Ep5 Resilience & Positive Self-Talk

In this episode, Dr Amanda Potter our Chief Psychology Officer looks at resilience and positive self-talk. She also starts to look at the importance of attitude or paradigm shifts to understand and face up to the emotions that could be inhibiting you from being resilient. 

Amanda and Tim the podcast host in this episode are joined by Martin Hewitt to talk about his recent expedition to the South Pole. Martin was a Commissioned Officer in HM Parachute Regiment, but was medically discharged after career ending injuries sustained leading soldiers on operations in the Middle East. A former athlete on British Disabled ski team he represented GB in the International Paralympic Committee World Championships and in international races achieving numerous podium finishes. Martin is the founder of the Adaptive Grand Slam. https://www.adaptivegrandslam.com/

Adaptive Grand Slam is a Charitable organisation that facilitates world record attempts and physical challenges undertaken by members of the disabled community, supported by professional guides, expedition managers and members of the public.

To contact Amanda and Martin via LinkedIn:
linkedin.com/in/amandapotterzircon   
linkedin.com/in/martin-hewitt-b5775327

The Chief Psychology Officer website is now available https://www.thecpo.co.uk/

To contact Amanda via email:
TheCPO@zircon-mc.co.uk

For more information about the BeTalent Resilience Questionnaire please go to:
https://www.betalent.com/product-resilience

Timestamps 

Resilience & Positive Self-Talk 

• 00:00 – Introduction to Resilience & Positive Self-Talk 
• 00:36 – What is Resilience? 
• 01:08 – Why focus on this? 
• 01:33 – What to look out for to enable Resilience? 
• 01:43 – 3 Enablers

Enabling Resilience in our lives 

• 02:14 – What do you mean by “Enablers”? 
• 03:35 – Is a more emotional person more resilient? 
• 03:56 – Talking to ourselves 
• 04:48 – Positive Self-Talk 
• 05:17 – Undermining self-confidence 
• 05:47 – Characterization 
• 06:18 – Effects of Negative Self-Talk 
• 06:57 – Effects of Positive Self-Talk 
• 07:14 – Snap out of this negative funk! 
• 07:44 – Paradigm shift? 

It’s not Scott of the Antarctic… 

• 08:18 – Introduction to guest: Martin Hewitt 
• 08:43 – Martin’s career history 
• 10:03 – The push to starting the Adaptive Grand Slam 
• 11:31 – What Adaptive Grand Slam is all about 
• 13:01 – Confidence boost 
• 13:22 – Independence boost 
• 13:49 – Antarctic Expedition to the Pole and climbing Vincent Massive 
• 14:35 – Walking unassisted 1200km 
• 15:19 – The Cold & Wind; Psychological as well as Physiological 
• 16:02 – The monotony of snow & ice 
• 17:05 – No proper panorama 

Is it all doom and gloom? 

• 19:06 – The psychological perils of the expedition 
• 20:01 – The first few weeks were the worst 
• 21:32 – Go into your mind… 
• 22:32 – How much change took place? 
• 23:09 – This is my

Episodes are available here https://www.thecpo.co.uk/

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Transcript

Tim Hepworth: 0:02

Hello, and welcome to episode 5 of the Chief Psychology Officer with Dr. Amanda Potter. This week we have a special guest who we'll meet a little later. But we'll start with Amanda cluing me into a little bit more about what it is we're going to be talking about. And today's topic is resilience.

Dr Amanda Potter: 0:22

Hi Tim, thank you very much. I was focusing this session and this podcast on resilience because I think it's a really good next step after podcast four, which was focusing on burnout.

Tim Hepworth: 0:36

Yes, podcast four available at all good podcast outlets. But as with our previous topics, let's start with you explaining what we mean when we talk about resilience.

Dr Amanda Potter: 0:48

Resilience is about being aware of and understanding our emotions. It is about being physically intelligent enough to make good choices that positively impact our physiology and our emotions and give us the capacity to cope with difficulty.

Tim Hepworth: 1:07

So resilience sounds like something that we should all be interested in. So why exactly is it important to actually focus on this?

