military suffering can breed confidence

I was going for dinner with J1’s girlfriend’s family, got off early from work and rang him up to see if he was free. He goes to Hong Kong in a matter of days.  It was a glorious afternoon and we walked around Kew Gardens for about 4 hours and talked.  The last time I went to Kew was just before I went to Cameroon.  I thought it was the last time I was going to see trees for a while.  How ridiculous is that?

Every so often with my children I get ‘intense’ quality time. It’s quite rare and generally unplanned.  It’s a point when you are alone together and the conversation is deep and meaningful and you feel incredibly close to them.  Sometimes, when I get these opportunities I have to remind myself that sometimes I am not a good listener and this is not about me.

 

We talked about loads and loads of stuff, but I asked him specifically to talk me through the stages by which he had made the transition from the military to getting this job in banking. It can be very difficult for military personnel to make the transition into civilian life successfully.

He told me that he had had to debrief this senior guy just before leaving. When he finished the guy asked him why he was leaving.  He felt he must have given a good account of himself in both areas because the guy gave him four names and contact details and told him to meet them all (all ex-military who had gone on to excel in other areas).  One was in IT, one in banking, one in security and another he never got to meet.

He told me he went to the banking meeting in London just before he went travelling to rule it out as a possibility. He put his bespoke suit on, did a lot of background reading, went and listened, asked questions and told stories about his time in the military.  He liked the guy a great deal.

He went off travelling for 9 months in Asia and this guy sent him an email cc’ing in another guy in Hong Kong and suggesting they meet up. He had one pair of chinos and a shirt and emailed this guy the night before asking if it would be OK or if he needed to get a suit.  The air B&B did not even have an iron so he was up the night before boiling water in a pan and using the two in combination to try and iron out the creases.  In the military shirt ironing is de rigeur.

That morning he went round a number of departments and met a lot of team heads. J1 tells me that people will often say to him, ‘I couldn’t do what you did’, but then, because he has read up on them AND these people are awesome in their own right, he will say, I couldn’t do what you have done and go on to feed back to them their success and J1 tells me that bankers can bring in enormous amounts of money in to countries that both creates hundreds of jobs and can be used for good.

He went away. They rang him and asked him to come back at 5pm.  He walked straight in to an intense interview situation. (Please accept these are simplistic summations!)

What do you know about banking? Very little, but I do know it is about managing teams to get ultimate performance and this is where I did this …..

What do you know about multi partnership brokering? Explicit examples of bringing warring political/cultural factions together.

You can’t sell. Of course I can.  I sell dreams where people risk their lives for me and each other.

I ask him where he got his confidence from. He said he got it from suffering. Both in training and action you have to endure and see terrible things.

I asked him why some people can move on from that and others can’t. He said sometimes people see such bad stuff it scars them forever OR when faced with a bad situation, regardless of failure or success, they did not react in a way that was the best version of themselves and it is very hard to live with that.

I thought that was so powerful and could be translated across all of our lives.

 

I asked him what he would miss about the military. He said he would never again be party to ‘the big boy s**t that shapes the world’ and would never stand in a group of people and know that every one of them would always have his back.