around and saw that everyone else was still heads down and deep in it.

Hearing all this from Lucas was simply incredible. I never dreamed that this little hack that I’d worked out years previously on a foreign battlefield as a terrified soldier engaging in brutal firefight after brutal firefight could possibly transfer to a GSCE exam hall in Bolton. It was only then that it occurred to me that the technique might have the power to transform other people’s lives, just as it had transformed my own.

Eagle-eyed fans of SAS: Who Dares Wins might have seen its powerful effects in a famous scene from Series 2. After my experience with Lucas, I thought I’d see if the technique could help the recruits get through some of the tough challenges we throw at them. One capable young contestant called Moses Adeyemi confessed that he was scared of heights and water. Unfortunately for Moses, heights and water were pretty much all we had planned for him in that series. One morning we brought the contestants to a large river into which they’d have to perform a backwards dive from a high platform that we’d erected on top of a shipping container. The moment Moses saw what we had in store for him he began shaking like a leaf.

What the producers of the programme don’t have time to show is that, as well as bawling at the contestants and pushing them and punishing them, we also mentor them. When I saw the state that Moses was whipping himself into, I decided to take him off for a couple of minutes and explain the fear bubble technique to him.

‘Why are you shaking now?’ I asked him. ‘You’re not in any danger whatsoever. The bubble is on the end of that platform. It’s at a place and a time that is not here and is not now. So fucking calm down.’

As I was speaking, Moses was so busy shaking that I thought it was all going completely over his head. But when he walked along the platform a few minutes later, he did so with utter confidence, as if he owned the bloody thing. I watched him get to the very edge, turn around and wobble. That’s when I knew he’d grasped it. He was in the bubble. The fear was hitting him.

‘You’ve got this,’ I told him.

He tapped his chest three times and muttered something to himself. In that moment I could see that he’d committed. There was no going back now.

And then he dropped. When he was dragged out of the water a couple of minutes later and hauled into the waiting boat, he looked as if he was wired on some sort of illegal drug.

‘Easy!’ he shouted. ‘Fucking easy!’

If I’d asked him to, I’d bet good money that he’d have gladly climbed right back up there and done it all over again.

It’s because of my experience with Moses that, whenever we have contestants on SAS: Who Dares Wins who have to do something heady like abseil off a cliff, I take the time to talk the really scared ones through the method.

‘There’s no point standing back here shaking,’ I tell them. ‘You’re wasting your resources. If you keep on thinking like this you won’t even get to the edge. Walk up to it, acknowledge the bubble, visualise it, get in it – and then walk back out of it, if you have to. Leave the bubble where it belongs.’

It gets people through, almost every single time. And Moses? That man who was afraid of heights and water, and was lost and trembling in a world of fear filled with heights and water? He ended up being the last man standing, the only one to make it to the very end of that series.

When you make yourself aware of these patterns, you start seeing them everywhere. For example, when people do a bungee jump, they’re always terrified before they leap but as soon as the rope takes their weight they’re instantly elated. They want to do another jump and then another jump. What’s happening is that they’re going into the fear bubble, bursting it, and then hitting an adrenaline buzz. That buzz is then pushing them to want to go back into another bubble. When they do go back into that bubble, and do another jump, they’re still going to experience a horrible, gut-wrenching dread just before they leap, but this time they know that the moment they pierce it they’ll get an instant, massive reward. In this way, bungee jumpers are going through exactly the same process as me on the battlefield, Lucas in the exam hall and Moses in the Ecuadorian rainforest. It becomes enjoyable. It becomes addictive.

THE CORRIDOR

This is when it starts changing your life. When you manage to harness the power of your own fear and go looking for bubbles to pop, amazing things begin to happen. For me, one of these life-changing events took place after I’d left the Special Forces. I’d found some interesting work to do that ended up taking me right across Africa. I spent most of my time on the western side of the continent, in countries such as Senegal, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone, but every now and then I’d bounce eastwards to Burundi. Often I’d be training government troops in surveillance, counter-surveillance and sniping. One day I found myself working with a team of snipers in Sierra Leone that were about to deploy to Somalia. I was in a troop shelter, unloading their weapons, when my phone rang. It was a withheld number. After hesitating for a moment I decided to answer. On the other end was a posh voice I didn’t recognise.

‘Are you Ant Middleton?’

‘Yes, Ant Middleton speaking.’

‘I hear you’re the man for the job.’

Who was this joker? After you leave the Special Forces you become used to being approached by all sorts of shady characters offering you all sorts of shady work. You quickly develop an instinct for who’s the real deal, and who are the idiots. The first tell is this – the idiots talk as if they’re in a bad Guy Ritchie movie. Still, I thought, I might as well hear this one out. To my surprise, he turned out to be an executive from a TV production company. He explained that they were planning on creating a major show in which twenty-five to thirty ordinary men would be put through a condensed version of Special Forces selection. He’d heard I was about the right age bracket and had the right experience. Was I interested in trying out for it, as one of the directing staff?

‘I’ll call you back,’ I said.

My immediate instinct told me that this was a definite no. At that time I was living completely in the shadows. I wasn’t on social media, I wasn’t in the phone book, I wasn’t even on the electoral roll. I was bouncing around Africa, a continent that I love, doing well-paid work, and the only person who knew my whereabouts was my wife Emilie. I was happy with that. Very happy indeed. And, besides, it wasn’t seen as the done thing for a Special Forces man to step out of the shadows. What were the lads going to think? How would they take it? When I began to think about the potential ramifications of a television career, a thousand questions suddenly flooded in. I felt my heart begin to pound.

