John Truitt (217:20)
Yeah, so I mean I've got lots of interesting experiences. Is mostly funny about how I. So I left the military very quickly. We do have a certain way of going and I left in three months, which is not necessarily what. But essentially I separated from the children to my mum, which was all done without lawyers. It was all done very well in that, you know, the whole thing is very uncertain for both. It costs a lot of money to do it to try and find individual decision making positions. But essentially we never had to resort to a contest. We never had to use legal people which cost a lot of money, money we did not have. And so we used the money to kind of shore up everyone's existence. And the biggest thing was ensure that people didn't leave that with a ton of regret they weren't going to come back from. So that's one of the reasons I kind of left the military quite quickly. I'd come to the end of my career, contractors on extension. Essentially. I knew I wasn't going to be operational anymore, so I chose to move on. Before I went, I sat down with the psychiatric nurse. It's no harm to check inside. Right. I thought, you know, I know, you know, in the course of my career, I know the things that have challenged me, plane crashes, being in situations where you had no control whatsoever. Right. And those are the things that I've remarked upon and I've largely dealt with them. I had my change in behavior around 2014, so I'm not. But it was a good thing to do to sit down and do the seven hour course. The other two reasons I did that is to reassure the people I've been working with for so long that when I was going I was in a fairly stable state. Because obviously people worry about you, not me personally, but generally, you know, they worry about. You're just about to go into a sea of change, really fast moving change and people don't realize the challenges that are presented personally, the sleepless nights you'll have and that can quickly revert you back into something somebody that's concerning. Right. Your behavior is testing, whatever. So I did it to reassure people and I did it it. So when I go and sit in front of these same people, I promise to be at the airport within three hours if they needed me to. I was perfectly fine. Right. And I, yeah, I'm going to say, look, you're never going to get to see it. But I've done that file. I am not that stereotype. I've not got PTSD and I'm not also not making that up because you'll also think I'm just saying that. No, I absolutely haven't. I've just checked. I'm good. Just need to work out work which is going to be messy. I get. So I did that and then I left. And in the course of doing that I thought I could set. It was at the back end of COVID and obviously everyone had been sort of Confined to their houses and moving out a lot less. So I made an assessment that everyone would want to train outside in the parks. And this was still in the course of me leaving in. So I set up three areas that I could sort of train people. And the assessment couldn't have been more wrong. People have been confined to their houses, tested mentally to a severe degree, and the last thing they wanted to do was go and do physical training in parks. So okay, I was wrong. I detected I was wrong. But when I was, I was running free areas, I was getting up at like 5 o' clock in the morning and doing these physical training sessions for what should have been 20 in a class. And it was like ones and twos if anyone turned up at all. And so I was having a ferocious schedule of honoring my things. I didn't have any money to bring on further instructors. The end game with that was like to set up something that was fairly stable that I could get local management to overlook so I could then quickly move on. And again, this is part of the naivety of kind of, you know, I've got no pedigree in business, I don't understand how marketing works. And so I've kind of sort of bumped off all the things. But quite hilariously I was messing around doing. I trained calisthenics quite a bit, or at least in a very amateurish way, right. And something called plants that you do. And I sort of binding my time waiting for these people to turn up that probably wouldn't anyway. And I saw like a beam in a car park park. So I was like, I'll just try planche on that if that was a really good idea. And the beam wasn't fixed, right. So it tipped forward. As it tipped forward, I had to quickly kick my legs through. And as I did the old crisp packet sheet white, I was with a friend actually who's coming to help me out. I know I broke my arm and I was waiting to have a medical discharge, right. And I desperate to move on. And so I was like in the way I was thinking at the time based in the mind that I was in the middle of a separation, I was leaving the army. So probably my decision making probably looked very, very different from what you would naturally be doing if you're sitting around the kitchen table after dinner and going, you know, it's like go on holiday. So when I broke my arm, my first thought is I can't get plaster because then they won't give me a medical discharge because they'll see that I'M injured and I suspect militaries won't let you go until you're absolutely fully