Dr Amanda Potter: 1:15

I wanted to bring up the concept of resilience because resilient people tend to have a very positive internal dialogue. The conversation that they have with themselves is one that helps them to improve their mood and boost their confidence when they're struggling.

Tim Hepworth: 1:33

Hopefully we're having uh those positive internal conversations, but what is it we should actually be looking out for?

Dr Amanda Potter: 1:40

There are three enablers of resilience. They are social connections and spending time with people who matter to us deeply, a belief and awareness of our emotions and being very much in tune with how we are feeling in a given time or moment. And thirdly, our physiology, the way in which we react to difficulty and how responsive our autonomic nervous system is, and our propensity to create cortisol and for our amygdala to be responsive to fight or flight.

Tim Hepworth: 2:14

Sorry, what exactly do you mean by enablers of resilience?

Dr Amanda Potter: 2:18

So we become more resilient and stronger and able to cope with adversity and difficulty when we learn, when we are agile. And the research has shown that we are more resilient and we are more able to cope when we fuel ourselves in the correct way. And we do that by making sure we spend time with people who are important, which is the social connections, and we have the opportunity to talk through difficulties when we are given the chance to reflect and understand those difficulties and the emotions that we're experiencing, and therefore make choices about the situations that we attend to or move away from. And finally, we are in tune with our physiology and we understand what's happening in terms of our nervous system and the neurotransmitters and hormones that are being released when we're stressed or when we're anxious. And so these three things are fundamental in helping us becoming more resilient and helping us to cope with adversity.

Tim Hepworth: 3:36

Obviously, emotions play a big part when we're talking about resilience. Is an emotional person likely to be less resilient? Are they likely to be more resilient?

Dr Amanda Potter: 3:47

What happens is as humans we have two types of conversation, one with ourselves and one with other people. The most important one actually is the conversation we have with ourselves, because this can have a significant impact on our confidence, on our belief, and our success. So we have 50,000 thoughts per day, and the language we use when pulling those thoughts together will determine how we see ourselves, our experience of our day, and how we participate in the world.

Tim Hepworth: 4:23

So when you say the the language we use, is that language that you use inside your head?

Dr Amanda Potter: 4:29

Completely. The language that you use when you're thinking, is that self-talk positive? And are you affirming the things that are good about yourself, or are the thoughts negative and are you undermining your capability and your belief? So someone who is very good at positive self-talk will affirm and confirm to themselves the areas in which they are performing well, and they will celebrate successes and they will congratulate the little wins. And this is fantastic for improving mood and boosting confidence because our happiness in life depends on our prevailing thoughts and our mood. But if we spend our time criticizing ourselves, always expecting more, setting standards that are extremely hard to achieve, what will happen is we will undermine our confidence and we will start looking to blame people or talk about luck, and we will see that we start using but in front of statements as an excuse for why something hasn't happened or why we can't do something effectively.

Tim Hepworth: 5:48

We're dealing with these issues of resilience internally, we're having conversations with ourselves, whether we're aware of them or not. How do you actually, you know, is it is it important the way that you characterize these feelings? Can they be characterized in one way or another?

Dr Amanda Potter: 6:03

If we think about challenging tasks or goals that we want to achieve, our mental perspective and how we are feeling and the way in which we focus on those tasks has a significant impact. If we have a negative focus and we use negative words in our self-talk, we are going to undermine our confidence and we are going to believe that we are not able to achieve the goals. If we have a negative self-talk, what will happen is we will look for all the reasons why we cannot achieve the goal or why we are personally unable to succeed, and our language will be around things not being good or it being down to luck, and there will be lots of excuses or blame. If however we feel and have positive thoughts, what will happen is our language will be around readiness and challenge and action. And we will talk in our heads about being re- energized and ready to go.

Tim Hepworth: 7:15

So obviously, I don't want to be uh stuck in this negative funk. What can I do to get myself out of it?

Dr Amanda Potter: 7:21

What we need is a paradigm shift. We need an attitude shift to move from the negative to positive. But very often it's very difficult to be told that you need to change your mindset or change your attitude. It doesn't come from someone telling you what to do. You need to recognize it within yourself.

