The Fear Bubble

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.

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