October proved to be an epic month for me.  I expected that climbing the beautiful and challenging Mt Kilimanjaro, the tallest freestanding mountain in the world, standing some 5865m or 19,242 ft would test my resilience, yet I've found myself tested in ways I didn't expect! 

Through my experience, I've discovered important lessons on Resilience, what it really means to get outside our Comfort Zone and the Commando Spirit that I share with you today and hopefully give you a little flavour of the experience too.

Firstly what is reslience?  For me its our ability to stay 'elastic', adaptable, in our power zone in no matter what is happening around us.

Four key lessons on Resilience

Identifying Our Kryptonite: Each of us has that something, usually unexpected that swiftly drains our resources, like Superman disabled by the glowing green rock.

Preparation and Practice: Conditioning ourselves with preparation  fortifies our resilience, nurturing our strength to endure.

Knowing our Why: Understanding why a goal is important to us, linking this to who we are, what we value most helps us dig deeper and overcome obstables that would otherwise cause us to stall.

The Expectation Factor: The stark contrast between reality and our expectations becomes a silent assailant, draining our resilience unconsciously.

For example, I was expecting a very physical 'gym-workout-hard' type experience.  Would I be fit enough?  Strong enough?  Able to cope with the physicality of the challenge?

I was expecting it to test my resilience and being a mountain, I was expecting varied conditions and it to be cold.

I also thought I had some advantage having co-facilitated "Managing Stress & Performance" leadership development sessions with former sniper, Commando and explorer Aldo Kane.  I thought his advice to drink A LOT and eat even when I didn't want to would help counter the effect of altitude and give me an advantage. 

I also learned about the Commando Spirit from Aldo, a truly powerful mindset that resonated with me.  This is based on four qualities:

-       Unselfishness

-       Cheerfulness in the Face of Adversity

-       Courage

-       Determination

As a coach, someone who has been through a lot of adversity in my life and who believed before this experience that I regularly get myself out of my comfort zone, I expected I would be able to embody this mindset and be a real asset to our group....erm, this turned out not to be the case at all!  

In reality the climb wasn't physically 'gym-workout' hard at all, instead it was hard for all sorts of other reasons:

- The weather was terrible.  Heavy rain and low visibility plagued us for 4 of the 6 days of our climb. 

- Camping in the constant rain, being wet through, at altitude with no facility to dry absolutely is my kryptonite. Hypothermia seemed a real risk.   

- Altitude sickness mimicked a severe migraine, who knew?!

- We had prepped to expect 'runny tummies' and we all had a lot of immodium in our first aid kits.  Altitude had the opposite effect on me and I could not poop for 3.5 days.  I've never been constipated in my life and urg, that did not feel good!

- The pace of our group was slow 'polay polay' which was a lot slower than my relaxed pace and meant we took longer to get to camp.

I journaled each night and observed my mind.  Urg.  Not what I expected of myself.  My mind seemed to nosedive into negativity.

Getting soaked day after day, with what feels like a skull crushing migraine; being forced to eat a lot of food without the ability to poop; climbing so slowly with not much view absolutely crushed my mind. 

I felt low, so low at points.  I definitely did not embody the Commando Spirit. 

What I realised, is when our expectations are very different to reality our reslience will be drained.  Our determination and ability to be cheerful at the very least will be challenged.    

Our resilience is directly proportional to the gap between our Expectations and Reality.

Yet even during the hardest of situations, there will always be incredible moments of love, joy and lightness if we can just keep ourselves open and able to spot them....

Much as the rain was hard for us, it was undoubtably harder for the porters, who had to pack up, carry and climb and then set up our camps for us.  Much as our stuff was wet, so was theirs. 

One day seeing how cold I looked, one porter who also looked cold, genuinely with such kindness, offered me his coat.  I teared up at his kindness - obviously I refused.  We were in this difficult experience together.  It meant a lot to feel we had each others backs.

This incredible kindness, strength and consideration of the porters and guides, the warm kindness of the Tanzanian people was definitely a highlight of this trip. 

The way our porters looked after us on the mountain was so much better than at the hotel in Moshi!  Our guides so generously taught us a little Swahili and told us so much about the incredible trees, the birds and beautiful monkeys that crossed our path and the history of the mountain.  

One of the funniest moment for me happened when we hit rock bottom on summit night. 

We had reached base camp much later than planned.  We arrived in the dark, only 2 of us had head torches in our day packs.  We were soaked to the skin, very cold and our guides could not find our encampment. 