Tim Hepworth: 7:44

So you talked about a paradigm shift, as always, with these podcasts. We uh we learn a lot through examples. Have you got any good examples of a paradigm shift?

Dr Amanda Potter: 7:54

I would love you now to introduce Martin because when preparing for our podcast last week, Martin talked me through his latest expedition and gave a fantastic example that he experienced, which will be much more interesting than one of my much smaller and less pivotal examples.

Tim Hepworth: 8:18

Okay, so I guess now it's time to meet our special guest, as Amanda said. We've got with us today Martin Hewitt, who is currently the chief executive of the adaptive Grand Slam, which Martin will tell us a little more about. Welcome, Martin.

Martin Hewitt: 8:35

Thank you, Tim.

Tim Hepworth: 8:36

Would you like to fill us in a little bit more about uh who you are and how you got here?

Martin Hewitt: 8:44

Sure. So um Martin Hewitt, I decided to join the British Army. I became an army officer. I commissioned into the parachute regiment. I served eight years in the parachute regiment, um, during which time I lost the use of my right arm. I was shot leading an attack in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, and uh a bullet came through my shoulder and severed the brachial artery, which supplies the blood flow to the right arm. It severed all the nerves of my right arm, which rendered my arm paralysed. I had uh a femurx, which is a collapsed lung, and it shattered my scapula. Uh I then got shot a couple of minutes later in the foot, just for good measure, I think. Right. Uh and then that obviously resulted in the the ending of my military career. Um then I moved on to my second job, career if you like, which was in adapting sport. Uh I set up a captain the creation of a new adaptive skiing team in the in the British Armed Forces called the Combined Services Disabled Ski Team. Um, and through that process I ended up racing for Great Britain on the British Disabled Ski Team. Well, I moved on from that into the world of small business charity and expeditions. So I've had uh a couple of different businesses. The first was in in training, so we used to deliver leadership training, and the second business was in uh challenge events and expeditions, which is what I do now.

Tim Hepworth: 10:02

So you created this fantastic organization for disabled veterans, disabled people in general. What was it that actually pushed you into starting it?

Martin Hewitt: 10:11

During that kind of period of my life when I was initially in Headley Court, which is where all the injured soldiers were getting physical rehabilitation at the time when I was injured in 2007, and my time afterwards involved with Paralympics GB, I met a lot of different people with different disabilities, and I saw the power of giving people a positive focus during a difficult time in their life. And so I wanted to do something to kind of give a bit back in that space. So I set up the Adaptive Gunslam project, and it was an endeavor really at first to try and change the perceptions of what could be achieved with disability. At the time, we had quite a lot of members of the armed forces getting injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, um, and we wanted to do something to try and push the boundaries and to inspire them to maximise their recovery. Um so I started looking at different endeavours that were out there, and I came across something called the Explorer's Grand Slam, which is a challenge event. Uh described at the time as the gold standard of exploration, which is an endeavour to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents and to walk unsupported, unassisted to the North and South Poles. Um, but every expedition we've we've taken additional team members. So every time we run a selection process, a training process, and we invite anybody who's um registered, disabled in the UK to come on board um and to and to try out for that year's expedition, that year's team.

Tim Hepworth: 11:30

Yeah, I've known you uh a long time, Martin, and it's very obvious that the adaptive Grand Slam is something that is very, very dear to your heart and something that you're very passionate about.

