E204 - Dr Sabrina Cohen-Hatton: Before I could thrive, I had to survive

0:00Before we start today's episode, I have news that the High Performance App is now available and you can download it for free. And on there, exclusive content, including our live Q &A with two-time Rugby World Cup winner Dan Carter. Simply search for High Performance in the app store right now and then use your exclusive code HPAPP to get in. Hi there, you're listening to High Performance, the award-winning podcast that unlocks the minds of some of the most fascinating people on the planet. I'm Jake Comfrey and alongside Professor Damien Hughes, we learn from the stories, successes and struggles with our guests, allowing us all to explore, be challenged and to grow.

0:39Here's what's coming up today. I experienced homelessness as a teenager. I spent two and a bit years rough sleeping on and off on the streets of a town in South Wales called Newport after a really challenging few years after my father died. And high performance to me at that time meant survival. I've worked too hard I've come too far there is absolutely no way on God's green earth that I'm giving up because of you and your bigoted opinions it's not happening it doesn't matter what happens, I'm getting up again it doesn't matter how many times life kicks me in the face or knocks me on my arse, I'm getting up again every single time unless I'm dead So this is a conversation with the Chief Fire Officer of West Sussex Fire and Rescue Service, Sabrina Cohen-Hatton.

1:37It's the most remarkable story. She will talk about how life started out on the streets but ended up with her leading in the fire service. She talks about decision making, she talks about emotional control, how to make her voice heard, how she's been stereotyped and how she rallies against that, the power of relationships and the pain of trauma. Look, there are some really harrowing stories in this conversation, but it's a conversation that I think you need to hear because there are so many lessons within it. I can't thank Sabrina enough for coming on the podcast. Let's get to it. Sabrina Cohen-Hatton on High Performance.

2:22Well, Sabrina, first of all, thank you very much for joining us. pleasure thank you for having me let's start with your version of high performance how would you define those two words it's a really good question i think high performance is really subjective isn't it and it depends completely on the individual and it depends completely on the circumstances as well you know if for you high performance means you've just been able to get out of bed that day because you've been suffering from something that's great if high performance to you means doing better than you did yesterday, that for me pretty much sums it up.

2:58I think it can be really easy to cast a judgment on what high performance means by comparing yourself to other people or other versions that you think that you should be, you know, you think you should be fulfilling. For me, high performance is all about have I beaten my own performance? There's no good in me comparing myself to somebody else because they're not me. They're not experiencing the same things. They're not in the same situation. And frankly, I don't care what somebody else did yesterday. I care about what I did yesterday and whether I can better that today. So that for me really sums up high performance.

3:31So let me ask you then to give me two definitions. What does high performance mean for you today in the role you're in, in the life you're living? And I'd also love to know what high performance meant to you when you were growing up in pretty tricky circumstances? High performance to me today. For me, my job is all around public safety. I work really hard to do everything that I can to make sure people have a better opportunity, they're safer, and that my colleagues are safer. Lots of my research focuses on decision making, and I use that during my day job to develop techniques to help firefighters make better decisions.

4:12And so high performance in that respect isn't just, have I learned something new and is it interesting? It's have I learned something new? Is it interesting? And can I use it effectively and practically to do something? But if you compare that to my version of high performance when I was growing up, it's an absolute world away. I experienced homelessness as a teenager. I spent two and a bit years rough sleeping on and off on the streets of a town in South Wales called Newport after a really challenging few years after my father died. And high performance to me at that time meant survival. Have I survived another day?

4:51Yes, that's a high performing day. I'm still alive. I'm still here. Nothing has happened to me in the night. That was high performance. And I think it's not just someone who's experienced homelessness, because I appreciate that that's not something that affects everybody, but everyone can relate to some kind of trauma that they've experienced on some level, something that they found difficult. And sometimes high performance in those kinds of circumstances just means getting through it. And that's okay too. And I go back to the point I made at the beginning, high performance doesn't mean that you have to be a millionaire and drive an amazing car and, you know, have all of those, have all of those things that you usually associate with success if you were to draw out the stereotype.

5:37High performance just means doing better than you think you did yesterday. So take us back to that. I mean, it's a utterly absorbing response that you've given, especially about those early years. But tell us a little bit about the circumstances that led to you being homeless and the experiences of living on the streets. It was horrible. I mean, I've got a backstory that's by no means unique to me. My father died when we were young. I was nine years old when we lost him and he was terminally ill for some time leading up to that. And my mum found it incredibly difficult to cope. Her business collapsed and we lived in abject poverty for some years.

6:21My mother struggled terribly with her mental health after my father died. And it got to a point where it was a really volatile environment and a really difficult experience. And by the time I was 15, nearly 16, it was too much and I couldn't cope. And I ended up sleeping rough on the streets of Newport. But look, as difficult as it was, one thing that I would say is that when you're raised by a caregiver who loves you very deeply, but doesn't have the mental capacity or the physical resources to care for you in the way that they want to, you're raised to see any kind of authority figure through a lens of mistrust.

7:05And that was certainly the case for us. So I was terrified of the school knowing because we had a social worker and I didn't want to end up in care. I thought care would be like some kind of Dickensian workhouse. So I was trying to avoid that at all costs. And so I slept rough and I still went to school, believe it or not. I'd sleep in shop doorways. I'd sleep in the porch of a derelict church. And for some time, I also slept in a derelict building because at least it gave some kind of shelter. But when it gives you shelter, it also gives other people shelter. And it ended up being used as a bit of a drugs den.

