He Lost a Third of His Body Weight

I’ve just had the privilege to run my Mind Resilience Masterclass 1 to the excellent senior team run by Operations Director Max Eyre for Applus UK. Four years ago, Max attended one of my Mental Resilience Masterclasses when he worked for Rolls Royce and when he joined Applus he contacted me to see if I could run a session for him and his new team.
 
The session was very well received, and it was great to see his team engage so well and participate in all the group work. The energy in the room was wonderful and we all had a great time. This was a special day and it made me realise just how blessed I am to be in a position to help people and have fun along the way.
 
Applus is a worldwide leader in the testing, inspection and certification sector. They have a workforce of over 25,000 employees across multiple sectors in more than 70 countries. The photo shows the team after my Masterclass which received fabulous feedback.
 
 
Springfield Training 
 
I also had the privilege of delivering my third 1-hour Masterclass in my Mind Resilience Programme to the staff of Springfield Training based in Leeds. CEO Noel Johnson booked all three Masterclasses from the Programme to be run once a month for 3 months and it has been a great success.
 
One thing which stands out is by running one session per month I have developed a great relationship with the team, and it feels different. There is an ease and camaraderie which make the sessions even better. I have loved delivering all three Masterclasses and thoroughly enjoyed the relationship building process.
 
 
Dave Clarke Guinness World Record Holder
 
I have a very good friend called Dave Clarke who I met in 2007 when I helped him with his mental resilience regarding a trip he was taking across the Atlantic Ocean. This wasn’t a cruise or a sailing yacht but a rowing boat. He was going to row 3,000 miles on his own!
 
Previously he had sailed solo across the Atlantic and set a world record and so he thought that he might as well row across because how hard could that be? It was once he commissioned the rowing boat to be built that he realised the enormity of the task which lay before him.
 
 
Very few had achieved this before
 
There were thousands of people who had climbed Everest but at that time only 64 people had successfully rowed solo across the Atlantic! He was crazy but he went for it and completed it successfully in 83 days.
 
This was a serious test of his mental resilience, but we worked together developing a positive inner voice and visualisation techniques where I coached him to visualise the crossing going well and him getting stronger and faster in the second half of the row.
 
He lost 3 stone during the crossing, but his visualisation and inner voice techniques really helped him achieve the task. Before he set off, he visualised himself arriving safely and drinking a bottle of beer to celebrate and this is exactly what he did when he arrived.
 
I recently read the following account of another solo crossing which didn’t end so well. This was a sailing trip across the Atlantic which Dave completed in the 1990’s but this didn’t go to plan for Steven Callahan.
 
 
Steven Callahan
 
“After successfully sailing across the Atlantic solo in his 6.5-meter sloop, Callahan started the trip home in January of 1981. The storm around his boat one evening didn’t concern him, but the hole a whale or shark put in his boat’s hull in the middle of the night amid the storm surely did.
 
As the boat began to sink, Callahan repeatedly dove back into the sinking ship to grab survival gear. With food and water for a few days, Callahan clambered into his 6-foot circular raft, adrift, 800 miles West of the Canaries and heading farther from them at every moment.
 
Callahan fished with a spear gun and made water with a solar still. At day 14 he signalled to a passing ship; it kept on passing.
 
After a month, he drifted out of shipping lanes. By day 50 he was covered in sores from the salt water, struggling with dehydration in the tropical waters, and struggling to patch a hole in his raft.
 
Exhausted, and after losing a third of his body weight, Callahan was finally spotted by some fisherman off the coast of Guadeloupe as birds and fish circled his raft, foraging the fish guts he tossed back into the sea. He’d been adrift for 76 days.”
 
 
He survived
 
Now this is what you call Mind Resilience. How did he keep going when all looked lost. The excruciating hunger he must have suffered losing a third of his body weight! 76 days not knowing if he would survive and yet he kept going and ultimately survived to tell the tale.
 
This wasn’t planned, he didn’t expect his boat to sink. It wasn’t a nightmare, it was real, and he had to face it.
 
This is a great analogy for our lives when things go wrong which blind side us. We are going along quite happily then something big hits us. We are shaken and we can be derailed but it’s how we respond which counts.
 
He could have become depressed and just given up and he would have died. But he didn’t, he fought like a madman to stay alive doing everything in his power to do so.
 
 
Thoughts for the week 

1. When things go wrong for you how do you respond?
2. Do you immediately give up and become negative or do you fight?
3. This week think about how you respond to negative things which happen to you and see if you can improve your response.
4. When something goes wrong, pause, take a deep breath, and see if you can take a positive approach to the problem instead of the usual negative response. 

 
Well, that’s it for this week, have a wonderful weekend and keep believing.
 
Warm regards

John

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