ZERO NEGATIVITY EB

The Power of Positive Thinking

Ant Middleton

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780008336516
• eBook ISBN: 9780008336547
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

NO.1 BESTSELLER ANT MIDDLETON SHARES HIS SECRETS ABOUT HIS POSITIVE MINDSET AND TEACHES YOU TO LIVE A LIFE WITH ZERO NEGATIVITY

There are times when life feels like it has you cornered: financial difficulties, relationship issues, work problems, all of the above. Every one of us, at one time or another, will have to face up to the challenges that come our way. And there are two ways of meeting them: negatively, where blame is the answer, where other people are at fault, where you haven't been treated fairly. Or positively, where you own the situation, learn and grow from it, and become a better person at the end of it.

Letting you into areas of his life he's never talked about before, in Zero Negativity, Ant will show you how to embrace failure and use it to your advantage, how to see change as the foundation of your future success, how to develop resilience, how to deal with bullies, what it means to be a positive roll model, and how to live a life with no regrets.

This book will not tell you who to be, where you should live, or what job you should do. That's up to you. What this book is for, however, is to give you the tools you need to become the best possible version of yourself, to own who and what you are, and to live your life with Zero Negativity.

CHAPTER 1

I KNOW WHO I AM

Ahead of Series 4 of SAS: Who Dares Wins, one of the producers asked me in for a meeting. ‘Ant,’ she said, ‘how do you feel about us changing things up a bit?’

Not long before we met, the British Army had announced that, from that point on, women would be allowed to apply for every single role in the military, including combat roles, with the Royal Marines doing likewise. For the first time in its history, recruitment would be decided by ability alone, and gender wouldn’t have anything to do with it. The producer had suggested that we should follow suit and include female contestants.

Initially, every instinct told me to steer clear. ‘I’m not sure,’ I told her. ‘This isn’t for us to do. It’s going to be complex – maybe it would be better if we left this to the army and Marines?’

I could see my producer was still thinking about it. Then she surprised me by asking me what it was I looked for in recruits for the show.

This was an easy one to answer: ‘I’m looking for all-round, balanced individuals.’ As soon as I said it, I realised something: that last word. It doesn’t matter if it’s a male or female – it’s about an individual. What’s most important is that they’re somebody who knows themselves better than anybody else; somebody who knows their strengths, but who also acknowledges that they have weaknesses and insecurities. Within hours of the start of filming I saw how tough, driven and resilient the female contestants were. It was eye-opening to watch the way they threw themselves heart and soul into every challenge. They fought as hard as the men, maybe harder. I instantly regretted my original reluctance. Having women alongside men added a completely different dimension to the programme.

The whole show is about putting all the contestants under a microscope, exposing them to such high levels of stress that they’re forced to confront elements of their personality that they’ve tried to keep hidden. Many discover talents within themselves that they never knew existed, others are surprised to find fault lines that, under pressure, start to crack apart. There’s no contestant, no matter how far into the competition they get, who comes away without a greater understanding of every aspect of their personality. What I realised was that I still had lots to learn too.

If there was any positive to be gained from the upheaval and distress of my early years, it was that during that period I picked up the habit of self-reflection. Like the men and women trying to get through to the end of SAS: Who Dares Wins, an intense period of disorientation and discomfort helped me gain a new knowledge of myself. If I’d had a more normal upbringing, I bet I’d have continued on a happy, oblivious path, like most kids.

Instead, there was my father’s death, and its unsettling, disorienting aftermath, when within days my mum married a new man, Dean, and every detail about Dad was wiped from our lives. Even his picture was taken off the walls. There were some days when it could seem as if he’d never existed at all. Or, at least, that’s what the adults in our house appeared to want us to pretend. His money was still good, though. The family lived it up for a bit in Portsmouth, using his life insurance payout, which took us from a council house to a big fancy home and private schools. Then everything turned upside again in the blink of an eye.

It was never actually clear to me and my siblings what prompted the sudden move to another country. There was a feud of some kind between my mum’s and late dad’s sides of my family. We were mostly protected from it, but we could all tell that something was going on off stage. So perhaps that had something to do with it.

One cold, damp winter’s day when I was nine, my mum picked me up from school early in the afternoon. I was a bit surprised as she didn’t normally come at this time, so I asked her what was going on. She said, ‘Dean’s patio firm has burned down.’ She was strangely calm and matter of fact. Even at that age I was knocked a bit off balance by this.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s all gone, burned to the ground.’

We drove over to the factory. Cinders and ash were everywhere. The fire brigade had already been and so some things were only half-burned, just about standing. In the middle of it all was my stepdad Dean. He was clearly distressed, picking up horribly stained patio slabs and then throwing them down in disgust. He kept on saying, ‘All that work. All that work.’

Apparently there had been an electrical fault. With the business literally up in flames, Dean and my mum decided that when the insurance money came through, they would move the whole family off to rural France.

Portsmouth is a working city. It’s busy and vibrant, full of builders, bricklayers and scaffolders. And it’s as British as they come. Going from there to a small village in Normandy was a lot for us to take in. All of a sudden we’d swapped the densely packed bungalows and villas of England’s south coast for rambling open countryside. I’d been used to crowded cul-de-sacs, bustling high streets, the chatter of passers-by. Now we were surrounded by endless land, space and quiet.