7:44And I'd go to sleep and I'd do things like I'd make sure that I had an escape route and a second escape route in case I needed to get out in a hurry. And there were a few times when I did, and I would do things like collect paint cans from a skip and I'd pile them up near a door. So if I had to run, then I could just pull them behind me. And it was really hard, really hard. I felt completely dehumanized on multiple levels at multiple times. There was one time when I decided I just wanted to go to sleep somewhere light, which sounds a bit trite when I say it out loud now, but I was just sick of not even being able to control whether it was dark or light.

8:25So I decided to go to sleep in a subway because it had that strip lighting and I put my cardboard down and I was in a sleeping bag, which I pulled up over my head and I had a stray dog, stray dog, stray girl, it kind of worked. And he was at the bottom of my sleeping bag. And just on that point, I know that there's a lot of people that might be listening that may have a view on people experiencing homelessness who have dogs. For me, that dog was the only social and emotional connection I had in a world where I was otherwise completely isolated. That relationship was all I had. Anyway, I'd bedded down with him for the night and I must have woken up, I don't know what time it was, maybe 12, one o 'clock in the morning, I'm not sure, to the sound of some drunk guy laughing and my sleeping bag felt warm and wet.

9:13And the first thing I thought in my kind of stupor was, oh my God, my dog's gone to the toilet in my sleeping bag. And as I kind of pulled my head out, I realised, I looked up and I realised that it was this drunk guy on the way back from a pub or a club or wherever he'd been. And he thought it'd be funny to urinate on the first homeless person that he saw. And that happened to be me. I had no clean clothes. I had no clean bedding. I had nowhere to go. So I just went and sat on a bench in the middle of the town centre and I pulled my knees up to my chest. and I just sobbed until the sun came up the next morning, which I guessed was about maybe six o 'clock in the morning and the bus station toilets opened then.

9:49So I went down to the bus station toilets and I cleaned myself in the sink as best as I could. And then I went into the toilet cubicle and I shut the door behind me and I locked it and I put the bag down on the toilet seat and I pulled out a crumpled up school uniform and I put it on and I went and waited for the bus and I went to school. That was one of my earliest lessons in empathy because nobody would have known why I was so short-tempered that day. Nobody would have known why I was acting the way that I was because no one knew what I'd gone through. And that's a lesson that I've carried with me every single day because we meet people all the time, don't we?

10:26And we think, I have got no clue on your perspective on this. I've got no clue why you're responding to me like that. But we never know what those people have been through that day before we've come across them. Sabrina, what would you say if you were to go back to the streets of Newport and you were to see a teenage you sleeping rough? From the perspective of your age and the subsequent life that you've lived, what would you say to that young 16-year-old girl? I'd say to her that in that space, it's normal to not have the headspace to find a strategy to live because you're so focused on the day-to-day tactics that you need to survive.

11:16And that's okay. And I think I'd say to her, don't be overwhelmed by how far you've got to go. Just think about the next step because I would look at how far I thought I'd have to go to get any kind of normality or you know even even get getting secure housing was incredibly difficult and I used to look at people around me and I used to think I can't compare to you I'm nobody I'm nothing and it's not helped that when you're experiencing a situation like that people will judge you and I'd experienced that on a number of occasions. And I tell you something now, it doesn't matter how many times you can rationalise to yourself.

11:59There are 7 billion people in the world and your opinion matters not a jot to me. And you'll know that. It doesn't matter how much you rationalise that. The reality is as human beings, we're hardwired to absorb the way that other people respond to us as social information. And that informs the way that we expect the next person to respond to us. eventually it becomes how we speak to ourselves and our inner narrative so it can have a really profound impact on you even though you know that their opinion doesn't matter and that was certainly something that I'd experienced in that time and it still sits with me now sometimes and so I think if I were to go back I'd say to that girl even though you might feel like you don't have value you do have value and remember who you are so was there a comment then just to pick up on that when you said how people we're so our brains are social organs if you like and we respond to how people see us was there a comment that particularly sticks in your mind from that period that you said you still go back to today yeah there was this one time I wrote about it actually and um in my new book there was this one time when I was selling the big issue and I had my dog my dog was called Menace because he was a bit of a Menace um I had him sat next to me and this guy was walking past and he must have been I don't know maybe late 60s early 70s and he made eye contact so I smiled I thought he was going to come and buy a magazine and instead he started to shout at me and he was saying how disgusting I was and that I shouldn't have a dog that I've only got a dog for sympathy and that I can't even look after myself.

13:41How do I think that I can look after another dog? And all of this kind of stuff. And he was insinuating that I was to blame for my situation, that I was experiencing homelessness because of life choices that I'd made, not circumstances that had led up to that. And he made me feel like the very few choices that I did have at that time were bad he made me feel like I was bad and it was awful I can remember just turning around and like after he'd gone off I just kind of like crouched down in in the shop doorway and just cuddled my dog and and just cried a bit and then dried my eyes and realized that I still had loads of magazines to sell and then I was quite hungry so I needed to sell them and just carried on with the day but that kind of experience wasn't a one-off I've been kicked and punched and spat at more times than I could tell you.

