Techniques to Overcome Fear

The Army Cadets sat down with TV adventurer and former Royal Marines Commando Sniper, Aldo Kane, who shares eight powerful techniques which have enabled him to overcome fears and smash boundaries.

It’s fair to say Aldo Kane knows a thing or two about facing fear: he’s been held at gunpoint, charged by a black rhino, spent ten days locked in an abandoned nuclear bunker and abseiled into an active volcano. And, as a location expert for the TV and film industry, he has come face-to-face with danger in some of the most far-flung places on the planet.

With each action-packed adventure comes the opportunity to learn physically demanding new skills: he’s spent days on big walls with top climbers, hunted killer viruses in the darkest corners of the Congo, explored remote caverns with expert cavers, and skydived with the world’s elite.

To build the physical and mental resilience necessary to overcome his fears and stretch his comfort zone, Aldo follows a strict goal-setting regime, ensuring that he can turn up ready for action, anywhere in the world, with the right mindset and set of skills.

Want to be more Aldo? Read his blueprint for smashing boundaries and overcoming fears.

1. Know what you want to achieve

Aldo advises everyone to take time out to decide what they want to achieve in life and create a vision that really inspires them.

‘Some people give more consideration to where they want to go on their summer holidays than what they want to do with the rest of their lives,’ he chuckles.

At the age of 16, Aldo dedicated all his spare time outside of school to getting fit and strong so he could pursue his dream of joining the Royal Marines. A tough daily training regime prepared him to take on what he describes as ‘the hardest infantry training in the world’.

Having clear goals later in life also enabled him to smash two world records by rowing across the Atlantic from mainland Europe to South America.

2. Break Goals Down

Aldo recommends spending time thinking about the target you want to achieve, then breaking it down into a list of smaller steps and goals to make it more achievable.

‘If a dream is so far out it seems completely unattainable, it is easy to let it slip by the wayside,’ ਉਹ ਕਹਿੰਦਾ ਹੈ।. ‘The way I have operated over the years is to have a massive goal and then break it down into steps I can achieve in both the short and long term.’

3. Know Your “Why”

He stresses the importance of not only knowing what you want to achieve but also the reasons ਕਿਉਂ you want to achieve it.

‘It’s not difficult to eat an apple a day, but it’s also difficult to eat an apple a day’ is his paradoxical maxim. ‘If it’s wet, cold and raining outside and the “why” isn’t big enough, you’re not going to be driven and motivated to get up and do those smaller bite-size chunks.

‘It’s all about that drive to get up every single day and work towards your goal – and that will only happen if you are motivated because the “why” is big enough.’

4. Mitigate the Risk of Failure

Aldo suggests writing down all the obstacles and scary situations you could possibly encounter along the way to reaching your goal and thinking about the best ways to overcome them.

‘You can never fully know or understand what might happen in the future, but if you are well-trained and well-prepared, you can deal with all the eventualities that might get thrown at you.

‘On expeditions, we do many things to mitigate the risk of failure. If we are doing white-water kayaking, we learn how to white-water kayak, how to rescue from boats and how to live on the side of a river safely. It all comes down to planning and the military adage: “If you fail to plan then you plan to fail”.’

5. Understand your Fear

Aldo believes fear is a natural and vital response to the threat of danger: an important emotion that has the potential to save you from death. However, when pursuing your goal you shouldn’t let fear paralyse you and rob you of your dream.

It’s crucial to assess whether your fear is justified (i.e. the threat is real) or whether you are experiencing an irrational fear.

‘Opinion is quite a good way of compounding fear and making the situation much worse than it actually is,’ he says. ‘In scary times I always try to mentally take myself away from the situation and find a place in my head where I can start dealing with the facts.

‘A good phrase is “control the controllables”. When something scary happens, you can’t physically control every situation, person or piece of kit, but you can control your feelings and reactions.

‘Fear is there for a reason, and it’s super helpful, but it’s not to be the controller of your life and decisions.’

6. Train for Resilience

He suggests getting out in the field and using physical and mental training in the outdoors to build resilience; stretching your comfort zone in challenging environments, such as mountains and moorland, is ideal.

‘Whether you are at an elite level or just leaving the house for the first time in six weeks, the fundamentals to building resilience are the same: take yourself physically, mentally and emotionally out of your comfort zone in a controlled manner. The more you do that, the more resilient you will become and then, when you do face a crisis, you’ll be able to cope.’

7. Cultivate a Positive Mindset

It’s Aldo’s belief that anyone can do anything they put their mind to.

‘The first thing I say to young people when I speak to them is “you will literally become what you think about yourself”.

‘If you are filling your head with negative thoughts, then your life will be a fairly negative place and you will have trouble achieving your goals. Everyone is where they are because of the way they think.’

8. Embrace your Failures

Despite his phenomenal achievements, Aldo doesn’t get stressed about getting things wrong, believing experience doesn’t come from getting something perfect but from bad judgment and mistakes.

‘I fail all the time,’ ਉਹ ਕਹਿੰਦਾ ਹੈ।. ‘I fail on expeditions, and I fail as a person and a friend. But I am not my failures, so if I fail at something, it doesn’t bother me for the rest of my life – or even the rest of the day. It’s just something that happened.’

He cites the example of a heat-seeking missile: despite making errors left and right, it always corrects itself back onto target.

‘It’s quite a good analogy for life,’ ਉਹ ਕਹਿੰਦਾ ਹੈ।. ‘If you’re too scared to do something because you are worried about making mistakes or what someone else might think of you, you’ll never get off the start point.

‘I’ve always thought: “the sooner I make this mistake, the sooner I understand what the mistake was about and the sooner I can rectify it and be ahead of the game”. Success breeds mistakes and mistakes breeds success.’

If you want to overcome your fears in a safe and fun environment, why not ਆਰਮੀ ਕੈਡੇਟਾਂ ਵਿੱਚ ਸ਼ਾਮਲ ਹੋਵੋ and create amazing memories and life-long experiences?