Martin Hewitt: 11:40

Sure. So um as I mentioned, when I first started the adaptive Grand Slam project, it was trying it was about really, well, two things. On a personal level, it was about trying to regain self-respect. You know, I had a I was very fortunate I had a career in the military where I had a combination of sense of purpose alongside job satisfaction, which I've I'm fully I'm very mindful that not everybody has that. And I wanted to get that somewhere else other than the military, and I thought I would get that in the in the challenge space. I'd always been interested in expedition since I was a young, young boy. Um so that was kind of going on. And at the same time, I was really trying to redefine myself and get some self-respect back. And I thought I had achieved that in part at the at that point in my life by you know taking on some endeavors that able-bodied people would look at and question if they could do that. Um, so that was really where I started it. And then a couple of years into the challenge events and the expeditions, I just started getting an increased number of people applying uh from a non-military background, either who'd been born with disability and they were looking for something in their lives to try and really help them be surrounded by people that were going to be positive and try and push themselves. And so I then decided to and to finance taking disabled people on the other side at no cost to them. Um, and what we've seen and what we've experienced over time is that it has several positive effects. The first is confidence. Um, I think you you know when you get a life-changing injury, your confidence just does take a hit. Uh, and we found that pulling people into nature's back door um with a bit of support around them, but in an environment where you need a bit of resilience and robustness to survive and thrive, um, that has a positive impact on people's confidence levels. Secondly, it gives people a level of independence. Um, and finally, through the network that we're building up, we provide opportunities for people to network and to meet people that have often led on to job opportunities.

Tim Hepworth: 13:34

I I find it incredible, to be perfectly honest. I don't think uh as a so-called able-bodied person, I'd be capable of doing any single one of your challenges.