fit. So I decided not to have a cast. I was fairly happy, it was stable and I've got pictures on my phone of what this looked like. And it was like a spiral fracture of the outer layer of the arm. And at this point I was sleeping on a camp cock, the metal frame camp cot. Right. So again, you know, I was implored to go and get a plaster on it, you know, so now. So what's the point? It's stable. You can see it's stable, right. You know, it'll heal quick enough. It was really disgusting color. And I was doing fitness training sessions and I think it was like the next day I was like throwing up in bushes because every time it sort of climbs. Clacked again, obviously I have this sort of immediate shock response, like for up in a bush. Utterly mad. Right. If you look back on it, it's like, what did they think, the people that I was taking for fitness? So anyway, I've sort of. In the end, I. I found something on the Internet. You know, the buckets, gravity that pushed their ice water into. I bought one of those and that acted as a really, really good cast. So I used to sort of. Of obviously going around with my bucket. So anyway, I turn up to do my final discharge stuff and you go around and they say, where's this jacket? You give back the jacket and all that sort of stuff. The last thing is this medical discharge and I walk into the medical unit and who are all amazingly lovely people, brilliant people as well, you know, it's all. But no. And I've said, oh, coming from a discharge. And the lady at the desk is like that, oh, no. They go on. On the phone since COVID So I'd gone to these extreme limits to not have a cast on my. On my arm in order to be present. A discharge that I never needed to be present for. So there was plenty of those sorts of experience that it would just pick you pick yourself up, up and find the next problem. Don't try and find it, you'll trip over it anyway and. But that all healed nicely. I was absolutely right, you know, actually there was no reason for a cast. Once I'd worked out that thing, it was brilliant, you know, it was just like, funny. But if you just picture sleeping on a camp cot with its metal frame, waking up in the night, you've rolled onto it and it's extraordinarily painful. So that was the immediate Process of sort of, of breaking free as such. And then I did some work as a sort of consultant but it's really, really low pay, right. And you know, I've got sort of fairly. It was never going to be enough and also it wasn't the right type of work but it was in performance. Then I got offered a job as a CPO in a fully employed role and it was extremely well placed. It was actually working in a pretty decent rotation. It came with full medical package. It's working for someone who did a huge amount of travel. So the days you were on, you know, very, very, very long days, like 18, 20 hour days but essentially the atmosphere was not good. I just wasn't in tune with it and I knew I wasn't in tune with it. And then I got offered a job by a company, Satellite Connectivity and I worked for them for a period of time and they wanted to break into new markets and they're assessing Ukraine for its, you know, its needs for energy, resilience, that sort of stuff. So building up connectivity. So I went through a period of that and actually it was quite enjoyable. I was in and out Ukraine, Ukraine quite a lot and very visibly connected with the business. But actually, you know, you could see beyond the valuable work I got done, which was the forward led work of that. But it was nothing to do with business, right. And when it comes to the business piece, it was all too uncertain. And through that period that's when the kind of the reflection came on me as like, hang on a minute, you know, in these employed roles people are having to justify my existence, existence and when they can justify the existence, it's all for these exceptional move into a new market. It's not for the normal everyday functioning of the business and that's where people sit comfortably. If you try and move into the new market with a business, it happens very rarely. People will usually test it and then come back. So I think the employment opportunities that people from special forces background need to be really, really carefully looked at because it's not about getting support, it's not getting people to bring into companies and employed having felt that they want to give you a chance because you're on a ticking clock. Actually the skills that you have are very, very effective. I've proved that, that I'm very, very supportive person and I love doing it. I love seeing something, I sort of call myself a very effective minion, you know, so I get involved in people where things are going on and I'm very, very happy to do it. Just because of time, just because I believe in it. I've got lots of examples coming up, but essentially if it's an employed role, people are struggling to explain what your role is in certain sectors and in the security sector from my brief interluding there. And I do draw a distinction between the US market and the UK market. Very, very, very different. You know, the US market has got a massive area where people from ex military backgrounds and it's especially pronounced