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