Martin Hewitt: 13:44

You will mate. All in time. So, do you think this is a good time now for you to talk us through your latest expedition to the South Pole? Yeah, so I've just uh I've just come back from our latest expedition um to walk to the South Pole, the geographic South Pole, um, and to climb the highest mountain in Antarctica, which is called Vincent Massive or Mount Vincent. Uh, our plan was to try and walk from the edge of the continent to the geographic South Pole unsupported and unassisted, which again means so we were carrying all of our own kit, no use of kites for wind, wind support, wind assistance, no use of any vehicles, uh, what's called man hauling all of your kit. So we had a 108 kilograms in the sledge when we first started, and we started on an area called the Ron Ice Shelf. Um, and our plan was to walk from the unsupported, unassisted 720 miles or 1,200 kilometres to the South Pole. Um, but in the same season, we wanted to be able to climb Mount Vincent, so we were under a bit of time pressure um because we had to complete the trekking phase of the expedition before the weather turned and summer attempts became untenable. So yeah, it was quite a big uh quite a big endeavour. Um we had uh a lot of different experiences in the end. We we couldn't quite complete the full distance to the pole that we wanted to because I had a I had a problem with my Achilles tendon. We ended up covering just over 750 kilometres to the South Pole in the end, and we managed to climb Mount Vincent. That's incredible. And in fact, when talking about the cold, you mentioned that it was the cold and the wind that really made you question yourself at one point. Yeah, so we um, like I said, we had a week in Chile, first of all, um, and we were packing all of our kit down there. We were getting these grab bags, so we had a freeze-dried food for our breakfast and for our evening meal, which is basically a little packet. Uh you you you pour that into a container and then you add boiling water to it, and that forms your meal. And then in the day, we don't we don't kind of stop for lunch. We had a routine where we were doing 90-minute shifts. So there was me and my teammate, a guy called Lou Rudd, who's very experienced, um, done more unsupported miles in Antarctica than any other human being in history. And he and I would rotate. And so when you're up front, the environment down there is pretty monotonous when you get off the ice shelf. So at the edge of the continents, when you're moving from the Ron Ice Shelf up onto the continent itself, there are a number of features you can look at because there's a number of mountain ranges, uh, but that lasts for about four days, and then once you're beyond that mountain range and into the mainland, we then had over 250 miles of nothing but snow in front of us. The best way of describing it was like a for those that have been alpine skiing, it's like a mogul field, uh, and you're looking at a feature called sestrugi, which is basically like a mound of snow. We're on a constant, gradual but subtle incline, you know, our run ice shelf that we got dropped off on the polar plateau that we were aiming for was over 3,000 meters in height. So you've got this over a distance of over a thousand kilometres, you've got up this gradual incline. Because of that incline, you can't see a great deal of distance in front of you. Our depth of vision was between, depending on visibility, some days we had a wiped out, a white-out condition, so you can't see more than a foot or two in front of you. And so there's not a great deal of uh visual stimulation. So we we were dropped off on the Ronai Shelf and we had a core temperature of around minus 30 with wind speeds that ranged every day from 25 knots to over 40 knots day in, day out. Um, and there's a psychological pressure on you because trying to do the most basic of functional tasks with one hand in that environment in those conditions becomes quite challenging. And I think because I had you know no opportunity to do the environmental training, you know, whilst we did some good stuff in the UK, it took a bit of time to just adapt to that environment and to accept that this was my new world. And I was having experiences that I've not had on past expeditions, such as um food cravings. Yeah, I've never really had that before. I mean, I've done long expeditions before over multiple months, um, but I've never really had cravings to the extent that I did on this. And maybe seven, eight, nine, ten days into it, day in, day out, I was just constantly thinking of certain foods, eggs Benedict, you know, Yorkshire puddings and roast dinners. And I was just, yeah, I was trying to snap out of it, but it just kept on coming up. And in the end, I ended up chatting to my teammate Lou and said, Look, I'm just constantly thinking of these foods, and he's like, Well, you're not getting them, they're not here, and that's not gonna help. So stopped thinking about it. Simple as that. And I don't know it was if it was that or something else, but after about two weeks on the ice, the craving stopped. Yeah, I stopped thinking about it completely. But those first few weeks were were psychologically the hardest. So, one of the things we were talking about was exactly that mindset, and it's quite interesting that you did respond to the, well, there isn't any food, so you might as well just get on with it. Because a lot of the research shows that if you get told to think something or told to feel something in a certain way, actually what often what happens is the opposite, we become quite dogged or we push back and don't necessarily respond very positively to being told how to feel or what to think. Yeah, I was psychologically, I was suffering. Um, it was the first time I've ever been on an expedition where I genuinely thought of quitting. Um, I thought this environment is pretty brutal. I don't ever want to be here, if I'm honest. And I was questioning whether or not it was doable. And the reason for that is that this feature I mentioned, Sestrugi, you've basically got to try and tactically get over it. Because of my paralysed arm, whenever I was on top of the uh Sestrugie, I'm trying to balance myself in a position where I can load up and then pull all the weight up and over this over this feature. And that meant putting a heck of a lot of load through my left-hand side because I don't have a pole in my right arm. My right arm was in a sling the whole time. And as a result, I was often kind of my balance was going off and I was