14:37And it does, it really sits with you. And I hid my homelessness for more than 20 years. I joined the fire service when I was 18 and I didn't tell people about it because initially I was afraid that people would judge me. I was afraid that people, God forbid, might look at me with pity. And I didn't want to be judged on that. I didn't want to be judged on my experience. I wanted to be judged on who I was then and how well I could do something or not. You know, that was the thing that I wanted people to judge me based on me, not a preconceived idea of who I was because of what I'd been through. But it was hard because I'd look at other people around me who were successful.

15:18I'd look at other people in my industry, other fire officers that I saw as high performers. And they would be people who would always knew what to say. They'd always knew what to do. I'd never seen them fail at anything. I'd never see them feel like they were vulnerable in any way. And having this in my background made me feel vulnerable. And it made me feel like I couldn't compare to them. It made me feel like I couldn't be a high performer. And I tell you something that I've learned. I couldn't have been more wrong. We all want to put our best foot forward and talk about our successes. That's normal.

15:53But the reality is when you do that, you're presenting a really curated version of your life. Every success behind every high performance is a litany of mistakes and a litany of failures and things that haven't gone so well before you get there. And if we're only ever talking about the successes, we're not talking about the reality. And in truth, we're making it harder for people who are coming up behind us and we should be paving the way. So why did you wait then? I was afraid because I thought that if I was open about my experience, that people would judge me, that I would be even less likely to be able to be like one of the people that I looked up to.

16:34And the more I started to think about it, the more I realised that your circumstances don't define where you end up, only where you start from. so here you are then um having spent years on the streets dealing with constant rejection effectively how was your experience of trying and wanting to join the fire service was there more rejection there or was it instant acceptance no there was loads of rejection oh my goodness me when i joined the fire service i initially joined um part-time as a retained firefighter and then applied the whole time, but it's so competitive. There would be kind of 12 ,000 applicants for about 24 jobs.

17:17It was really tough. So I applied to more than 30 different fire and rescue services and it's a really long drawn out process. It takes forever. So, you know, you'd be going through consecutively and I had loads of no's before I had a yes. But then when I did join the fire service, there are people who are still like big brothers and sisters to me to this very day who believed in me so much they pushed me to do things that I didn't think that I was capable of but I make no bones about it there were also an awful lot of people who didn't want to work with me because I was a woman and now bearing in mind I'm talking about you know 2001 now so a good 22 years ago I have been very open about my experiences I experienced sexual harassment in the past I was told that things have to be different for me because I wasn't a guy.

18:08And there were people who very openly said to me, I don't agree with women in the fire service. I think that it's, you know, I think that women will get firemen, they said. We've been firefighters for 30 years. There's not a person employed on a contract today that was ever a fireman. But he made the point of saying women will get firemen killed. And eventually I kind of found my teeth a little bit and I said, yeah, do you know, I get it. I feel the same way about morons in the job. We should never employ them you know no offense to you my darling but you know here we are what's interesting there though is that when we rewind back to your time at school there was a real fear there there's a fear of um telling people you were homeless there was a fear of going into care you know fear kind of followed you around for a long time suddenly it feels like you've found a way to be fearless i mean to speak like that i mean even to even to speak out about sexism in the fire service that's a fearless thing to do you know i know the stats because I've read them in your book, 3 % of women in the UK are firefighters.

19:05It's a nonsense. It's not good enough. But there are risks attached with you talking like this, aren't there? There absolutely were. When I think about some of the things that I experienced, there's no way I should have gone through that. But you know what? I didn't challenge it at the time. I'll be really honest about that. And that is one of my biggest regrets. That is one of my biggest failures. By not speaking out, I didn't stop it from happening to anybody else. And I'm sure that there were people that came up behind me that had the same experience that I had that might not have if I'd have had the courage to speak up then.

19:38And that's why I look at people who are talking about this today and I really admire them. I'm really pleased that they feel that they can talk about those experiences. And it's so important that we listen and we do better as a result of it. But for me, the reason that I didn't speak out at the time is in truth, I was young. I was, you know, kind of, I joined at 18. I was really young. I was insecure and I felt like the balance of power was against me. I felt like I didn't have the voice because of the dynamics in the group. It's not about, you know, the service or the organization and what they do or whether they take it seriously, because I'm pretty certain they would have.

20:16It was about the acceptance of your peers. It was about being perceived to be the squeaky wheel. And I just went into survival mode because I wanted to survive. And when that was happening to me, I can, I would think there is no way you're taking this away from me. I've worked too hard. I've come too far. There is absolutely no way on God's green earth that I'm giving up because of you and your bigoted opinions. It's not happening. And that drove me to carry on. But what I find intriguing, Sabrina, is what was it about the fire service that was so attractive to you to want to first of all go there but then have that courage to confront those kind of dinosaurs to be able to stay there when i was experiencing homelessness but secure accommodation started to become a reality for me i started to think about what else might become a reality and the reason i started to think about the fire service is because I think firefighters are in an incredibly privileged position because they're trusted by people to know what to do when they might be having the worst day they've ever had in their lives.

