Battle Ready

by Ollie Ollerton

  I recently came across this information:

  Alcohol is said to have come from the Arabic term, ‘Al-Khul’ and ‘Al-Gawl’ which means ‘Body Eating Spirit’. Perhaps this is why alcoholic drinks are called ‘spirits’. Drinking alcohol is one of the fastest things you can do to lower your vibration, as it’s been used as a tool to keep human consciousness at a lowered state for thousands of years.

  My thoughts totally align with this as I feel alcohol has suppressed my productivity and creativity for much of my adult life.

  In the first days of the bootcamp I’d say to myself, ‘What am I going to do on a Friday, when all my mates are calling?’ I felt deprived of something. But then I’d progress to realising that the only thing I was depriving myself of was time, and how many precious hours I had already lost. As I started to recover from my dependence, I began to fill the gaps with positive and productive things and before I knew it, I was looking back, thinking, ‘How did I ever have time to drink?’ I heard that beautiful banshee calling to me from the mire of my 3 a.m. dreams, gasping for a drink, but I didn’t let her in. Mostly.

  When you stop living in the future when you imagine life will be perfect, and instead start appreciating what you’ve got in the present, your life becomes fuller and more balanced. Newfound sobriety is like a fog that lifts around you so you can see things clearly in the sunlight once again. Some people will say, ‘You must have such a boring life, now you don’t drink any more,’ but it’s the opposite. You lead a more interesting life because it’s more present, full of surprises and less predictable than if you’re just drinking to mark time. I experience moments more deeply, and value every day now. Someone recently stated, ‘You’re only here once!’ ‘Exactly!’ I replied.

  WHAT’S THE PURPOSE?

  In those precious three months that were to form the bootcamp that ultimately saved my life, I finally started questioning the longterm benefits of my affair with alcohol. ‘What is the purpose of you drinking?’ I asked myself. Alcohol was such a massive part of my life at the time, but when I questioned its actual purpose and couldn’t list any successes I’d had while on the sauce, it became obvious that for me it was a waste of time and it made me hate myself. There was nothing, absolutely nothing to recommend it, so why have it in my life? I used the purpose pyramid and couldn’t tick one value!

  If you’re doing something that’s only offering you short-term euphoria but no long-term gain, you need to question its worth. We need to hold to account the purpose of everything in our lives that might be holding us back. I’m not saying that’s the same for everyone; some of you may like a regular tipple but that’s all it is, you know when to stop. But when something’s got control of you and is steering you rather than the other way around, you need to deal with it. Money had control of me, alcohol had control of me, just as a co-dependent relationship had once had possession of me until I moved to that flat on my own in Brisbane and began to relish my own company.

  So many times before I’d felt the numbness course through me as I touched my lips to a drink, and I never questioned it: I was drink’s bitch, chained by my neck to her ankle. But gradually, the more I questioned the purpose of taking a drink, the easier it became to be able to recognise a break point; it was only a second but that was all I needed to be able to process the harm it would cause and start to resist, to fight back.

  My choice was either continued addiction, dismantling my life for short-term comfort and long-term discomfort; or taking a break point and going through short-term discomfort for the long-term gain. When you don’t have a goal and therefore a focus, you leave the door wide open for all the negative things in your life to wander in. But I had a very clear purpose and it meant a great deal to me.

  ONE-METRE SQUARE

  When you’re in the white heat of the battle with addiction you must forget about the bigger picture. Bring it back to one-metre square: just focus on everything that’s right in front of you. This will help get you through this moment and avoid any negative externals that could infect your thinking. It’s a case of looking out for the break points in your immediate vicinity. With a little practice, they start to appear like cat’s eyes glowing in the darkness and a road opens up for you to follow, so long as you focus on what’s right in front of you. I was climbing Mt Blanc recently, and when I first took in the enormity of Europe’s tallest mountain, I thought, ‘How the fuck am I going to get up there?’ But instead of looking up I focused on my feet moving step by step. When I finally did look up again, the summit was so much closer. I glanced back to see how far I’d come, admired the stunning view and kept climbing. It’s not all about reaching the top, but savouring the journey to reach it, enjoying each moment, and occasionally looking back on your achievement so far to spur you on. It’s easy to get fixated on where you want to be, but time should be taken to raise your head, look back and give yourself a pat on the back because nine times out of ten no one else will be there to do so.

