Transcriber: Annet Johnson Reviewer: Anna Sobota
I could feel it.
It filled the space between pain and exhaustion.
Right there, in that moment,
the sweat was making its way down my nose, on the tip, ready to fall.
I stood there and with my hands on my knees, my legs shaking,
kilometer 95,
and I thought this was it.
This was how it ends,
right here, right now, I wouldn’t be able to get up.
Ladies and gentlemen,
tonight I would like to share with you a part of my story.
I stand before you,
two years after some of the most grueling training of my life,
both physical and mental.
What I want to share with you tonight
can best be illustrated by imagining a wormhole in time.
I was able to reach through, years into the future,
and grab experience to benefit [me] today.
What interests me is not specifically what I learned,
but I would like to focus on
what I was able to glean [from] this knowledge at the age of 19
and then benefit from it in my professional and school life.
Most of you are probably a bit confused.
Let me give you a bit of context.
Carpe diem, the famous phrase in Latin,
for me is a 100 kilometer march by foot
that features as the final test
of the Tank and Artillery Officer Academy 22
of the Swiss Armed Forces.
The path leading up to carpe diem is called veritas.
Veritas is a 150 kilometers on bike, roundabout,
another 50 kilometers on foot,
and various other shooting exercises in stressful situations.
Food and sleep are severely rationed during this time to heighten tensions
and push the body to the absolute limit.
So let’s take it back to kilometer zero; for us this was in Morat or Murten.
We’d packed our bag, we’d filled our bottles,
we’d checked our shoes, and we thought we were ready.
We never doubted our ability.
We had to finish.
Today was our day.
We thought we knew who we were and who stood next to us,
and for us, that was enough.
We couldn’t imagine what would come,
what we would come to face in those next 24 hours.
The unknown was so strong because it had two core elements.
There was the unknown itself,
not knowing what was to come,
and the undeniable inevitability that we knew something was going to come.
The unknown in my previous experience had always had this connotation,
now pulled its way through all the experiences that I had with it,
and that was an eerie silence.
For me, it was just before stepping on stage here tonight, TEDx.
For some of you, it might be at 09:01 on your final exam day
right before you click start on LMS,
silence.
What scared us more
than any number of kilometers that they could throw at us
was that silence.
Now, we’d come a long way since the day in the colonel’s office 13 weeks prior.
Now, the colonel’s office overlooked the entire military base.
But what was interesting,
the colonel himself had this ability to remain completely expressionless
despite any circumstance.
It was a rare occasion that someone of my rank would sit [there] today
in that office doing what I was doing.
I was signing away my rights to good health and sanity
as I signed on to become a future officer after 15 weeks of training.
I remember the colonel, he left me with these wise words,
with his complete expressionless figure,
he said, “Just try not to break anything, that would be a shame.”
So you can imagine my face after that.
So we're back at the march now.
It took massive bravery, like it does to talk about it today,
to get out of that starting block.
We stepped across the line.
Now we were walking.
We had been walking for a while now,
kilometers started to go by and go by.
We just passed kilometer 30 a little while back
and we were starting to come to kilometer 34.
This was the resupply spot where we had to fill our bottles,
draw the next 10 kilometer mandatory pass on our map
and then, get going again.
So here we were in high spirits, smiles all around, we’re motivated.
Me and Lieutenant Konrad at the front; we were leading the patrol with our maps.
It was heads down and keep up.
This was the adrenaline-pumping stage of the march.
Everybody was happy, there were smiles,
and this was the moment we were living [for].
What I found during my military service is that trust and respect required time.
There were two elements that I found were mandatory to me building my authority.
On the one hand,
being ready to be the first person through the door in a combat function.
This meant risking your neck for your soldiers.
And the second, was being transparent.
We all have weaknesses and we all have struggles,
but being open about it is the ultimate show of strength.
I struggled with notions
and required several instances where I needed to be pushed again and again
to find that courage to lead.
So we’d filled our bottles, drawn the next 10 kilometers on our map,
and we’re on the way again.
So now the kilometers, they drew on.
And when I say drew on,
I’m talking about 14 hours of just walking.
Slowly we’d come to kilometer 70, kilometer 71.
Nightfall had lowered our morale and the rain had dampened our spirits.
At three o’clock am, we stood in some random town,
just around the Bern area.
At three o’clock in the morning, and we had a problem.
It wasn’t the rain. It wasn’t the morale.
It was the physical condition of the team.
We had somebody who’d had a malformation after hip surgery.
One that had problems after having broken his femur two years ago.
They all came back to haunt the team.
A decision had to be made.
We had two choices.
One, we go for the pace and we let someone stay here,
lay on the ground, and give up.
Two, forget the time; everybody that started, finishes.
Right there in that moment, at the age of 19,
I had to push my friends across their line.
I had to, in their pain, convince them that the next line that they had to cross,
and their next objective, was just over the hill.
I looked at my map.
It wasn't the case.
Some might call it torture,
others might call it the right thing to do.
Consensus, it wasn’t easy.
I struggled with it.
I struggled with problems and situations that I wouldn’t have,
if I hadn’t done this,
until later years while climbing the corporate ladder.
I remember when I was in recruit school as a wee little lad,
following my sergeant into battle.
I remember I wanted to lead troops.
I wanted to lead men on the battlefield,
but it came so much easier than managing humans in real life.
I dreaded waking up every day to have those H.R. problems,
people with problems that came to me and needed solutions,
but I didn't have the solutions.