21:26They are at their most vulnerable. They don't call us unless the situation is so extreme that they don't know how to deal with it. And I felt like I could relate to that because I'd experienced the best part of two and a half years of not knowing what was going to come next, of feeling incredibly vulnerable, of feeling like every day was my worst ever day. And so I think in a funny kind of way, I wanted to help people in a way that no one had been able to help me. So what was it then that gave you the courage to want to, to, to challenge some of the, you know, like that response you gave about, you know, but like working with morons is just a dangerous for your health like I love it but for a young 18 19 year old girl to be answering back and challenging that for you know I think back to the story of you in that subway what had changed during that period of time that meant you you're prepared to fight back and stand your ground rather than just accepting horrific behavior I think there was something about the thought that I've been through so much already why should I let you do this to me look all three of us having this conversation I've got daughters right and I sometimes feel like such a cliche because my son is obsessed with football my daughter is obsessed with dancing and I keep thinking like have we like made this happen like unknowingly or is this just how they are and I and I suppose what I really want more than anything for Florence is for her to be able to just be totally authentic in the world not to feel like she has to be a girl and do girl things in a girl way.

23:06What advice would you give me, if you don't mind, to pass on to her so that she can live a really authentic life and be the Florence that she really wants to be, not the Florence that society is expecting her to be? One thing that I would say is, as parents, we put an awful lot of pressure on ourselves and we think that this is all on us. And the first thing I'd say to you, first and foremost, so that you can help her, is to recognize that you are preparing her against a backdrop of constant reinforcement and constant messages that do categorize people through stereotypes, whether that's through a gender stereotype, whether through that's a stereotypical image according to a role or anything like that.

23:47When we absorb information from the world around us, we categorize it very automatically. And if you imagine our brains to be full of little files, every time we get information that's similar, we file it together. We file it all in that category. So we will automatically be experiencing women and men and female things and male things all around us, and they get categorized in these little files. And that becomes our stereotypes. Those stereotypes become our frames of reference. They become our go-to, but it also means they become our biases. Gender stereotypes are set really young by the ages of between five and seven and they are incredibly powerful because of all of these messages that we're absorbing all the time.

24:30So my best advice that I could give you to help her would be to help her to recognise that she is who she is and she will be absorbing all of these messages and to help her filter through that, to help her recognize that the way that she might feel about something is because of these things that she's absorbed all the time and to help her to be able to recalibrate to absorb different information and recalibrate so i'll give you an example there was this lovely study done with children who were all asked to draw pictures um they were all about they were preschool they were kind of like five years old they were all asked to draw pictures of firefighters of doctors and of pilots and out of 61 pictures only four of them were female all of the rest of them were male and then in walks a real life firefighter a real life surgeon and a real life fighter pilot and they've all got their masks on and the kids are like yeah this is amazing and then they pull off their masks and they reveal that they're women and the kids are like how cool and then they're asking loads of questions and they're instantly their stereotype of those things are recalibrated And that's really easy to do with kids because they're absorbing information and they're not formed.

25:45It can be a lot harder with adults. And when you challenge someone's stereotype as an adult, then it can be very easy to experience something called the backlash effect where they'll respond in a negative way. so the other thing that I think is really helpful especially for for young girls to understand as they're navigating the world is sometimes the responses that you get from people won't be because of you or because of anything you've said or because of anything that you've done it's because you're challenging a perception of the world that they have that they believe to be true and when you come along they realize it's not true so I think just helping her to understand that will help her to navigate the world because we can't change the world right we can only change how we interact with it and what's your experience of it now because you know you haven't just been a firefighter you are one of the UK's lead firefighters um has that changed how people react to you or see you in the workplace or do you still feel like you need to work twice as hard be twice as good speak twice as convincingly as a male firefighter do you know I actually probably be getting more pushback from people who aren't in the fire service than I do from colleagues within fire now.

26:58I absolutely adore my career and I work really hard for the people that I'm responsible for. And I hope that whilst they might not agree with everything I do and say, I might not get everything right, but I hope that they recognise that I do it with the best of intentions and that that earns a degree of respect. But I think for members of the public or people that don't know anything about it, they're really surprised. And I'll give you an example. In my book, I wrote about dinner party that I'd gone to with my husband. And we were chatting to a couple there. We hadn't met them before, kind of knew them from the school, but hadn't really spoken to them.

27:31And they said, what do you do? And Mike, my husband said, oh, I'm in the fire service. And they were like, wow, that's amazing. Oh my gosh. Tell us all about it. You must see some things. And then my husband turned around and said, yeah, I've been a firefighter for a long time. And so is my wife. In fact, she's my boss. Well, in fact, my boss's boss's boss's boss. and they looked at me and they went you but isn't it a bit risky haven't you got kids and so it was really interesting and I went away and I said to Mike afterwards I said that's do you always have you ever had that kind of response and he went no never in more than 20 years of firefighting has anyone ever turned around and gone oh that must be a bit risky oh how do you manage that you know what like I work all the time traveling the country no one has ever said to me who's got the children what about your children it's mad isn't it when you look at it in that respect not once have they ever said that you know I have absolutely no hostility towards people and frankly I would rather that they say it and they ask and then we can have a conversation and we can go oh yeah actually that is a bit daft I think sometimes when you are so aggressively confrontational you lose the ability to get somebody to change their mind, right?

28:45Because they're kind of automatically in defense mode. And I think sometimes if you can, in a kinder way, or even a more lighthearted way, just kind of offer a different perspective, it's enough to start somebody thinking, you know, thinking differently. And it's interesting, when I was writing my book, I found a glorious bit of research that looked at people who were, they were fathers who had a firstborn daughter. And what it found was that fathers of a firstborn daughter were actually more likely to vote politically for a female candidate than uh than people who didn't have a firstborn daughter and it's amazing isn't it when you have someone that you can relate to you're automatically changing your stereotype right that you're seeing them in a different way and so sometimes it's just that experience and that exposure can be enough to recalibrate whatever your your stereotype is whatever your mental file is kind of creating that bias.