  It’s the same when dealing with addiction. Don’t look too far in front of you, keep going one foot in front of the other, and before you know it, you’ve lasted the day, then two days, then a week and then a month. You’ll be able to look back and see how far you’ve come. You’ll feel good about the progress you’ve made. You still don’t need to look directly at the summit, but perhaps you can afford a peek. It won’t be so daunting now.

  Alcohol can provide short-term euphoria. I used to have a drink and become creative. It might help me have ideas, but when it came to long-term achievement, or implementing those ideas, I was too scared to do anything. I was living in a state of fear. I might try to convince myself that alcohol was great for that creative mindset, but it wasn’t. When it came to action, I would never follow through.

  I feel a lot of people have self-medicated and become addicted because of a vacuum of purpose in themselves. When we experience that void – through any kind of addiction – it’s not because we’re losers, it’s because we’ve got nothing in our life that’s channelling our energy, which leads to low self-worth. For me it was silencing the mind-chatter, that nauseating voice. The booze successfully numbed it, closed it down. It also helped me deal with my existential boredom. Sobriety seemed a monochrome, sterile place. Now and again, like Withnail threatening to install a jukebox in the Penrith Tea Rooms, I needed to change the dynamic with a few fireworks and paint the weekend red.

  Your mind will push you to chase something. And if you don’t focus it on the things that benefit your life, it’ll choose for you. It has a choice of 70,000–100,000 daily thoughts to feed on, and it will engage with something in there, so it’s about you being the dictator and orchestrator of your thoughts, not their victim. The human mind doesn’t know the difference between a good habit and a bad habit. It doesn’t know the difference between good and evil. It just makes sure that we’re engaged and focused on something. And that’s why it’s so important for everyone to have conscious focus and direction of their energy.

  If you’re passive to those 70,000–100,000 thoughts that rush through your mind every day, you’re unaware of what you’re growing in your Thought Farm, and given our default setting, your thoughts will most likely be heading somewhere negative. Even positive people are prone to negative thoughts; it’s not protocol for us to think positively. The caveman didn’t walk out of his cave looking for a unicorn, instead he came out thinking, ‘Holy shit, what’s going to kill me today!?’

  That’s just the way we’re geared, and while it makes sense (so far as survival of the species is concerned) to look at any situation and consider what might go wrong, it should not be allowed to block our right to joy and abundance.

  THE DEVIL’S TRIDENT

  Addiction, like the Devil’s trident, has three prongs: fear, lack of purpose and trauma. You may have been scarred by something when you were younger, but you’ve managed to keep a lid on it most of the time; you occasionally go off the rails for a bit but then get back on track. You ma
y well be blocking out your trauma, blanketing it in addiction. In Baghdad, when I was working on the job my head was consumed with business stuff, but I used to hit the drink every time I came away from there because the trauma was going on in my head. And the simple solution was drink or substance abuse, or whatever. I thought that self-medicating was my only route, or maybe I didn’t think at all, reaching for the substance that was going to numb me most, when in fact what I needed was to accept what had happened to me and move forward.

  Life is tough. People will let you down, walk all over you, cheat on you, and people close to you will die. You need to understand that there’s going to be hardships in life and it’s not going to be a smooth ride. I also think it’s a lot harder these days with the addition of social media, because you’ve got all these dream lifestyles presented to you every time you turn on your phone or computer, all of which is bullshit and about as authentic as a second-hand-car-dealer’s promise. And because our lives don’t match up to the fake dream, and because we are not prepared for life’s curveballs, bereavement and betrayal, it hits us hard in the gut and leaves us reeling and out of breath. Resilio is the old Greek word for the ability to spring back into the same shape, and modern-day society is just not resilient any more. The bottom line is that being popular on social media is like being rich in Monopoly.

