Who Dares Wins

The team of ex-special forces soldiers who put the candidates through their paces on SAS: Who Dares Wins. Source: Remote Trauma.

One of my favourite TV programmes is the Channel Four series SAS: Who Dares Wins. Each series follows a group of men and women on a condensed version of special forces selection training.  

Each day the selection process gradually weeds out those who are unable to cope with the physical and mental stresses and strains of the course. Participants can voluntarily withdraw at any time, but each day the weakest individuals are removed from the course by the directing staff (known as the ‘DS’).

Although all candidates have above levels of fitness (and range in ages between 18 – 44) sometimes they find out that they just aren’t physically strong enough or they suffer injuries that mean they must withdraw or be withdrawn from the course.

But what causes most candidates to leave (or be asked to leave) is that they aren’t mentally strong enough to cope with the relentless challenges and stressful situations they experience. Successful candidates from the previous series included a 40-year-old female orthopaedic surgeon, a 33-year-old male firefighter and a 25-year-old male water engineer.

The difference that makes the difference

The chief instructor makes the point that special forces operatives are not carbon copies, but a diverse collection of people from different backgrounds and personalities who all possess similar attributes of adaptability, self-discipline, resourcefulness, initiative and determination.  But it is mental and physical resilience – the ability to bounce back from setbacks, mishaps, mistakes and unexpected events – that really matters to making the cut.

“It is mental and physical resilience – the ability to bounce back from setbacks, mishaps, mistakes and unexpected events – that really matters to making the cut. "

Money resilience

This got me thinking about the parallels between the selection training and being good with money and it being a force for good in one’s life. Developing resilience to financial shocks – such as the loss of a job, illness that reduces or stops income, or an unexpected expense like a boiler or car repair – is at the foundation of financial wellbeing. You can’t control many things but you can control how you react to them.

Many people who accumulate expensive (non-housing) debt do so because they don’t have any or enough emergency savings to help them cope with life’s curve balls. It’s not a case of ‘if’ you’ll need to call on your emergency reserve, but ‘when’. Having cash available makes a crisis into a mere inconvenience, as I set out in this blog last year. It also makes you more resilient.

Having the confidence that you can cope with financial shocks means you can take more risks with your career, you can emotionally cope with stock market risk and you can cope with a sudden loss of income in the short term, as my blog from last year explains.

So, make it a priority to build and maintain an adequate cash emergency reserve. You might not be able to make it through SAS selection training, but you will be able to cope with most money problems on your life journey. And if you can do that, you’ll probably be happier and healthier.