29:41So can I just pick up then and ask about this idea of reframing and changing frames of references? Because I was lucky enough many years ago to work in the fire services with the McGurk brothers in Liverpool and Greater Manchester. And one of the things that they were trying to do at the time, Sabrina, was almost move away from this idea of firefighters were recruited on the mental model of Red Adair, you know, coming in, kicking down, burning doors and saving people from buildings. And yet the statistic at the time was that just 7 % of the time of firefighters was actually spent dealing with fires.

30:22So that left 93 % of the time that they almost wanted to change the reference from rather than fighting fires to preventing fires. So it was about knocking on doors and fitting fire alarms for old ladies or going running football competitions in inner cities to get kids off the street and I know from first-hand experience of seeing in those fire services how difficult it was to get people to reframe from what they held true to what they now needed to face and I'm interested for our listeners of people that might have similar challenges within other organizations of getting people to embrace a new way of working or adopt new methods.

31:06What have you learned from your experiences that might be able to help our listeners do something similar? I think that whenever you're trying to affect some kind of change, whether that's in an organization as a leader and you're trying to do something differently or whether you want to get your family to think about something in a different way, one of the biggest challenges that you will come across is if you're asking someone to do something differently, or you're asking them to be different, you may well be challenging their sense of identity. And certainly when we talk about, you know, the firefighting example, being a firefighter is not just a job, it's a vocation and it becomes a huge part of how you see yourself, a huge part of your identity.

31:53And so if you go into a career with that in mind, and then all of a sudden, you're asked to think about something differently, then you feel like you're being asked to think about you differently. So I think for me, when you're trying to change anything, you have to get people to think about what it means to them and what it means to how they're going to see themselves. and at that point you can start to think about what the motivator is what is the motivation to me to change this when you think about the work that we do and the jobs that we go to we see the aftermath of some of the most traumatic experiences that people have ever had whether it's a house fire that's completely destroyed somebody's life whether it's a road traffic collision.

32:47Those people, the thing they all have in common is they woke up that morning expecting it to be completely normal with their bowl of cornflakes, but something happened without warning and their lives were turned upside down. And when I talk to people about this, I talk about how much better it would be if we could stop that happening at all. Because yeah, we can rescue them and we can stop it from getting any worse, but actually, wouldn't it be more powerful if somebody is still walking around that day completely blissfully unaware of what the sliding door scenario could have been because of something amazing that you did.

33:22Because you went in their home and you taught them something different about how to stay safe. You stopped them having that fire. You've helped that young person have other opportunities and achieve social mobility because they now believe in themselves because you've been a role model to them. That's an incredible privilege. And actually when you start to frame things like that, when you start to think about how does this change affect the way that that person is going to see themselves you can help people to think about it in a different way for so long many of you have been asking for more from the high performance podcast and now you can get it i'm pleased to say the high performance app is available for you to download now simply search for high performance in the app store right now and then use your exclusive code hp app for exclusive content untold stories and things you won't see or hear anywhere else.

34:15Check it out right now, the High Performance Podcast app.

34:24And the truth is, the sad truth is, even if you can try and prevent disasters at source so they don't happen, some will. And as the Chief Fire Officer of West Sussex Fire and Rescue, you were the lead responder at Finsbury Park at the Westminster Bridge terror attack as well at the Grenfell tragedy. Can you share with us what those very sad incidents taught you about effective leadership? Yeah, I mean, those incidents were when I was in London Fire Brigade and I was dealing with the aftermath of Grenfell and some of those other terror attacks. And they were really challenging incidents. And they're challenging because of the impact that you see on people.

35:10but you know what sometimes it's not always the big incidents that everybody hears about that have the biggest impact on you sometimes it's the smaller ones that nobody else knows about but actually have an enormous impact on you because they recalibrate your view of something so I'll give you an example there was one um road traffic collision that I went to me and Mike were due to get married um you know when dating goes too far that thing marriage and I'd gone to this road traffic collision it was this young couple that had just got married they're on their way back from the honeymoon and they had all their luggage in the car and they had their Mr and Mrs towels on the back seat um and it was a really bad incident uh bread lorry had kind of the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel and it had jumped over the central reservation and and crashed into this car and sadly the the husband was killed instantly and the the wife was in quite a bad way, but she was conscious.

36:06And so she will have seen a very graphic image of her husband's, her newlywed husband's remains. And that really bothered me. The fact that she saw that bothered me more than the rest of the incident. And the reason that that bothered me is because it recalibrated my view of what forever meant. I thought me and Mike are about to get married and that's forever. And we're going to, you know, retire one day together. And, you know, all of that kind of stuff that you think about, again, when dating goes too far. But I realised at that moment in time, that's not necessarily going to happen. You know, something could happen tomorrow and completely change that.

36:45So my view of forever got recalibrated. And I think what I learned from all of these incidents is that you will need to process something. There is something that will stick with you that you will need to recalibrate, whether you're a responder or whether you're affected by the incident in some way, whether you're involved in it or whether you just watch it on the TV and it really kind of sits with you because it's challenged something that you think you know to be true. And can I ask you in those moments, where self-doubt sits for you? You know, we've spoken a lot about the self-doubt that crippled you when you were younger and suddenly there you are on the scene, you've got real lives that are at stake here.

