Written by: Rosalyn Palmer, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
My partner and I are fans of the UK Channel 4 ‘Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins’ TV programme (him being ex-forces and all). While the challenges are brutal, the conditions are brutal and most of the encouragement comprises: “Don't fu**ing f**k this up, dig deep, don't fu**ing fail!”, shouted repeatedly into the ear of a muddy, struggling participant, it is not all bad.
When it comes to the debriefings, and the one-on-one interviews, the SAS guys are actually supportive.
Clearly part of the remit of the TV programme is for them to get the celebrities’ backstories at such times. They give the participants the chance to open up about their childhoods, their fears, how they've got where they have what they worry about. It is usually couched in a shouty conversation that goes something like this: “What the f**k was going on with you today? You are not a weakling. We are not the fittest guys in the world, but we know that what it takes is mental fitness and a determination not to quit. Why are you quitting on yourself? What is going on in your head? Tell me about why you are here and your childhood?”
And what we see over and over and over again, is the vulnerability below the veneer.
One by one the celebrities reveal that they have signed up to this brutal challenge for various reasons; mostly to see if they can succeed or to stop being afraid. Particularly in the case of a very fragile and vulnerable, Ulrika Johnson who you can see was a former poster girl for the SAS guys, it doesn’t take their questioning to see that all of her confidence has gone. She admits to feeling utterly lost. That now her children have left the nest she is left with herself, and she is lost as to who that now is.
What the celebrities find about themselves seems to be quite empowering. They all say that they have signed up for this gruelling test to tap back into themselves, find themselves or overcome something painful.
Coming through the 90s in the era of Tony Robbins (who was a PR client of mine and whose entire Mastery University I completed around the world) it was pretty much about your power play. The focus was on pushing through your limiting beliefs, embodying the mantra of Susan Jeffers in her 1987 bestseller, ‘Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway!’. So, we completed massive burning firewalks, we jumped off telegraph poles, I did fire-eating and more. It was all about conquering your fears and smashing those old beliefs.
I was fired with this reprogramming for a considerable time. “Hold yourself to a higher value and you’ll not fail” was the voice in my head.
Yet it was rather like the recent publicity with gymnastics star Simone Biles at the Olympic Games after she pulled out of the women’s team final citing mental health reasons. There was much debate following her action with some old views expressed along the lines of, ‘You don’t get to that level and then let everyone down’ versus ‘It is not worth sacrificing your mental and physical wellbeing for a medal’. Whatever your view is on this matter, it is important to understand that if someone with so much to lose chooses to pull out of an event to stay mentally well, then that is something to learn from. It was reinforced in June when British tennis player Emma Raducanu withdrew from Wimbledon due to anxiety. She followed in the footsteps of world number 2 Naomi Osaka who dropped out of the French Open in order to protect her mental wellbeing.
These are top-flight athletes who will have spent as much time in recent years with sports psychologists as they have with trainers for technique.
I regard this new wave of athletes who are not willing to sacrifice all their wellbeing on the altar of ‘success’ to be a welcome development that we are not used to seeing but that will become the norm. Why shouldn’t they be the best they can be in both body and mind? Why should it be expected that the price of admission for world-class status is a broken brain?
If such actions by athletes together with many admissions from well-known public figures about how they have struggled with mental health issues make it familiar for us all to talk about mental health in the same way we do about physical health then this can only help everyone who is pushing up against their limits.
I reached a tipping point with pushing on through my limits in the early 00s while attempting to gain my pilot's licence when I was living in the Bahamas. The idea of learning to fly and island-hop was appealing but the books I had to study were like advanced maths and I dreaded them. Not that I’m bad at maths, I have A-level Economics and know my way around a spreadsheet, but I was exhausted having ‘retired’ and sold my PR business after years of merciless 80-hour weeks.
It just wasn’t enjoyable and a voice in my head was saying: ‘This is no fun!’ on repeat. I stopped it and yet I felt like I’d failed.
I felt like that after my second divorce. What a failure at relationships I must be.
Now I see those things through the lens of experience and compassion. I succeeded at not exhausting myself more with the pilot licence study. I developed breast cancer the year afterwards, so I think my body was really trying to tell me something.
The second marriage was not a values match. It was not a nurturing place to be so stepping away from it allowed me to grow and fearlessly thrive and be the woman I am today.
Now, as a coach and therapist my whole core philosophy is all about alignment and balance. Plus changing that lens of what I call ‘The Ghost Ship’ of how you came to be where you are and who you are today.
That's the secret I share.
The secret is finding that balance between pushing yourself, challenging yourself, holding yourself to higher standards, overcoming the fear and not being held back versus something much more nurturing. It’s about listening to the inner part of your very being, your inner soul that is probably screaming: “Please stop and let me off! Let me just be. Let me just walk around in nature, feed the birds. Just be me or find me.”
That secret lies at the midpoint of a line between the two axes of “Just Do It!” and “Just Be”.
The sushi illustration below is what can happen when you feel you should do something or sign up for something and just don't enjoy it.
Don't feel like a failure. Either buy your sushi in or decide that this is one of those challenges that you just never need to step up to. As Shirley Conran said in the 80s: “Life is too short to stuff a mushroom”.
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Rosalyn Palmer, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Rosalyn Palmer is an award-winning transformational coach and therapist, combining advanced rapid transformational therapy/clinical hypnotherapy & NLP-based coaching to create deep desired changes. She works 1-2-1 with clients and via her group courses.
As bestselling author of the award-winning self-help book: ‘Reset! A Blueprint for a Better Life’ and three other Amazon bestsellers, Rosalyn makes emotional wellbeing accessible to all. She enables high performers to live their best lives that feel as good inside as they look on the super-successful outside.
Rosalyn draws on extensive business experiences - in top London PR & Marcomms (‘retiring’ as a self-made millionaire at age 40 after a stellar career helping clients including Tony Robbins and Edward de Bono) and the insight of being conflicted when the outward vision of your life doesn’t serve you. Added to this are her deeper values and life experiences born from many challenges including cancer; redundancy; bereavement; menopause; divorce; a financial loss that broke her open to finding out what really matters in life and how to live a life of balance and joy.
As a natural communicator, she is the well-being expert for the radio show Girls Around Town, has a monthly newspaper column, and two podcast series: Monkey Business and Life Alchemy.