Base camp is pretty large and the terrain is very uneven and steep in places.  It took about an hour to find our tents.

Being wet, cold and with much less time that we had expected to rest, morale in our group could not have been lower.  We had only about 4 hours to rest before setting off for the summit at midnight.  We had to climb into our sleeping bags in wet gear as this was the only hope of drying off. 

We had had a serious conversation about the risk of hypothermia on the climb, our amazing and upbeat Lead Guide reassured us that we would be moving and would not suffer hypothermia.  We were all skeptical.  He tried to rally us saying he had confidence in us, we would all make it he said.  I don't think any of us were feeling it.

In our tent, my buddy Manal and I got the giggles as we joked around trying to remember the symptoms so we could fake HACE (extreme altitude sickness) so we could get the emergency helicopter off the mountain.  Pretending to be disorientated and slurring our speech, we laughed until we cried happy tears.

To be honest, if we had been warm and snuggly in our sleeping bags, we may not have made it out the tent and up to the summit that night.  Thankfully we were so damn cold in our sleeping bags,  we had to move to get warm!! 

By some miracle we were mostly dry which was reassuring.  My gloves were still pretty damp but Emily kindly gave me her one spare hand warmer and this saved my bacon.  How weird that one warm hand tricked my brain into thinking the other hand wasn't as cold.

Summiting was for sure one of the hardest things I've ever done. 

Altitude sickness got worse as we gained altitude. I experienced hallucinations.  Trekkers ahead of us looked like cartoon animals.  Rocks looked like people.  It seemed like there were basketball courts to my right sometimes left. 

Walking in the tunnel of light from our head torches was making me feel like I was wobbling on the edge of consciousness, unsteady on my feet.  The biting cold, a strong bitingly cold wind that felt like it was trying to pull us off the mountain helped keep us compus-mentus.

The wonderfully cheery Senior Guide Emmanuel said not to worry, this was to be expected, nothing to worry about and gave us flat coke to drink which helped.  Hot ginger tea was a life saver. 

Winter warmer: Grate raw ginger finely, add hot water and leave to steep with a little honey.  Drink when cold or feeling a cold coming on.

I figured it was either the combined effect of altitude, fatigue and working against our natural biorhythms, or the last traces of any narcotic I've ever experienced leaving my body!  

Seeing the moon rise, so huge and close with Mars so clear and red in the night sky took my breath away. 

Sunrise was an equally spectacular magical moment.  My hands way too cold to take photos of any of these moments...!

We had hoped to reach Stella Point for sunrise but we still had about 90 mins more to climb.  It felt like the summit was getting further away the more we climbed and then finally, when it seemed all our inner resources were expended, ta dah!  Stella Point!  

Stella Point is one of three official summit points, located at 5,756 meters (18,885 feet) on the edge of the crater.  The feeling of achievement was tremendous.  Not all 9 of us made it, but all of us did our absolute best. 

The four 20 something young 'uns in our group and our friend David who was climbing to honour his sister who died who had always wanted to climb Kili pushed on the extra 100m to reach Uhuru Peak (5,895 meters (19,341 feet). 

My friend Adam and I decided against this as we felt so rough.  The visibility was worse higher up too, and so as the others disappeared into the fog, we started our decent accompanied by the porter who had served us ginger tea with a grin.

Decent was by contrast so relatively easy and fun!  Our symptoms alleviated with each downward step.  The terrain was scree and our guide showed us how to kind of ski down and so our decent was fast, sweaty, thigh burning fun! 

We descended below the cloud and all of a sudden, we could see for miles! 

In an instant all the difficulty of the ascent, the problematic experience at base camp, the four days of getting soaked and walking in the rain melted way.  Pure joy!

We reached base camp around 2pm and enjoyed a wash and then dozed in brilliant sunshine.  Over the next few hours, the various sub groups that we had splintered off into returned. Jo & Manal happy they had reached high base camp.  Adam and I delighted we had reached Stella Point, Francesca, Emily, Tom and Dave jubilant at their Uhuru Peak achievement and later Dee too.

This leads to you the biggest lesson I've learned through this experience, which I leave you with: 

Before this experience, I believed that nothing good comes from feeling baaaaaad.  I also thought I got out of my comfort zone often.  Turns out this is bull*&^%...  

Truly getting out of our comfort zone feels awful. 

This may well trigger us into a mindset we are not proud of. 

Yet here, in this deeply uncomfortable place is where our greatest opportunity for growth lies.