37:26How is your self-talk and what advice would you give to people for whom hopefully they don't have decisions to make and take as big as yours. But what advice would you give for people to follow their instincts and really trust themselves in those big moments in life? So for me, there is something about the way that you make decisions. And this is what my research was looking at in its entirety. And I think most people who work in high pressured environments will tell you that at the time that you're going through something, you don't have the time and the space for self-doubt. you focus on the task at hand, you do what you need to do.

38:02And it's usually afterwards, when it's quieter, that's when the self-doubt can creep in. But what I know from my research is sometimes when you are making those big decisions, you can experience something called decision inertia. Now, this happens in situations that can be really uncertain, or situations where you are overly focused on anxieties about your own accountability. Now, some accountability anxieties are good, right? That helps to keep you on track. It helps you to think about the ramifications of what you're doing. But if you're so focused on those, you get caught in a loop of what ifs.

38:39And we developed some techniques in the fire service to help us to deal with those on the back of the research that we did. And they're called decision controls. And so we now train our firefighters at the point in which they've made a decision, not before, because some decisions you make a gut decisions and in high pressure usually about 80 percent according to our research will be a gut decision only about 20 percent will be very analytical but you can't tell someone you're going to make an analytical decision this time or no no no this time it's going to be a gut one it depends on too much what they've previously experienced how well they're coping with the stress how much more they've got in the tank too much but the point in which you do have an opportunity for an intervention is once they've made a decision, but before they action it.

39:24And at that point, we train people to go through a really rapid mental checklist of decision controls. The first one is, what's my goal? That might sound really simple, but if you're making a gut decision, you might be making a decision based on a piece of the jigsaw, just a single piece of the situation, which might be the right thing for that, but it could have unintended consequences when you stop that piece of the jigsaw back in the bigger picture. So what's my goal? And is this going to help me get any further to it. The second one is what do I expect to happen? Now that sounds again really simple but when you're making a gut decision or you're under pressure we found from our research that people's situational awareness is actually quite low.

40:02You're very much focused on the here and now not on the what might happen next, where you're going to be in the next 30 minutes. So just priming that to say what do I expect to happen is a really effective way of increasing your situational awareness. And then the final one again super simple, how does the benefit outweigh the risk. And just rationalising that to yourself can help to kick you out of that loop of accountability anxieties and really stand by the decision that you make. And so from my experience of those kind of decision-making environments, those are three really simple techniques that you can extrapolate into any decision-making environment that can be incredibly helpful.

40:41I love them. Would you give us an example then of where you've applied the three questions of what's my goal what do I expect to happen and the cost versus benefit analysis yeah every single decision that I make on the fire ground I'm running through those three decision controls but again you know it doesn't just have to be on the fire ground you can do it when you go into the fridge and you're trying to decide whether or not you're going to grab that extra piece of chocolate cake what's my goal well it's to eat healthily and this isn't going to get me any closer to it what do I expect to happen well if I eat this cake it's going to be amazing in the moment but then I'm going to feel like crap for the rest of the evening I'm going to feel really guilty and I'm going to have to go for a three mile run tomorrow which I really can't be arsed with and is the benefit worth the risk or reflection probably not and at that point I reach for a banana.

41:28So how do you train this then to firefighters because it's as you say it can be applied so much broader than that but how do you get people to to be able to use these in practice? Things like that are never helpful when you're kind of reading them in a book or you're sitting down and watching a PowerPoint and you're going, right, okay, I've got that. I know that conceptually because it's too abstract. You've got to apply it. You've got to do it and practice it. So the most effective way to do this is by running through, and one technique that we use is to set out a video of an incident and we let it run and we stop at a decision point and we say, okay, what would you do now?

42:05What's your decision? Okay, that's great. Why is that your decision? What's your goal? Tell me, what do you expect to happen? Tell me how the benefit outweighs the risk. And you repeat that. You let it run further forward. You stop it again and you're okay. You say, okay, what are you going to do? And that's actually how we did the research around it. We set up national decision trials comparing the old way we made decisions with using these new decision control process techniques. And when we were training them, that's exactly how we did it. and we did it in a 40 minute period, you know, really kind of short and sharp.

42:39This is how you do it. These are your prompts. And then we sent people out to make decisions on the fire grounds in a training scenario. And then we looked at how the decisions were sequenced, what happened as a result, measured their situational awareness. And it was a profoundly beneficial technique to use. And it can be taught so quickly and so simply, but you have to do it practically. just you know having it held conceptually in your mind probably won't get you where you need to go so you've got to practice it of course they're brilliant and they're very useful and i love you sharing them but they're not foolproof because nothing is so what's your message to people listening to this who would go great now i can avoid failure by making the right decision every time because you write a brilliant chapter in your book about the notion of reframing this stigma around failure that we all have to live with every day yeah so firstly i'd say if you think that you're never going to fail, think again, because that's just not real.

43:34It's just not true. And there's something really important about failure, isn't there? Because, you know, for me, innovation is incredible. And that's how we progress, right? It means getting out of your comfort zone. It means doing something that's not the status quo. It means doing something different. And when you do that, that comes with a degree of risk because it might not happen. It might not work. If it did work, we'd be doing it already and we'd all know about it. So actually, if we're going to shift the dial, it means doing something that comes with the risk of it not working. And I would rather fail quickly and learn fast because then you can rejig, then you can change something, then you can do something differently.