slipping and falling. Lou, I think on the whole of the expedition, another 700 kilometres, had I think five or six falls. I was having between three and twenty-five falls a day, every day. And that was really resulting in the first few weeks, on top of the weather, on top of the wind, on top of the cold, on top of the environment, I think making me think, I don't know if this is doable. And I started to get frustrated at the frequency with which I was falling over. So if Lou's up front, he might not have seen that I've fallen over, so he just keeps on going. So I'm lying there on the floor and I've got this harness on, and so I'm I'm trying, yeah, I'm in an awkward position, trying to get up on ice with one arm and one pole with you know 100 kilograms behind me, and Lou's kind of bugging off in the distance. And I was getting really frustrated with that at times, but most of the time it was because he he just he didn't even know I'd fold and he couldn't hear me because we've got this you know this catapatic headwind in front of us the whole time, or he's got his earphones in, and that was the other factor. I had two sets of earphones. I had you know I'd spent hundreds of pounds on audiobooks, and I had a load of different playlists created in order to try and you know look at the motivation, different playlists at different times of day. I had playlists of music to help me try and calm down and and relax as quickly as possible of an evening because there's so much to do down there. You want to maximize what rest you can get. We were never getting more than four or five hours sleep. So I was trying to maximize all that. So all this is going on, and then of course, I have this uh I have this tech failure, and so my first set of earphones stopped working on about day four or day five, and my reserve set of earphones stopped working on day nine or ten, I think it was. So I had no music either. So I was in my own mind for you know between 10 and 12 hours a day pulling every day, and I started going to some pretty interesting places. Um, and then when I was really starting to suffer with the falling, Lou came over and I said, mate, just take some video of this, would you? Because I'm I need to look back at this one day. Should I decide to come back or want to come back? So he got the camera out and he started taking some video of me. And he's just stood there watching me as I get up. And I get up and he starts taking the mick basically. He's like that, you know, the sniper that shot you in Afghanistan has followed you out of here, you keep on falling over so frequently. Um, and just I think the dark humour that we had between us, and the fact that I knew for me to see the funny side of this and for me to not be consumed by a negative mindset at that time, I needed something that was going to snap me out of it. And for me, that was dark humour. And that's what Lou provided. Um, I don't know if he knew that. I never said that to him in advance. Uh, it was just the way he was and the way we worked together. Yeah, him taking the piss out of me was exactly what I needed. To what extent do you feel that you had in that situation at that moment just a change of mindset or a change of attitude? Uh significant. I think I, well, a number of things were happening at the same time. One, we got um our first bit of not good weather, but the wind speed dropped from between 30 mile an hour and 40 mile an hour down to less than 20 mile an hour. So we could actually hear each other speak for a start. And you weren't constantly in this headwind, and that that helped. Um, secondly, I was my body was adapting to the environment. You know, you the the cold, albeit still cold, wasn't quite, it didn't feel quite as cold. You get used to the environment and you were climatized. And most importantly, I was accepting that this was my new world, and my job was to walk for between 10 and 12 hours a day, every day, until we get to the South Pole. And I think because I'd accepted that and I was starting to get used to that, it made the journey a lot easier. Um, to the point where about 15 days in, we really started cranking the pace up. That's amazing. And I love talking to you because you challenge my theories. I've always believed and suggested that persistence is the enemy of resilience, that if we push and push and push, that actually what will happen is we will undermine our resilience and our ability to cope with difficulty. And that actually what's more important is agility and learning. But it sounds to me in your example, Martin, that you did nothing but persist. You were dogged, you were determined, and you fought through those three months in getting to the South Pole. Do you have any perspective on that? Do you think I'm wrong? Uh no, I think it's like all these things, I think it's down to context. Uh, and I think persistence in that environment, well, the LC is you've got no choice but to persist in that environment because you could there's no one coming. You know, you you you're you're in the environment and you're on an unsupported expedition, so you carry on. But I think from from the perspective of psychology, there's a big difference in whether or not persistence is complementary towards resilience or not. In that, so for example, when I was in the military, you know, the the powers has got a reputation for for you know for what they are, and there's a very robust selection process that people go through in order to get in. When I was a young officer in that organization, our physical training was all about maximizing soldiers' ability to be able to perform under pressure, carrying kit in hostile environments. And a lot of that was around endurance training, but there were specific tasks and specific distances carried specific weights every time that we had to hit. And so you kind of that becomes your comfort zone. And that's that's the that's the physical standard that we then trained to. When I got onto the GB team for ski racing, I went from doing you know two mile, two-mile marches with Kate under, you know, whatever time you could do it in, 10 miles, 20 miles plus, to suddenly ski racing on a mountain for no more than three and a half minutes. A completely different physical experience. You know, we referred to it in the military. I mean, the military's changes are not now, but we used to kind of refer to our training as beasting sessions. You know, every session was 100%. And that was part of the mindset, it was part of you know part of the way in which we decided to deliver