The Man

Morning friend.

It is just after eight o’clock on Wednesday morning and I am on a train from Leeds to Manchester.

I am heading into a room full of people with far more experience in business than me.

Jonny Wilkinson is the first speaker.

My plan for today is mostly to listen.

There is something else on my mind, though.

It was there when I went to bed last night and waiting for me when I woke up early this morning.

So instead of preparing for the day ahead, I am sharing it with you.

Yesterday lunchtime, I finished teaching some of my more experienced students.

The temptation when teaching people who already know a lot of Jiu-Jitsu is to keep giving them more.

Another technique.

Another answer.

Yesterday, we worked only on movement instead.

The idea behind the class was that it is not always how much you know that matters.

Sometimes it is how well you do what you know that counts.

After class, I picked up my phone and checked Instagram (don’t judge).

There was a message from a man called Alex.

I met Alex last summer when he attended a men’s health retreat I had founded.

He had sent me a post he had seen online.

It said:

“Be the person people say, ‘Damn, this MF never quits.’”

Alex told me he found me inspirational and that quote was what he thought when someone mentioned my name.

“Keep leading the way,” he wrote.

I smiled.

There are worse things to be known for, right?

A large part of my life has been built around the belief that most of us can endure far more than we think.

I have made a habit of doing hard things and continuing long after the excitement has disappeared.

Almost everything I value has taken longer and been harder to achieve than I wanted.

Then, not long after reading Alex’s message, an email arrived requesting an immediate conference call with my legal team.

During that call, I was asked to consider changing direction on a path we have spent four years struggling to carve.

I didn’t like hearing it.

I still don’t.

Those four years have cost me much more than I expected when I first set out.

The whole thing has broken me several times. It has taken my sleep, my friends and occupied parts of my mind and body that should probably have been saved for somewhere else.

Now, at a moment when we are starting to see the finish line, I am being asked whether continuing along the same path is still the right thing to do.

Changing direction when everything is going well looks strategic.

Changing direction when you’re a bit beaten up feels a lot like giving in.

That is why Alex’s message kept bothering me.

What does the person who never quits do when continuing might no longer be the best thing to do?

I know, professionally at least, that changing the plan is not the same as abandoning a mission.  No plan survives contact with the enemy after all.

During my military and covert career, the Commando quality of determination mattered, but determination does not mean blindly carrying on long after the situation has changed.

If the route ahead was likely to cause heavy casualties without moving us any closer to the objective, we did not keep fighting straight down the middle simply because that was where we began.

We would break contact, find some high ground, regroup and look at the battlefield again from a different perspective.

Perhaps there was a way to outflank the problem.

A weakness in the enemy defences we simply could not see through the narrow scope of our rifles.

The mission might remain exactly the same.

The plan did not have to.

That is what I call judgment.

So why does changing course now, during this specific fight, feel like such a personal failure?

That’s the question I was left thinking about as I headed south along Deansgate.

I wrote everything up to this point on the train into Manchester.

I am writing this next part on the train home to Leeds.

Something Jonny Wilkinson said today changed the way I was looking at Alex’s message and, if I am honest, at myself.

Jonny spoke about being eighteen or nineteen years old and playing rugby with a sense of possibility.

He was free.

As he progressed and began playing at the highest level, something changed.

He was still driven by mission and purpose, but fear had become tangled up in both.

He said he dealt with the feeling of survival through relentless practice.

Panic masquerading as perfectionism.

By his own admission, he became closed and arrogant, then wondered why nobody wanted to spend time around him.

Everyone expected him to be the man.

When people saw that familiar intensity on the outside, they assumed he was on it.

Inside, he was frightened and living with almost constant stress.

That landed heavily with me.

People have turned to me during difficult moments for most of my life and certainly during my career.

When things go wrong, I am the person expected to know what to do. The one everyone can rely on. The man who never quits.

I have taken pride in that.

I still do.

But there is a weight that comes with being the man other people expect to keep going.

Eventually, you can become frightened of what it might mean if you need to stop.

Worse if you want to.

Jonny also spoke about growing up with the feeling that he did not quite belong, despite being surrounded by a loving family.

That part landed in my ribs like a trademark Wilkinson tackle too.

I grew up feeling a bit different, as though I wasn’t quite where I should be. The absence of a guiding hand from a man in my life left me carrying a sense of not belonging that has never completely gone away.

Jonny found safety in rugby.

I found it in the military.

There is something strange about both of us finding security inside environments that were often physically brutal and full of risk.

Perhaps that was part of their appeal.

The military gave me a place and men to trust in. It made clear what was required of me and, if I met that standard, I earned my place in the group.

For someone who had spent much of his life wondering where he fitted, that mattered more than I probably understood at the time.

I have always considered my ability to continue beyond the point at which most people would stop to be one of my greatest strengths.

It has carried me through some extraordinarily difficult things.

But listening to Jonny made me wonder whether all of it has come from strength.

Perhaps some of it has been a way of dealing with the fear of rejection too.

Perhaps if you grow up unsure of where you belong, you learn to make yourself valuable by becoming the strongest person who can always be relied upon.

You carry more than other people.

You don’t ask for much in return.

And when everyone else has stopped, you keep going.

People begin to see you as the man.

Then you start expecting yourself to be him all the time.

I don’t know how much of that is true for me.

And I’m not trying to explain an entire life with one evening of reflection on a train.

But the question makes me uncomfortable enough to think there may be something in it.

And I wonder how many of you might feel something of the same?

There was nothing wrong with Alex’s message.

It was kind and I was grateful to receive it.

He sees someone who inspires him to keep going when things get tough.

The truth is that I like being seen that way.

Perhaps the reason his message has stayed with me is that changing course does not only threaten the outcome I have spent four years pursuing.

It threatens the very fabric of the story of myself I have written.

If I am the man who never quits, who am I if I stop fighting in the same direction?

Jonny eventually left England and signed for Toulon.

The sun and sea helped, but it was being surrounded by people who made him feel safe again that allowed him to open himself up to a new way of being.

He did not quit rugby.

He just found a different way to live inside the game he loved most.

He no longer had to keep performing the version of himself everyone expected to see.

He was 18 years old again with a life full of possibility.

Perhaps that is what I am being asked to consider now.

Not whether I care less about the outcome.

Not whether I have become less determined.

But whether I can let go of one plan without believing I have become less of the man I have spent my life trying to be.

I do not know the answer to that question yet.  But, writing this all down has really helped and I want to thank you for letting me do that.

I  know that I need to get high enough above the last four years to see what is really keeping me on this path.

Alex told me to keep leading from the front.

I intend to.

I’m just beginning to understand that continuing forward does not always mean carrying on in the same direction.

Before we go any further, let’s take a moment to debrief together:

How much of the person you have become today was built around who you thought you needed to be in order to belong?

Your mission this week (if you choose to accept it):

Choose one decision you are currently wrestling with and ask yourself what you would do if the world stopped watching for a moment.  

That’s enough for now. 

More next Sunday.