Our new home was an ancient farm with a huge barn next to it. Dean threw himself into remaking the whole house, which was in a fucking state, almost a wreck. In those first few months while he tried to make it liveable, we slept and ate in caravans that were parked up in the barn.

That was when it all hit me. I remember asking myself: where did the good life go? How come we’re living in a barn? You can deal with change when it’s a question of moving two streets, even two towns, away. But starting your whole life again? That’s something else, especially when, like me, you’re still grieving for a dead father. There were other strange things that I couldn’t get my head around. We were eating pasta and sweetcorn for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I was being dressed in hand-me-down shoes and clothes from my brothers. And the adults were driving a shitty old car that occasionally would simply refuse to start. But on the other hand, the house Dean was working on was massive.

To begin with, this strangeness was compounded by the exhilarating freedom my brothers and I discovered in our newfound isolation. We’d moved in summer, and since Dean and our mum were so focused on getting things up and running, we were given the run of the fields around the house. Nobody told us what we could or couldn’t do. Even sleeping in a caravan was like an adventure after suburban Portsmouth.

And then it all came to an end. The threat of going to a French Catholic school had hung over us right through July and August, but we’d managed to shove it to the backs of our minds. I didn’t speak a word of French, not even stuff like bonjour or au revoir. We were also going to be the first English children to ever attend the school. New kids are always treated like they’re carrying a disease – surely the fact that we were foreign would make that even worse.

On the first day of school we were late – the fucking car wouldn’t start. I can vividly remember going into the classroom. I walked in and there was a moment of silence. Every single pair of eyes in the classroom bored right into me. The way those rows of kids were staring at me – it was as if I’d murdered somebody. My cheeks went red, but it was going to get worse. On the way in, once it had become clear that we were going to be late, I’d asked my two older brothers how to explain that we’d had the problem with the car. They told me, ‘Just say, “voiture kaput”.’ This would have been good advice, but what they hadn’t told me was that you have to pronounce ‘kaput’ as ‘kapoot’. If you say ‘kapot’, people will think you’re saying ‘capote’, which is a French word for condom.

I went into the classroom in the middle of a French lesson being taught by Monsieur Laurent, the headmaster, who was bald, with glasses and a polo neck – he looked as French as you like – and who ran the school along with his wife (because it was a Catholic school, the majority of the staff were nuns, something that added an extra layer of weirdness as I walked in). Madame Laurent was known as the good cop, while her husband was the bad cop. The tradition there was that if you were late, you had to stand up in front of the class and explain why. Schools are stricter in France, especially religious ones. I was dragged up in front of the blackboard, and then Monsieur Laurent spoke some words in French to me. I looked blankly back at him. I had no idea what he was saying. He repeated his question, in English this time: ‘Why were you late?’

That’s when I said the only French words I knew: ‘Voiture kaput.’ Except, of course, not knowing any better, I said ‘kapot’. The whole class burst into laughter, and I just stood there, bewildered, with no idea what was going on. Then Monsieur Laurent put me out of my misery and escorted me to my chair. I sat there humiliated and angry, and increasingly anxious about what was to come next.

It was the longest day of my life. Everything was strange. Everything was a challenge. Going into the playground that very first break time I found that I was an object of fascination. Most of the other kids crowding around me had never met anyone from England. This was La Manche, Normandy, a place where a lost cow or a surprisingly big chicken could end up as the talk of the town. It was two hundred miles in distance, and about a century in time, from Paris.

To them I was a freakshow. One minute they were all laughing at me, the next they were firing a million incomprehensible questions in my direction. One thing they kept asking me was if I wanted to play ‘babyfoot’. I now know that this means table football, but at the time I thought they were warning me that we’d be having baby food for lunch. So when it was time for the rest of the kids to go to the cafeteria, I just found somewhere to hide. Going hungry seemed to me a better option than cramming mush down my throat.

I remember crouching down, asking myself again and again, ‘What the fuck is going on?’

When we got back to our home later that afternoon I went straight to the den we’d made in the massive conifer trees at the bottom of the garden. I crawled in there in my school uniform and curled up, watching cars whooshing past on the main road from Caen to Saint-Lô, counting them, thinking, ‘How am I going to get through this? What is the solution?’

Ultimately, though, there wasn’t a solution. Or, maybe there was one, but finding it was way above my pay grade. My mum and stepdad might have been able to choose to go back, or change things up again, but I didn’t have that power. I was just a kid

What I realised was: you just have to go along with things. You’re at that school, whether you like it or not. You’re living in France, whether you like it or not. You’ve got to fucking adapt to it – or you crumble. If I didn’t get on with it, I’d have never gone back to school again. And it wasn’t like I could escape it for long; there were even classes on Saturday mornings. But if I couldn’t change the situation, I could change the way I perceived it.

In the process I developed a habit that has stayed with me to this day. The magnitude of the situation was so overwhelming that I could not possibly begin to understand it, although I did comprehend that there was a new man in my family’s life and that we were in a new country where they spoke a different language.