44:12But it's not easy. It's not easy because nobody likes to fail, right? We want to succeed. And so I think that by kind of owning your failures with as much conviction as you own your success, you can signal to other people that, look, it's normal to fail. So being open about that, being honest about that and helping to kind of embed that sense of psychological safety with other people means that if they fail, they know that they can talk about it. They can admit it. They don't have to hide it away. It's just the reality. And then you can talk about what you can do differently, how you can succeed, how you can get to this place that you're trying to get to.

44:50So I think it's actually really powerful. One of the things that was really interesting to me when I was writing the chapter in the book about failure was how differently failure can be viewed by women and men, both in terms of the act of failing, but also perceiving people who fail. And it's really interesting. There's a brilliant psychologist called Carol Dweck, who did a lot of work on the growth mindset. and what she found with her experiments was actually very gendered and particularly with young girls and young boys and when children were given a task and in this case as I recall it was like a maths task the higher the IQ of the girls the more likely they were to give up because they were afraid of failing because if they failed it would be reflective on themselves and their own ability.

45:43I failed because I'm stupid. Whereas the little boys saw it as a challenge. They weren't afraid to fail. It was okay. And they would go harder at it. And what that reflects is a really kind of deep rooted sense that we get in society where women have to be perfect. You have to do this right. You have to do that right. You have to look like this. You have to achieve this. You can't ever get anything wrong. And it affects the way that we take risks. And those same messages aren't given to little boys and it affects the way that we then take risks and we move out in the world. You look then at the world of work and the Hewlett-Packard study that shows on average men would apply for a promotion if they met just 60 % of the job criteria, whereas women would only apply if they on average met 100%.

46:31You can see how that appetite for risk and that fear of failure really does sit with us and affects not just us in the moment, but our life chances, our chances of economic success and the way that we view ourselves when we do fail at something. So I think it's a really kind of powerful thing to get a grip of and say, you know what, it's normal to make mistakes. It's normal for things to go wrong. And it's actually quite normal to feel crap about it as well. That's life. Let's pick ourselves up and we'll move on can we run through our quick fire questions please are you good with that yeah so brady there are three non-negotiable behaviors that you and the people around you should buy into the first one is never give up it doesn't matter what happens i'm getting up again it doesn't matter how many times life kicks me in the face or knocks me on my ass i'm getting up again every single time unless i'm dead and for me that is something that has served me well even when it's hard, even when you feel like crap and things can go wrong and it's okay for it to feel rubbish, I'll give myself the night, I'll mope, I'll have the biggest gin and tonic that is healthy for my liver and then I'll go to bed and I'll get up the next day and I'll think about what I'm going to do differently.

47:47It's okay to sit with that feeling as long as you're not giving up and you're getting up again and you're doing something different. It's that relentlessness that for me is so important And when I look back at my experience and the things that I've gone through, that's probably the one non-negotiable behavior that has made the single difference between life and death. the second one and it relates to what we were talking about is to own your failure with as much conviction as you own your success for all of the reasons we've discussed but not least because I will learn so much more about somebody's values and about their character from seeing how they respond to one failure than I would do if I saw them experience a thousand successes I'm not interested in that I want to know how you respond when your back is up against the wall and I want people to see how I respond when my back is up against the wall so they know if they can rely on me or not.

48:42So that for me is another non-negotiable and it's that authenticity as well that's so important isn't it. And I think the final one for me is always find the good. It doesn't matter how crap the situation is or how badly someone has behaved always find the good. And when I look back to my experience of homelessness and some of the really bad ways that people have responded to me, one thing that really helped me during that time is to think that I've had a bad moment with you. I've had a really bad moment. I've experienced maybe the worst of you on this day. But that doesn't characterize you. there are people who love you no doubt there are people who you love no doubt you are capable of love and I've had but a fraction of an experience of your entire lifetime and it's been a really negative one but that doesn't make you no more than the situation that I'm experiencing now makes me if you could go back to one moment of your life what would it be and why I wouldn't I'd be right here.

49:52And the reason for that is the past is gone. We can spend so much energy on regrets or wishing that we did something different or, you know, wishing that we hadn't done something that we've done. And it's a waste of brain energy because you can't change it. All it does is create anxiety. And frankly, I don't care much for the future either because it's not here yet. Who knows if it'll even come here. My everyday reality is surrounded by people who thought that they were going to have a tomorrow and it never came. So there's no point in wasting your time thinking about that either. The only thing I have any control over is this moment right now.

50:32For the audience, if you've not read any of Sabrina's books, please do. They're exceptional. They're fascinating. I'd highly recommend them. However, you can't recommend them right now sab because i'm going to ask you to recommend a book for the um high performance book club and i'm afraid it can't be one of your own well that's okay that's okay the book that i would recommend um this might be a bit soppy but it's a book called the old man and the sea by ernest hemingway um it's my favorite book of all time it doesn't matter how many times i read it i always take something new from it because it's a story about an old man a fisherman um that essentially meets his biggest challenge in trying to go out and catch this marlin and he despite the fact that he feels completely defeated he never gives up and I'm not going to spoil the story for those of you that don't know it by telling you the outcome of it but essentially it's a beautiful story of hope and resilience and I find it really inspiring every time I read it it's quite sad in places because it's it's real you know and it's a bit gritty from that perspective but I love that book.