in SF backgrounds, actually military, slightly better, whereas you don't have that in the uk. So I bumped through, I got made redundant in May last year and I was expecting contract work to come in in the background. I've been trained as a speaker, so that's led to sort of two things. One, I did a, you know, define it as professional speaking, although that sounds sort of quite sort of sort of high up there. But it's speaking where you've studied it for a course. And I did a course called with the Bespoke Elite Speaking Training. It's an ex professional rugby player called Leon Lloyd who's actually very. He's quite involved in transition veterans. And so from having done that course I thought I would get enough of a program, a speaking event, events to be able to kind of stay positioned, ready to take this contract work and ready to be where the main things I was involved in do break. But actually that's again, it's quite naive, you know, if you think about how I do my speaking and I love doing it, I'm really, really passionate about it. I just did one for the London Fire Brigade, eight different sessions and it was absolutely brilliant. You know, not an easy set of people to talk to as well. It's really great. You know, I like being on my toes sometimes. Right. And it's, it really develops you as well. You have to study what does the audience need. And there's absolutely got to be an element of performance in there, which is where this course came very important. You're working with professional comedians, you're working with people who worked in sort of stage shows in this course. So the course itself was very valuable to do, but it didn't necessarily lead to more work work. And the speaking I do is always in person, you know, it's always going to be specifically impactful. I can do behavioural adaptation, I've got a program for that. You know, I can do any type of speaking and I've proved that, you know, from speaking at cadets dinners, which I absolutely love, through to speaking to defence primes. And actually the thing I've probably cherished the most is I did one for a scaffolding company, which is absolutely brilliant. Big scaffolding company in Wales and a roofing company. So it's almost sort of going back to my heart. But they were brilliant and, you know, doing something for the services like London Fire Brigade and sort of getting across those experiences. But again, it's just reassuring people that you, like, sometimes ignore the clamor and the noise. Society has become very noisy and it's got real high expectations and actually concentrate on what you've delivered, because every single time you turn up and you are doing your job to exceptional standards and just focus on that, you know. And some of it, I know it was quite interesting because I asked some people, you know, what do you worry about? They would say, oh, you know, it's the opinion of this or this, you know, has been seen as an instant where it should have been betterly managed. You go, but really, is that your job to worry about that? Actually, there's a person over there who's paid to deal with that. And again, it's all around this sort of slight sort of shouldering of stress and responsibility. It all comes from listening to the noise, right? And I say, say to people, protect and preserve your own perspective, your own perspective. You own that, right? Doesn't matter how hard. You've got to sort of close off the clamor. Sometimes you've got to get into that, you know, in their case, their fire engines, and go and respond to a job. You turn up and you do it every time. And it's remarkable the standards expected of all of these things. So I really enjoyed that bit of work. Work. The other, I'm ambassador to a performance company. So this is a company called Planet K2. This is quite new. So one of the first things I did, I was put in touch with a guy called Keith Hatter and goodness knows what I sounded like when I had my first conversation with him, because I was still speaking in a language that people really didn't understand. You know, I was struggling to explain my skills and in sort of words where they're just like, well, okay, but so they slightly after that, you know, Keith Hatter asked me to do they have something called Performance Fest and it's run out of Soho Hotel. And he asked me to be a speaker as a number of four, and the title was Using Data for High Performance. And, you know, I said, I'm not a nominal data expert. I've got a lot of experience with data and everything else. And the other people on the course was a very high up person in IBM for energy, the head of EMEA marketing possibly for Meta, and the chief analyst at Gusto, chief analyst Distribution at Gusto. So it's quite a sort of considerable kind of professional experience there. So it was one of the first sort of speaking events where I sat down, really tried to apply myself and it seemed to go very, very well and it proved I could do it alongside and more latterly and a few years went by and I talked to Keith every so often. He's an extremely experienced person and sometimes just talking to people you get the best bit of advice that they never intended to give. And some of my interactions are very lucky. I've got really great