Forging Resilience

Kirsty Ward spent 11 years as an RAF engineering officer, working on aircraft and armaments where precision wasn't optional. She was also, by her own account, on track for early promotion right up until chronic ill health and burnout took the choice out of her hands. She's now the founder of InTah, helping high performers build careers that don't require self-sacrifice. We get into...

If you’ve ever tried to “take a break” and found it weirdly uncomfortable, you’re not alone. Sharon Pickering joins me to unpack why permission to slow down can feel heavy for leaders, founders, and high performers and why that weight often comes from identity: the fear of being judged when you stop spinning all the plates. Sharon brings a human factors perspective shaped in safety critical enviro...

Success can look loud from the outside. Full calendar. Big responsibility. People relying on you. A life that looks like it is working. But what if it is quietly costing you? In this episode of Forging Resilience , I sit down with returning guest James Porter, leadership communication coach and author of A New Way to Thrive .We talk about the quiet cost of success. The kind that does not always lo...

Your life can be your work, your brand, and your public story. That sounds like freedom until you realise the camera can start telling you who you are. Aaron Hill sits down with Louis Cole, filmmaker and one of the original daily travel vlogging pioneers behind Fun For Louis, to unpack what it really means to grow up and evolve in public. We talk about the early rush of YouTube’s Wild West years:...

Pressure changes people. So does transition. When teams shift, titles change, results matter, and the stakes keep rising, what does leadership actually require? In this first official Forging Resilience Roundtable, I’m joined by two returning guests who bring very different lenses to the same question. Air Commodore Robin Caine MBE brings the military perspective: fast jets, flying training, decis...

You can be disciplined, ambitious, and genuinely committed to other people and still be quietly running yourself into the ground. We sit down with Sharon Pickering, a human factors expert with experience in safety critical environments, to unpack why “permission” is such a sticking point for leaders, founders, and high performers. The tension is not laziness versus drive. It is the deep belief tha...

Ben Newton has spent his life leading in extreme environments military, close protection, fire service, industrial rescue. But none of that prepared him for the hardest thing: leading himself. In this conversation, Ben and Aaron trace the thread that runs through every high-pressure role Ben has held and every identity he has worn. From a near-fatal anaphylactic episode on a rooftop in Afghanistan...

Belonging sounds like a warm word until you realise how often we settle for fitting in, shaving off the edges of ourselves to survive a culture.  We talk about that difference, from early military moments where the team feels like “little and big brothers” to workplaces where everything becomes an adjustment and you start questioning your place. We talk about how culture, not demographics, shapes...

War doesn’t stay in the past. And neither does the identity you built to survive it. Parts of this conversation go to some heavy places, including suicide and mental health.  Today I sit down with James Malone, former Royal Marines commando and now founder of Palpa Films to explore what really happens when you leave one life behind and try to build another. James walks us through that shift. From...

Most high performers are running on a nervous system that hasn't been given permission to recover. You feel fine. You're productive. And underneath it, you're running hotter than you know. Jack McMillan was an elite footballer who kept choking under pressure not from lack of talent, but from a nervous system he'd never learned to regulate. What he found, reluctantly, through yo...

Your service ends, but your decision load explodes. One day you are inside a system that tells you where to be, what to wear, and what matters. The next, you are choosing everything,for some, the smallest choices can hit the hardest. Helen Lunnon-Wood joins me again for part two of our transition series. As a former RAF fast jet pilot and the founder of High Flight Coaching, she brings a grounded...

This is a conversation about what’s really going on beneath behaviour. We get into the gap between reacting and responding, and why most of us—especially under pressure—default to the behaviour we see rather than the feeling driving it. Alice breaks down mentalisation in a way that’s simple and practical. Not theory. Real-life application. We talk about what happens when we’re dysregulated as pare...

You can plan the exit date, but you cannot schedule who you become afterwards. Aaron Hill sits down with Helen London Wood, former RAF fast jet pilot and founder of High Flight Coaching, to talk honestly about transition as a living process that keeps evolving long after the uniform is handed back. We get into what it feels like when structure vanishes, when identity suddenly becomes a question ag...

You can spend years trying to fix a problem that was never locked in the first place. That’s the provocative premise behind our chat with Sam Smith, coach and author of The Door Is Never Locked, and it immediately changes how we think about resilience, mindset, and high performance under pressure.  We talk about what it looks like when a single insight shifts your trajectory faster than another pl...

Astronaut training sounds like a world away from everyday leadership, until you hear what Susan Charlesworth learned at the European Space Agency: the best crews succeed because they master the human skills, not because they are fearless. Susan is a psychologist and human performance specialist who has trained astronauts, mission control teams, and Antarctic expedition crews in leadership, communi...

What happens when the rank slides off and the real test begins? We sit down with Paul Blair, a former Parachute Regiment officer turned founder, to unpack the gritty reality of moving from elite military units to building and scaling products like SafeSticks and ArcX. This isn’t about war stories or pitch decks; it’s the unvarnished blueprint for leading without a uniform, navigating bad deals, an...

The room went silent when Joel’s son didn’t take his first breath. From that instant, everything accelerated: 45 minutes of resuscitation on the kitchen floor, an ambulance ride that felt like forever, and the surreal calm of a NICU buzzing with experts. Joel takes us inside the father’s experience what it’s like to do infant CPR with shaking hands, to watch a newborn turn from blue to pink and ba...

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Bex shares her story from early life in London, shaped by a loving family and growing up fast while her mum lived with MS and her dad worked decades in policing. She reflects on a career filled with both extraordinary moments and real trauma, and the pull she’s always felt to “give back” by passing on what works beyond policing into everyday leadership, work, and relationships. A core theme is sel...

Bodhi Aldridge teaches leaders how to strip back the armour and lead from what’s real. In this conversation, he lays out his core framework for true freedom—inner, outer, and relational—and why most high achievers can win on paper while still feeling trapped. Aaron and Bodhi explore the search for the “holy grail” and the shift from chasing success outside ourselves to reconnecting with essence wi...

This conversation with Tom Dear explores creativity not as artistry, but as a fundamental human capacity for problem solving. Drawing on his journey from amateur rugby into the creative and brand world, Tom reflects on the tension many high performers feel between seemingly opposing identities. Rather than choosing one side, he shares how learning to sit in the middle where structure meets play be...

Charlie Radclyffe's story is a hard pivot: British Army officer, injured on duty at 24, and an overnight shift from fully fit to paralysis. He speaks about the strange clarity he felt early on almost skipping the “expected” stages and how the fighter response took over: rehab, grind, “get better.” Alongside that, a quieter thread ran in the background: the sense that this was also a “quest,”...

A single report cracked the silence. When Laura stumbled across research on child sexual exploitation in gang settings, she suddenly saw her teenage years reflected back in detail language for what had been unnamed, proof she wasn’t alone, and a doorway to tell her mother at last.  From that moment, a decade-long journey gathered momentum: specialist services, nights of journaling, breath that sof...

What if physical performance looked less like punishment and more like momentum? We sit down with performance coach Chris Tombs whose résumé spans World Cup-winning rugby, professional cricket, action sports, and high-performing everyday people to unpack a framework that actually fits a busy life. No biohacking gimmicks, no three-hour sweat marathons just proven habits and smart training that comp...

In this episode we sit down with Jo Bradshaw, Everest summiteer, expedition leader, and leadership coach. But this conversation quickly moves beyond altitude, summits, and achievement. Jo shares a non-linear life story shaped by uncertainty, fear, loss of confidence, and repeated reinvention from working with horses, to corporate roles, to standing on the highest mountains in the world. What emerg...