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,