friends when I talk to them. It just sort of reminds you keep on your centre point, things are good, they're held in together. They may not look pretty, pretty but Keith in the end has asked me to come ambassador to planet K2 and there's a different type of performance we're talking about. I've done a couple of speaking events for him and I think they're sort of increasingly looking at hopefully a growing relationship where I'm included in their offers and they do performance as a culture. So they have 21 rules that they stick by. And so it's not immediately something I have something to add to their offer, but I also have to learn their offer and their culture. And they've got two decades of experience of delivering this. So through these types of interactions I've learned a great deal and develop, developed very fast. Right, because if someone asks you to sit on a stage, you take it seriously, you go and learn, you educate, you develop. That's been absolutely fundamental to keeping my progress going. But the speaking is really yet to take shape and I've got a strong suspicion that speaking comes from doing, becoming involved in other very important things. So I hope that in time, but the last thing you want to do is rely on people unnecessarily. It's their pattern of business that allows you the opportunity to join in. You can't immediately sort of turn and say things are getting really, really tough. I really, really need more work. You know, you've got to let them develop at their own pace and it may not necessarily suit you. So I've had other, you know, extraordinary asks. You know, I tend to like to support people and, you know, friends. A friend's father came to me and said a very, very high net worth person was getting threatened. You know, I went and sat for quite A long time with her, looked at the messages they were receiving. Essentially it was down to what do these threats constitute? Are they real or perceived? I said, well, you know, written that in my view it's perceived, but you can never rule out real. But instead of hiring huge arrays of security just because of the possibility of real, you just need to understand how to control the communication, the means of communication, these threats and understand where that is located. And in my view that's a threat that you can report. So it was actually a no money solution and it was worthwhile in terms of, of one, you know, one of the key ones is, you know, reassuring these people so they're not walking around feeling threatened by everything and everyone. But essentially, again, it's taught to me when I look at the solutions to things, they don't fit what people want to say. You know, it's like these days when you say I need a, you know, what should I do about my cctv? We're like, well, get a machine learning program. These two people don't need to be sat here, right? So it's a lot necessary the solutions that other people want to see as well. But I have had sort of interesting interactions. There's a company called Cocoon, excellent digital privacy. I hope that this sort of grows, but who knows where it will, you know, consultancy I think is going to be something I'm going to have to push really, really hard for when I get home. Speaking is definitely not something I can massively rely on, but I absolutely love and I think it will become big. But quite early on and I was looking to get on a course at Imperial College, bearing on my last time I did proper study. I do have a certificate in International Relationships international security, so PG7 as such qualification fell short of a Master's, but otherwise it's A levels and you know, I went to Imperial College to try and understand whether there was a course in coding I could do or some element around sort of cyber or, or that side of things. They did in the end offer me a place on a Master's in resilience and Security. But on our walk around a guy called Professor Deep Channer, who's the head of the Institute of Security Science and Technology at the Imperial College. So really, really significant. Imperial College is an incredible institution. In the walk round of the Innovation Hub I was introduced, introduced to a guy called Richard Statham and he eight years ago met, I don't know how long he'd known Vincent Tellenbach, who's an engineer before, but Vincent Tellenbach had been writing waveforms and he did it in cooperation coordination with John Hopkins and Kennedy Krieger Institute, John Hopkins University. So medical grade waveforms, when they were written to deal with pediatrics with neurological conditions, very, very challenging ones and in some cases, sort of nothing to lose type stuff to sort of affect neurology. So Richard Statham started a company called what's now called NMES Group, so neuromuscular electrostimulation group. And over the next eight years, through a process of engineering. So none of this is brand new in terms of it's a trusted technology, it's an EMS background, but they've found a way of making a superconductive membrane that can be rendered into cloves and therefore the platforms you can put it in are endless. And these are trusted technologies that have already been used, same as tens, although TENS is just for pain reduction.