the training ourselves as between commanders. Um whereas when I hit Paralympic sport, I had to completely change my attitude around what training was. Persistently doing the same thing wasn't going to achieve performance level sport. Um, and what I mean by that is that we had to change the way in which we trained in order to get the performance in the ski racing gates, and that changed everything. It was a complete world apart from the physical training and preparation for alpine sport. So everything completely shifted. And I think had I just continued, had I've entered performance sport with a persistent mindset of just doing the same old fizz that I've always done, I wouldn't have got anywhere near as far as I did. What did you take from that expedition? Because it sounds like it was the toughest, or or at least one of the toughest you've done. Yeah, I think on a personal level, I mean, there's kind of yeah, there's a lot of different lessons there, but I think on a personal level, I not having the opportunity to conduct environmental training was a real issue. And that could have been, it could have stopped the whole thing. It could have, you know, that expedition could have failed because of the shock that I had going into that environment without having any environmental training beforehand. The flip side of that coin is that because I'd done so many expeditions prior to that, I've had experiences in the military and since the military that have developed a certain level of resilience, in my opinion, that was kind of credit in the bank and was probably contributing factors towards not quitting in those first two weeks. So I think the biggest lesson for me was preparation. You know, I'd something I talk about to others all the time. And yet in that in that on that expedition, for reasons out of my control, I wasn't fully prepared. Uh, and that nearly jeopardised the entire expedition. I think the second big lesson was really a humbling one on my part in that when because I was constantly having to put this load through the left-hand side, uh, about 230, 240 miles into the expedition, my Achilles tendon um nearly snapped. Uh, I had tendonitis. Uh, it got to the point where I couldn't walk, I couldn't wipe bear on the on the leg, let alone pull a sledge. Um, and so we we had to make a decision: do we try and stay on the ice and take a resupply, lose the unsupported element of the expedition and get a resupply of food and fuel and then rest it for a couple of days there and then carry on? Do we come back into the main logistics space and try and get some medical attention? Or do we just keep on going and if it snaps, it snaps? And yeah, part of me wanted to keep on going, part of me wanted to stay on the ice, but it wasn't until I spoke to actually the sponsors of the expedition that I've had a couple of a number of commercial partners who sponsored our expedition who I'm very fortunate, have been with us for a number of years and have become very good friends. And the first thing they said to me was get off the ice, go and get medical attention. Antarctica's always been there. Yeah, you can come back if you need to, you can do what you need to do, but safety is paramount. And when you're in these environments and you're consumed by the task at hand, I think it's quite helpful to have some people that you trust mentor you and coach you who aren't necessarily emotionally involved with it to give you hopefully sage and sound advice, which looking back for me was very sage and very sound advice. And as a result of taking their advice, okay, we didn't get to do the full distance that I was hoping to do, but we still did over 750 kilometres. We got to the South Pole, where Achilles tender didn't snap, and we went on to clan Mount Vincent. Had I not had that advice and had I not taken that advice, it could have been quite a different outcome. And Martin, in the years that we've worked together running resilience events for leaders, and I know you're very familiar with our B Talent resilience model, I would love to hear from you what reflections have you had from working with us and working with our clients around the area of resilience? I think the biggest thing for me when I look at the range of clients that you've had go through different programs is especially people in leadership positions taking on a lot of responsibility, being mindful of the fact that actually, whilst a lot of high performers often try and increase capacity, increase capacity, they've all got a limit. And I think if you can create an atmosphere in your team of openness and trust and share things and discuss things internally, then it helps. And we've seen that come time and time again. Um, and all too often, unfortunately, prior to training, there seems to be a bit of resistance to asking for help, especially in people in positions of authority. And that's something that I think people need to work on. Thank you. We've been doing quite a lot around psychological safety and resilience together with our clients, haven't we? So I do believe the same thing that if we could just get people to trust, to open up and to talk more about what might be challenging them and what would help them to succeed, I think we'd be in a much stronger place. So, Tim, do you have any other questions for Martin?

Tim Hepworth: 30:35

I find myself in the situation here, to be honest, um, of being an absolute rubbish interviewer, and I'm just sat here listening in all to what Martin's done, thinking and feeling very inadequate, and feeling that I think my levels of resilience are not even a one on a scale of one to ten, I'm afraid.

Dr Amanda Potter: 30:53

Martin, thank you so very much. I've really appreciated the time together. I know this has been a real commit from you because you have turned down so many opportunities to do podcasts with other podcasters. So we're delighted that you said yes to us. So thank you very much. And I believe this is probably our best podcast. You're very eloquent and your stories are amazing. So thank you so much. Not at all, thank you. And it's great work that you guys are all doing. Along may it continue.

Tim Hepworth: 31:26

Thank you for listening. We'll be publishing the Chief Psychology Officer Podcast every couple of weeks. We'd love it if you could join us for our next episode, which will be on the topic of healthy habits. If you like what you've heard, please consider following us or leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or LinkedIn. Thanks again for listening.