I remember thinking: don’t try to understand what you can’t. The only thing I could understand was myself. I began self-reflecting. I couldn’t control anything about being in France, I couldn’t change the sheer fact of our location, but I could look inside myself and see what tools I had to face the situation.

I say this to my children even now. ‘What makes sense to you? What can you understand?’ They’ll tell me what they can understand, and I’ll say to them: ‘Everything else, don’t even try. At this time in your life it’s too much to take in. Wait until you’re older.’

That’s what I did. When I couldn’t understand why my father had died so young and had been replaced so quickly by another man, I cut it out and focused more on myself. I could control what I was doing and feeling. You cannot expect to have the answers all the time, so why torment and confuse yourself by pretending otherwise? It will all make sense in time, when you’re ready. Don’t waste years of your life.

Sitting there, in my den, I asked myself: do you want to be that boy hiding from lunch every single day? Why not just embrace being that country kid? The moment you start fighting against it rather than looking for opportunities, that’s the moment you start to go under. I began to list my strengths and weaknesses to myself. I knew I was good at getting on with people, I was good at football (a handy thing for helping you fit in with other kids at the best of times, and even more so when you had no common language), I was resilient. These were all strengths I knew I could draw on and develop. But I couldn’t speak French and I didn’t have much leverage over my circumstances. These were both weaknesses. As I thought about it, I understood that while one of these could be fixed the other couldn’t. Just acknowledging that fact lifted a weight from my shoulders.

The next day I went into school almost without a care in the world. I stopped worrying and my attitude became far more, ‘Let’s just see how this goes.’ I went into lunch and realised that the food was actually decent, and went into what was called the foyer and found out what babyfoot really was. I played football in the yard with the other children and began to form a connection with them. My first and second days were like chalk and cheese.

I worked on the things that lay within my power, like getting to school on time, and I didn’t stress about the things that weren’t. I knew I wasn’t going to learn French overnight, so I didn’t allow myself to get dispirited by getting bad results to begin with. It wasn’t that I didn’t care; it was more that I was aware of what I could and couldn’t control, and so realised that there was no value whatsoever in beating myself up about stuff that wasn’t in my hands.

This habit of self-reflection was just what I needed. I’d go to school during the day, mix with the French kids, sit through all the lessons, then I’d come home and play in the den. It was almost as if I had two lives. On the one hand I was like a young Robinson Crusoe, running wild in the countryside, on the other I was receiving this really old-school French education.

And it worked. Back in England, school had never interested me and I never took lessons seriously. I didn’t play up in class; it was more that I was a daydreamer with the attention span of a gnat. But because I’d been plonked down in a French school, I picked the language up pretty quickly. I was surrounded by it, so I didn’t really have to try. Within three months I was holding perfect conversations without any trouble at all. Within six I might as well have been French. I had a Normandy accent. Some people refused to believe I was English. Years later, when I was in the military and doing work with the French Foreign Legion, the guys there thought I was some sort of undercover agent.

It was there, in France, as a lost and confused kid, that I began the process of really understanding myself and the world around me. I felt alone, and knew that I couldn’t rely on anybody else. I learned that everything starts with yourself. To begin with, that responsibility was daunting. Now, I realise how exciting and liberating it really is.

‘Ant, who are you?’

One thing I do sometimes when I give talks is get somebody up on stage and ask them, ‘Who are you?’ The answer is always something along the lines of, ‘I’m John. I’m a software engineer. I’ve got four kids and a wife.’

So I ask the same question again: ‘Who are you?’ They’ll be a bit less sure this time round. ‘I’m John, I’m a software engineer, and I’m a loving husband.’ At this point I flip it around.

‘Ask me who I am.’

‘Ant, who are you?’

‘I’m an emotionally connected, positive, driven individual. That’s who I am. What you told me are only the labels other people have given you. You’re John. Somebody has given you that name. Software engineer? That’s a job title, it’s not who you are. However, you saying you’re a loving husband; that’s closer to the truth. Are you an emotional person? Are you empathetic? Do you think positively? Who are you?’

Sometimes they’ll still struggle to articulate who they are outside of the names other people have given them. Others will be different. They’ll say, ‘Well, to be honest, I’m pretty negative. I worry I can be selfish.’

That’s when I know I’ve got them. Fucking hell. You’ve come to the rig...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to Readers
• Dedication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION: BULLETPROOF
• CHAPTER 1: I KNOW WHO I AM
• CHAPTER 2: TEAR THE MOULD AWAY
• CHAPTER 3: KILL THEM WITH KINDNESS
• CHAPTER 4: KEEP IT SIMPLE
• CHAPTER 5: CHANGE OR DIE
• CHAPTER 6: MAKE MANY PLATFORMS
• CHAPTER 7: YOU’VE GOT TO GO THROUGH THIS
• CHAPTER 8: BE A SHEPHERD NOT A SHEEP
• CHAPTER 9: GIVE THEM ENOUGH ROPE
• CHAPTER 10: THE GARDEN OF EDEN
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• By The Same Author
• About The Publisher