What bothered me the most
was that people needed to see a solution in the person that stood in front of them.
So, now we’re back at three o’clock in the morning.
The local baker is leaning out of his window
and he is seeing a scene that’s unfathomable.
You have people that are leaning on the fountain.
You have people that are dancing on the only part of their feet
that don’t hurt.
Then you have the rest of us just staring into a bush.
So now, let’s talk about age.
In that moment, I could have [used] my age as an excuse to give up leadership,
to renounce my position and say, “Listen, I’m too young,
I can’t do this.
I’m not a professional, I’m not qualified.”
In that moment, I had to put my age aside,
keep my responsibility to my team and to myself, and push on.
I had to do it.
In that moment, it wasn’t a reflection I made,
but now that I’m thinking about it,
it was the toughest situation up until that point.
I remember what illustrated this link
or this misconception about age being linked to management
and being able to carry responsibility.
Towards the end of my service,
when my soldiers stood in front of me that I had been training for 14 weeks,
they came up to me and they asked me,
“Listen, before you leave, we need to know how old are you?”
In that moment, it struck me.
I didn’t care about my age.
I didn’t think [about] it on a daily basis.
I was just being me, trying to do my job and carry the responsibility.
So it was like a cow auction.
Do I hear 24, 24, 24, do I hear 25, 25, 25,
do I here, 26, 26, 25 going once, 25, 26, to the man in the camo in the back.
I didn’t understand.
The misconception for me didn’t make sense.
For me, age was just a number.
It remained just a number.
A number, kind of like 95.
So we’re back at 95.
The sweatshop had left my nose and splattered on the ground.
Its impact so insignificant, but for me, so monumental.
I remember the little voice in the back of my head,
saying, “Forget it, you give up.
Today is not your day.
You tried, you failed.”
I remember the will to give up was like a snake coiling around my legs,
making its way up my back, ready to strike the final blow.
In that moment, I thought this was it.
Then I remember Lieutenant Martin.
He came to me,
he leaned over, picked me up,
spoke some encouraging words, slapped me on the back, and we were off again.
I can't remember what he said,
but what was going through my mind in that moment was how can he,
in his pain, still find the effort to pull me up?
I didn't get it in the moment.
So now it was a literal blur.
Our feet were moving,
we didn’t know how or why.
But we didn’t need to know, we knew the path.
We knew where we were going and we walked together 96 kilometers.
The captain brought us the flag, the class flag,
and we stood in formation.
Everybody nice and tight up front, to finish together.
The pride flapped off the flag and into our step, 97 kilometers.
Now there was a river rushing next to us, but we couldn’t hear it.
Nobody spoke.
There was silence all around, kilometer 98.
There were not eight souls walking that day, but hundreds.
Everybody had suffered for a reason, for themselves, for others.
We took everybody with us on that day.
Kilometer 99, we saw the final bridge.
We saw the military base.
We knew the way, our feet were carrying us.
The problem was we had the pain.
It came rushing back because we started to hope.
We started to want the emotions that we stuffed into a drawer
for 13 weeks came rushing out.
We wanted the end.
One hundred.
No, it wasn’t easy.
We’d made it.
We had just walked 100 kilometers.
We got there and praise from the colonel and champagne.
He opened the bottle with his saber.
Poured us all a glass, bottoms up, and it was over.
Now the 100 kilometer march, carpe diem, that I witnessed
and that I lived through
was one of the hardest challenges that I’ve ever started and finished.
There’s no number of words that I could use today
to describe exactly how hard it was,
or exactly how many times I doubted myself again and again.
What’s important today is the lessons that I learned
at kilometer 34, at 71, and then at 95.
There’s three things that have changed since then,
and it’s not in the way that I tie my shoes in the morning,
in the way that I hang up my coat in the evening,
but rather in how I see leaders in the workplace and at school.
What I want to see now when I look at leaders
is when their group or their project is having that kilometer 95 crisis moment
or that kilometer 71, three o’clock in the morning, middle of nowhere,
people are starting to complain about pains and aches moment,
how does the team react?
Does the dynamic change?
How does the leader take on that situation?
Are they ready to learn?
Do they have their weaknesses ready?
Are they transparent with their strengths and weaknesses?
Second thing,
leaders are no longer just a facade, a rank, or a position to me.
When I think about leaders, when I look at them,
I see pain, I see experience,
and I see a story that we can all learn from.
It’s become interesting to me to just sit back, relax, and observe
when they take the initiative.
How do those initiatives and steps
compare to the calls that I had to make during my military service?
The last thing is that I tend to notice
how often people lead with their age when introducing themselves.
There’s this misconception that age comes with experience
and being able to carry responsibility and be a leader with authority.
That bothers me.
But I see it [every day] in leaders that stand before me.
Now, I’m not here to tell you that your civilian situations
or your professional experience relate exactly to military experience
like it does for me.
But, rather, I’m here to tell you that age really is just a number.
And that if we take the time and the effort to be transparent
and open about who we are and what we do,
if we’re new leaders in a position
or whether we’ve been doing it for a while,
if we’re transparent and open about it,
all of our 95 kilometer crisis moments can be solved together.
We can stand and walk together.
So I want to leave you with one last point, one last reflection,
something to think about on your way home:
if I stood before you as a lieutenant at 19,
or a manager in your workplace,
would you accept my authority?
Thank you.
(Applause)