  There’s a big difference between believing you have a right to be happy and live your life the way you want to, and somebody who is stuck with a sense of entitlement who thinks, ‘It should come to me. I’m owed this.’ You must generate abundance yourself; you shouldn’t wait for it to come to you. And when you are in vibration, in tune with the natural flow of the Universe, life is so much easier; there are fewer major ups-and-downs, less drama, just a natural, contented flow. Once you begin to trust the flow and your inner wisdom, it’s amazing how resilient you become. You realise the Universe hasn’t got it in for you and you’re an integral component of life’s fabric. Everything is connected: when we die, we’re recycled into the soil, our genetic make-up is the Universe. We need to learn not to get overly emotionally attached to success, nor to trauma. It’s about keeping an even balance of your emotional state, living in the now and maintaining the flow in yourself.

  I’m grateful for where I am, but I put in the hard work to get to this point. I cleared the skeletons out of my closet, hosed away the addictions, and learned to remove the negativity from my thinking as soon as I heard it carping in my head. And only because of these measures have I been able to access the inner me, the flow that has started giving me exactly what I want in life. We need to declutter, realise that it doesn’t serve us to hang on to trauma, what’s the point? Don’t let it define you – stick it in the fucking bin!

  The more you live within your limits, the less fulfilling your life. It all comes back to spotting your break points, having goals, and pushing into the discomfort of the short term for the long-term gain. The military and the Special Forces gave me a good foundation to take my next step in life, but I believe I’ve achieved and learned so much more outside of the military. The military never made me, it just prepared me for what was ahead.

  Everyone has break points throughout the day. Everyone. I know when that Shortcut Syndrome is operating, when I don’t want to dot the Is and cross the Ts, and that makes me want to fight it even more, because it’s my default negativity system creating self-doubt to prevent the goal from happening. We’re all fallible and it’s a constant battle. Just this morning I was sitting in bed thinking, ‘I should go out for a run. I should definitely go out for a run . . .’ Only, I spent too long thinking so I never went. If you begin to think about doing something, the mind will always say, ‘Well, tomorrow you’re up early and then you’re going to be working late for the next three weeks, so you deserve a break, have a lie-in.’ Sometimes we do need to rest and listen to our body and be kind to it: ‘You’re tired, time to go to bed’, or ‘Don’t take that run today because you’re absolutely knackered’, but most of the time your mind is looking for an excuse not to go.

  I decided to give alcohol another go and after a little peer pressure from the lads from SAS: Who Dares Wins I got back on it while filming series four in Chile in October 2018 after two and a half years without a drop. I thought that maybe I was missing out and now that I was the master of control it was something I could pick up and put down when I felt like it. I drank for nine months which were, looking back, nine months of bad choices; skipping training days and eating food that simply wasn’t akin to a healthy lifestyle.

  The last time I touched a drop was during a recce to the Isle of Skye for series five of SAS: Who Dares Wins. I drank every night that week and on my return home to Shropshire, late on a Friday night, my girlfriend was away for the weekend and I had the house all to myself. Just me and my black lab, Murphy. I’d had a few drinks with Billy (Mark Billingham, my fellow DS on the show) at the airport earlier that day and in the taxi on the way home. The next morning, I woke and got up quite late, and already that mindset of: ‘You’ve had a hard week. . .’ had established itself, and I just sat in my lounge, vacant as a zombie. It was nice weather outside, a beautiful blue autumn day, but instead of getting out in it, I put a film on. And as the film started I was just sitting there when I said to myself, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ but then my mind counter-punched with, ‘You’ve had a hard week, Ollie. You deserve this lazy time.’ Then the ‘What’s the purpose?’ question, which has now become a habit, sprung up in my head. ‘If you hadn’t been drinking would you still be doing this, sitting inside on a glorious day? No, you’d be in the gym, you’d be up the hills with Murphy.’ And it was at that point I told myself, ‘I’m not drinking again.’ That was the last time I had a drink. Sometimes you have to revisit the past to reconfirm why you gave it up in the first place. Like a random meeting with an ex shortly after your break-up, which rarely ends well.

