Living With “If” Part One: Keeping Your Head

Note: These are personal reflections written from personal experience and perspective, not claiming authority.

The first time I was introduced to Rudyard Kipling’s poem If I was 18 years old, actually just going on 19. The person who introduced it to me was a man who became my boss and friend in the world of covert operations that I worked in.

At that time in my life I was going through several very difficult situations. Not too long prior I had lost very close friends of mine in a car accident in my hometown where three people tragically passed away. My parents had divorced around the same time and then I was contending with a personal issue that had risen to the surface, one of those metaphorical monsters that had been sleeping under the rug for years and no longer had anywhere to hide. Confronting it caused an enormous fallout on several levels of my life, including on a business level.

The man who introduced the poem to me was somebody who would take the time to speak with me, not just about work, but to help steady the ship while I was going through rough waters.

At the time I was expecting that I might have to go through a legal process and in my mind, at least at that young age, right was right and wrong was wrong. Given that he worked in law enforcement and had an enormous amount of experience at a senior level, and because he knew the ins and outs of the story, he tried to teach me something I didn’t understand yet. Truth and justice are not necessarily the same thing and the argument between law and morality is about as old as time.

I think what he understood that I didn’t was that from a legal point of view I wasn’t necessarily going to get what I considered to be a just outcome. I had to reorientate my mind away from being married to one black-and-white outcome and learn to see things over the course of time and within a bigger picture. Karma, the universe balancing the scales of justice, call it whatever you want. He introduced If to me as something that might help guide me through some of the nuances of life that I wasn’t yet old enough to understand.

The opening lines read:

“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;”

I think that’s why the line “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you” came in very strongly for me at that particular time. I did have to keep my head on my shoulders and remain calm while sitting at the centre of public scrutiny, being accosted verbally and physically and being in a situation where nobody really understood the truth of what was going on behind the scenes.

Ironically, writing this now, I think back to the more recent several years I went through with the high-profile court case in Ireland and exonerating my name. Sometimes it feels like my life has been a training ground that prepared me each time with just enough of what I was able to handle so I could grow and then hopefully be the man I needed to be when the next challenge came.

Keeping my head served me very well through all of that. I’m not saying I always walked that line perfectly or that I never felt the pressure when other people were blaming me, behaving irrationally, panicking, feeling angry or whatever the case might have been. But by and large patience is certainly one of the greatest lessons I’ve had to learn and apply throughout the different challenges that came before me over time.

I can think of one particular night at the height of the investigation that eventually became the high-profile criminal court case in Ireland. The investigation had started from the Department of Defence, my bank accounts had been frozen and my social media had been hacked into. I was locked out of it while an enormous amount of negative things were being posted.

I woke up at around two in the morning and there were something like 1,800 negative comments being directed at me on Facebook. At the time it felt extremely unjust and I had a total loss of control over the situation. There was very little I could actually do about any of it at two o’clock in the morning.

What I was trying not to do was lash out at people, over-explain myself, defend myself to everybody or end up talking publicly about things that weren’t mine to unpack.

Thankfully my son was with me. He was young at the time and sleeping in the same bed. While I was looking at all of this stuff on the phone, he turned around, curled into me and wanted a cuddle.

That shifted my thinking.

I remember essentially asking myself, am I really going to let strangers on the internet, or even people I might have known who turned out not to be my friends, ruin my day or my night when I have the most important thing in the world lying beside me right now?

I don’t think it’s really the case that I cared what 1,800 people on Facebook had to say about me because those people weren’t paying my bills. And when you actually meet people face to face, they generally don’t behave as obnoxiously or as rudely as they sometimes do on the internet.

This is one of the things about social media and the internet that I don’t think we’ve fully figured out how to manage. We know it allows for a lot of antisocial behaviour. There’s also this false premise that if enough people think the same thing, they must therefore be right. But the internet creates echo chambers and allows people with bad intentions to find each other in large groups. It can look like there’s this enormous group of people behaving toxically and negatively when part of the reason they look so large is simply because they’re visible.

I think part of what drives that behaviour is that there is very little consequence or filter between somebody and their keyboard. There are things people will say online that they would never get away with saying or doing in person because normal social interaction has consequences and, if you push certain boundaries far enough, those consequences can even become physical.

When my son cuddled into me, the reality check of what was important and what wasn’t became pretty self-evident. It brought my attention back to my actual life rather than this artificial technological world playing out on a screen

That’s probably one of the better real examples I can give of what keeping your head means to me. It didn’t fix anything. My accounts were still frozen. The investigation was still happening. The comments hadn’t disappeared and I couldn’t suddenly control what everybody thought of me.

But I could decide what I was going to allow to control me.

When it comes to putting order into chaos, I think keeping your head means mastering yourself first because if you don’t have control over yourself, you can’t really take responsibility for the world around you.

Enduring without falling apart and keeping your head are certainly related, but they’re not necessarily identical at all. Keeping your head isn’t merely surviving and just getting through a terrible situation. There are some important factors involved. You have to remain orientated, you need to be capable of being articulate and you have to be able to carry responsibility while you’re under that pressure.

Somebody who is merely enduring can be trapped with no choices and no capacity for those things. It might appear that they’re getting through the process, but they can also become numb, almost disassociated from reality, and I would bet that eventually leads towards resignation and resentment. That person hasn’t necessarily kept their head. They’ve managed to endure, but haven’t necessarily acted in a way that could potentially improve the situation.

When you endure something, fine, you can say that demonstrates an ability to absorb the blows or punches that life throws at you. But that really only shows a capacity for tolerance. And yeah, tolerance is part of strength, but it’s not the only tool we need to move forward in life.

A pretty simple example of this for me was learning how to forge a new type of toe clip on a horseshoe. Previously I had learned to do it with a bob punch and something called a ball peen clipping hammer, but I had never learned the technique of doing it with a plain flat-faced hammer.

For me this was very difficult, and I also think there’s something difficult about already being good at something in one domain and then having to bring yourself back down to being a beginner again when you learn something new. There’s a wrestling match with your ego involved in that which I think a lot of people fail to win, and eventually that stunts your growth and development.

I had to endure the pain to my ego of doing something I wasn’t good at and, on top of that, I did so much practice that I got literal blisters on both hands from holding the tongs and hammer while forging. But I kept practising it over and over again and even went to an instructor who was better than me to learn how to do it properly. I still don’t do them perfectly now, but I’m capable of doing them to a very good and consistent standard.