When my mind gets bombarded with questions like this, I always like to take a step back and ask myself the most important question of all. Who am I? I’m someone that loves a challenge. I will challenge absolutely everything. I love opportunity. I will seize every one that comes my way until the end. But my main characteristic is that I love putting myself into situations where I’m forced to sink or swim. I want fear bubbles in my life. I want to be in a world in which I’m having to step into them and pop them in order to move forwards. Everything about this offer scared me. In which case, perhaps I should give it a try.

As it turned out, stepping out of the shadows was indeed a difficult thing to do. After I was approached about the show, I was put under immense pressure from everyone up to Director Special Forces himself not to take part. I was called in for a meeting and told that I would be in breach of my contract if I did it. I didn’t believe this was fair.

‘You’re not paying to put food on my table or a roof over my head, but you still want to dictate the terms of my life,’ I said. ‘You expect me to live in the shadows even when you’re not looking after me any more.’

In that moment I made up my mind. I wasn’t going to let them dictate to me.

‘I’m doing it. Take me to court.’

I soon discovered that I wasn’t the only former operator to tip up as a presenter on the show who’d been through similar meetings and also possessed the fortitude to press on.

The truth is, if I hadn’t had my particular relationship with fear, I would never have called that posh guy back. But I did, and it changed everything. Because that’s what happens when you live with courage. When my phone rang on that sunny morning in Sierra Leone, it felt as if a door had appeared before me. In front of that door was a fear bubble. After a lot of anxious thinking, I decided to step into that bubble and open that door. And when I went through it, I found myself in a brand new world.

This is all of human life. We live our days in a corridor that’s lined with doors. Each one of those doors is frightening to open. This is why, nine times out of ten, we choose to step back from them, leaving them closed. But whenever we muster the courage to step through them, we emerge into a new and better corridor, one that’s lined with even more doors that are even scarier to open. Becoming the person we want to be, with the life we’ve always dreamed of living, is simply a matter of developing the courage to open more doors.

You might not believe that a radical transformation in yourself could be this easy. But it really is. Trust me when I tell you there are two lives you could be living. There’s the life you’re in right now, at this moment, and there’s the better life that’s just a step away. Every day that passes without you getting to grips with harnessing your fear means another day that these doors remain shut and you stay limited. I want you to start changing this today. I want you to begin opening these doors. And not only am I going to tell you exactly how to do it, I’m going to show you that it’s much easier than you think.

I also want to impress upon you that this should be an urgent mission. You should take it seriously. The sad thing about all these doors you’ve left closed in your life so far is that you’ve no idea what lay behind them. You can’t imagine who you’d be today if you’d been just a little bit more courageous over the years. But that’s enough looking back. I don’t want to make you feel regretful or negative. As you’ll soon discover, an essential component of the fear bubble technique is the positive mindset. Simply know that your days stuck in that same corridor you’ve been in for years are now numbered.

WELCOME TO THE FEAR BUBBLE

As you read this book, I want to tell you the story of my journey up Mount Everest. It was during those long days in the spring of 2018, a great many of which were spent quietly putting one foot in front of the other, that much of the thinking you’ll find in these pages was done. After that, I want to tell you the story of my coming down Everest, which ultimately turned into the most fearful and humbling experience of my life. But most importantly, I want to use my adventures, encounters and conversations on that mountain as a springboard to dive into everything I’ve learned over the years about how the ability to harness fear and use its power can enable anyone to live without limits.

I’m going to explore how damaging fear can actually be to the individual and everyone around them if it’s not contained. Living in fear is corrosive. It creates negativity that spreads throughout a whole life and actually changes the way you perceive reality. Just as it did twenty years ago on Snowdon for the lad just above me who became terrified and suddenly saw the mountain as one huge death trap, fear makes the entire world seem threatening, dangerous and populated by aggressors. This is why living in fear creates a victim mindset – a mindset that’s spreading like wildfire in today’s society, creating a generation of men and women who seem motivated only to stamp their feet and hope that everyone else will take responsibility for them.

I’ll then take a deep look into the three kinds of fear: fear of suffering, fear of failure and fear of conflict. I’ll explain how exactly the same fear underlies all of these – the fear that you’re not good enough. If you can learn to harness this one – and you can – there will be absolutely no stopping you.

If you’ve read my previous book, you’ll already be familiar with the finer details of my life. After the death of my beloved father, I endured a tough childhood in France with a new stepfather and a mother who forbade any of her children to mourn. I joined the army at seventeen, crashed out at twenty-one, went through a dark period of alcohol abuse, steroid abuse and street violence before finding direction, structure and passion in the Marines, with whom I served a tour of duty in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, and then as an elite operator in the Special Boat Service for four years. When I returned to civvy street in 2011, an altercation with a police officer led me to prison, where I served four months of a fourteen-month sentence for assault. After my release I worked in a variety of jobs that can be very loosely bracketed under the term ‘security’. And then I received the call from that posh man from the TV.

But, as I said, if you’ve read First Man In you’ll know all this already. The pages you hold in your hands now contain a very different piece of work. That book was my story. This book is my soul.