  Regardless of whether you’re a lawyer, surfer, an astronaut, or working in a laundrette, cutting out or cutting right down the amount you drink will improve your life. It was vital that I re-evaluated what I was doing and compared what I would have been doing if I wasn’t drinking. Unless I’d had the last few years’ experience of how much more productivity I get out of my days when sober, it would have been easy for me to have gone down to the pub, had a couple of pints, and slide back into that cycle again.

  PART III

  HOW TO CHANGE

  CHAPTER 11

  BOOTCAMP

  In 1971, Muhammad Ali established ‘Fighter’s Heaven’, his new training camp in rural Pennsylvania, at a place called Deer Lake. Here he trained for his most famous fights, ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ (’74) and ‘Thrilla in Manilla’ (’75). At the side of the road that snaked up the mountain past his cabin, he placed boulders upon which Ali painted the names of his greatest adversaries: Sonny Liston, George Foreman, Joe Frasier . . . As he ran up this road clocking thousands of miles of roadwork, the names of those leviathans would remind him of his past triumphs and inspire him for his next challenge. Mum’s cottage was my Deer Lake, and upon my imaginary boulders were the names of my greatest foes: Jack, Jim and Johnnie; the difference being, I was yet to beat them.

  Fresh from Australia I started my own bootcamp, one that incorporated process, habit-building routine, positive affirmations, meditation, nutrition and exercise. I made sure I didn’t read any newspapers or watch TV, all of it was inflammatory unnecessary mental noise. Nor did I allow myself to go near my phone. Newspapers veer towards the alarmist and the negative to sell more copies, while TV news is no different. If you’re not careful it’s easy to start thinking that there’s no good left in the world and the apocalypse is imminent. I think the more fear the system disseminates, the more malleable and passive the population becomes. We wouldn’t consciously put fuel in our cars which would strip the engine and affect its smooth running, and yet we insist on filling our mind with yet more worry by swallowing the crap thrown at us by the media d
aily.

  First, I had to be extremely honest with who and where I was in life. It’s easy to spend your life comparing yourself with others, that’s what we do as humans. Comparing with people more fortunate than you enforces need and stems from jealousy. You say to yourself that you wish you were them or you want to be just like them. This is toxic and the vibration you emit is so far from what you’re comparing with. It’s time to level with yourself and appreciate exactly where you are. From here you have a foundation that’s relative to you and no one else. This is the foundation that will establish a root structure big enough to sustain the imminent growth, as opposed to a tree that falls over once the wind hits it.

  I resolutely policed the input going into my mind and avoided anything negative. In order to change things in my life I knew I needed to take a good look at myself and create an infrastructure, a process that I could adhere to to move things forward. The change had to come from me internally before anything would change externally, and that call had happened when I left Sarah. But it had taken this long for me to find my purpose and now I had to break down my goals as well break the back of my alcohol addiction. I started off every day with meditation and self-affirmations and then I exercised. As well as reading self-development books, I cut out all processed foods in favour of wholesome, healthy organics. I bought a clean A4 notepad and started drawing up everything I wanted to achieve as well as listening to podcasts framed around personal development and positivity, and Ted Talks. I cleansed myself internally by being conscious of what I was eating from the moment I woke to the moment I went to bed. Dairy and red meat were eliminated, and I increased my intake of green vegetables. I consumed only distilled water and if I felt a little crazy, I would add some ice and lemon! My Cornish bootcamp established this regime and it was to last two months. Every day I had to battle constant doubt, an imaginary audience of a thousand critics following me around everywhere, mocking me and my grand goal. I had an internal battle of good and bad and it was time to enter the ring and step toe-to-toe.