51:39Doesn't matter how many times I read it, I always learn something new. What's your biggest strength and your greatest weakness? I think my biggest strength is genuinely believing that you can't control what happens to you in life and you can't even control how you feel about it. But the bit that you can control is what you do about it next. And that's the thing that gets me getting up again every time I get knocked down. And that's the thing that makes me look for another route around a problem when everyone else says it's impossible. Give it up. It's never going to happen. It's that concept that gives me the drive and the hope to be able to do things when I might actually just feel like giving up.

52:21So that for me is the biggest strength. My biggest weakness is definitely my dancing. It's just embarrassingly bad. Like no one needs to see that like ever. How important is legacy to you? Oh, it's massive, isn't it? Isn't it? It doesn't matter who we are or what we're doing. We are but a custodian of whatever it is that we've got at that moment in time. There've been chief fire officers before me. There'll be chief fire officers after me. I'm responsible for it for a period. The same with my research. There've been researchers before. There'll be researchers after. The only bit that I've got is the bit that I've got now.

52:59So being able to do something positive, to be able to leave something in a better shape than you found it, to be able to do something that will make a tangible difference to somebody's day, that's really important to me. And it might not always be easy. And you know what? The outcome might not always be worth the effort that you've put in to get there, but you never know until you've done it. So legacy is enormous. And legacy is the basis on which other people build progress, right? and don't we all have a responsibility to leave the best legacy that we can lovely um this is a quickfire question which is actually exclusive to you it's never been asked before and it is you've done lots of research into trusting your gut and making decisions based on instinct is your advice that we trust our gut trust our instincts every time i believe in trusting your gut to a point the gut decisions that we make are based on our past experiences past associations, past associations between things that we're experiencing in the environment, a cue and something that it's become conditioned to with us.

54:04So they're there. Our brains have developed that pathway for a reason. It helps us to navigate a very dynamically changing world very quickly. So it's useful, but it's not foolproof because your gut decision might be triggered by a cue in the environment, which may or may not be right. So I'd always say, listen to your guts, but always make sure that you're challenging yourself and what you think you know. So the final question then, Sabrina, is what is your one golden rule to live a high performance life? My one golden rule, I think, is never forget who you are. Because we can get so wrapped up, can't we, in things that are happening and things that are outside our control that they make us feel like it's our fault or that we're not worthy or that it's spinning us to a different place and it makes us forget the very essence of ourselves and I think there's something profoundly powerful about authenticity but being authentic takes courage sometimes especially in a world that tells you this is what normal looks like or this is what success looks like or this is what you need to aspire to and the truth is you don't you just need to be you and you will find your own way you will find your own path you'll find your own people but you'll only do that by being unreservedly and unashamedly you thank you for an amazing conversation that was stunning thank you it's been a privilege damien jake what a fascinating individual sabrina is and i i just i think there's a really strong message coming across to the audience listening to this that nothing is fixed and it really isn't where you start it's where you end up and she's testament to someone who has turned things around in a big way and I think she's a thoroughly inspirational person oh she's incredible I mean I'd having read a book you know can really uh advocate it but meeting in person was even better to think somebody that like she said it like where you're from really isn't that important it's where you are at this moment in time where we need to meet people and she was a real inspiration and i know that you will really like the way that she reframes uh decision making and the thought process behind coming up with uh your decisions those control gates are great because like she said you can use them in pretty much any context of at any one moment before you make a decision just ask yourself what's my goal what do i expect to happen as a result of this and then finally how do the benefits outweigh the risks and i think once you get there I think you can then at least make an educated risk rather than just going on like you say pure gut instinct and I think that is a takeaway that I'll I'll apply to so many different aspects of my life will you use it in yours Jake yeah I will absolutely I will I think it's um I think the great thing about it is it's really sort of simple and clear how you come to those decisions and I also love the conversation we had um about you know female empowerment in the workplace.

57:14And, you know, as men with daughters, you know, you and I want a world where you can do anything you want. You don't have to be doubly good to be respected or accepted in the workplace. And I think the work that she's done in that area is incredible. She's just someone who, you know, like some people just get happy with achievements and other people, they achieve something, but then they just want even more and they want to understand them. I think like she's really thirsty for knowledge thirsty for understanding people you know her PhD in psychology is a really good reminder that if you understand people you can understand the world and if you understand the world then you can affect change and I think that's I think that's what she's doing yeah and it reminded me of a previous guest that we've had on the podcast the Dr Lucy East Hope where Dr Lucy spoke very much around some of the same principles of what Sabina was talking about actually meet people where they are be empathetic and don't underestimate the power of just small acts of kindness just listening to people the difference it can make and go such a long way and that in its own way is how we lift others up to achieve their definition of high performance and that's what sabrina's doing both in the fire service but also for any readers of book.

58:33It was brilliant. Damien, thank you so much for your company, mate. No, thanks, mate. That was a real privilege to be there for that one. And that brings us to the end of this episode. I think the key takeaway here is understanding that you're not fixed. I love the phrase, life isn't where you started, life is where you are. And despite all the traumas that she's been through, despite all the challenges that have been placed in front of Sabrina, just look at what she's managed to do. Look at the clarity thought that she possesses when she's talking to myself and to Damien. And it's another strong reminder that life is about separating fault from responsibility.

59:07So much of the things that she's seen are not her fault, but it's always her responsibility to find a way through. Look, thank you so much for listening. Don't forget you can find out more about all the things we offer you from High Performance at thehighperformancepodcast.com. And we'll see you for another episode very soon.

59:29Thank you.