A Brush with Resilience

A couple of weekends ago, I participated in a 48-hour event with the Evennett team in Caringbah which aims to marry some of the disciplines of Special Forces selection training to civilian life.

I have been asked a lot about the experience and found it had a fairly profound effect on me that I thought I would provide my experience of the weekend here for anyone who is interested to find out more.

Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to have been enrolled on many leadership programs and courses designed to test or instil resilience for both individuals and teams. None, however, could have prepared me for the experience I had on this weekend.

Growing up in military family and a long line of relatives who served, I probably shouldn’t have underestimated the seriousness of the physical aspects of the course I was about to undertake as I entered the Evennett HQ in Caringbah, NSW on a rainy Friday afternoon in November.

As “Australia’s toughest challenge” the experience is designed to “make you a better human being” and more importantly, teach you a level of resilience which is considered to only be achieved when you have been truly 'broken down', both physically and mentally, to see your true self and how you cope or react in the face of adversity.

I should point out at this stage that the 48-hour course consisted of very little sleep (less than 2 hours each night on a concrete floor in a sleeping bag), a single field ration pack as food & more exercise than I thought was possible to perform in a given time period. Various cognitive skills tests where undertaken in a calorie and sleep deprived environment to measure performance. To put this in perspective, I managed to inadvertently prepare for the Christmas period by losing 5kg’s over the weekend as a by-product.

I was lucky enough, or foolish enough (unsure which), to be one of the 5 who finished the full 48-hour course. Of the 28 people who registered and paid for the course, 50% had pulled out prior to it even starting on the Friday night. We lost the remaining 9 people over the course of the first 24 hours, either through injury or deciding the course was possibly not for them.

My first real brush with adversity occurred when I was approximately 38-40 hours in and it became abundantly clear that I had become the weakest link as evidenced on an exercise. Falling behind whilst scaling a 45+ degree sand dune and then embarking on a 350m stomach body crawl along the beach wearing our packs and a 14kg torsion bar which served as a ‘rifle’, as the sun continued to beat down tested my resolve.

Despite how hard I tried to gain traction whilst crawling on the beach to gain yardage and numerous attempts to change rifle carrying strategies to rectify the situation, I struggled to gain any momentum and ultimately keep up with a now fairly spread out team. There was no doubt in my mind at this stage that I was not going to complete the task in a timely fashion. I desperately didn't want to be last on this exercise!!  This is where the real pressure, desperation and mental games kicked in. The voice in my head: Maybe I had bitten off more than I could chew this time, who did I think I was to even think I could do as well as the others more fit than I, I could have been having a nice Sunday lunch with friends and a bottle of red, did I want to go out like this after coming so far, Dig in keep going, it’s only another 150 metres, or is it 200m? etc.

The mental aspect of needing to perform and be an integral part of the team and not 'let the team down' began to outweigh simply completing the task in front of me. I was not used to being in this position within a team and the discomfort was agonising, but a valuable lesson in humility and leaving the ego at home. Upon reflection, the resolve to shut down the internal doubts and keep pushing on with the task seems quite amusing now, but I still remember the incredibly difficult personal task for me at the time. Given we had been standing in chest deep cold water for an hour the previous day under the rib trying to keep warm as one of the exercises versus what I considered would be a 'simple' crawl along the beach, I am not sure what I was complaining about, but that was my point of pain. The exercise eventually came to an end and we moved onto the next exercise.

Interestingly, as I put this specific situation and the whole weekend in perspective in the days which followed, I remember the guy who had been carrying an injury since the very first couple of hours who was still with us to the end. This is the same person who just a couple of hours before my stomach crawl meltdown, grabbed me by my pack and dragged me up a sand dune when my chest was about to explode, which will have been a real task for him yet on the very next exercise, that same guy was shivering uncontrollably as we lay face down head toward the ocean on the shore break holding onto our rifles as the waves crashed over us for 60 minutes.

For whatever reason, I didn’t feel the cold at all on that exercise and although it was uncomfortable to have the water washing over my head every few minutes, I found this exercise was a relief compared to others we had undertaken so far and what was ahead of us. This was his turn to be tested and every time I looked over at him, I could see he was very uncomfortable, but he pushed through and held onto his bar to the end of the exercise. I drew a lot of confidence from seeing him in this situation, not in a cruel or spiteful way, but given how strong he had been to help me on the previous exercise, there was no way I was quitting. 60 minutes later when he had thawed out, he was then 15 metres in front of me as we crawled on our stomachs on the hot sand calling back and waving at me to keep going. These series of exercises truly highlighted to me the direct impact on differing individual strengths and weaknesses within the team quite literally in the space of a couple of hours.

The key takeaways from my overall experience on this course was not only the confidence which comes from being one of the 5 who finished and although that didn’t really sink until I could walk properly again some 4 days later, but the mental journey undertaken along the way - a mixed sense of humiliation, anger, defeat, winning, empathy, elation, confidence, exhaustion, maturity and resilience.

For me, it instilled a discipline where no task seems impossible now and it reinforced the tangible application of team work and how individual strengths and weaknesses can definitively mould the outcome of any given situation.

As the instructors say, you can misprice a trade, miss a deadline and you will possibly get a slap on the wrist from your boss or distain from your peers, but in the military field if you come ill-prepared physically or mentally, the consequences are much greater for you individually and more importantly, for your team. If this course does nothing else, it instils this sense of direct consequences to every action or decision made. I have also made some new friends who I feel I have known for a very long time following a great level of bonding and camaraderie.

I decided to go in at the deep end by starting with their longest course (48hrs), but there is also 6,12 & 24-hour events as well as other immersion and bespoke courses with theory and practical application, so if the physical angle is off putting, there are other options available. If my story has intrigued you, you can visit www.evennett.com.au for more information.

I am now ready for 2018.