Ben Pronk DSC - The SAS, leadership and stoic philosophy to build your resilience to win in life.

So Ben Pronk is a leader and specialist in risk, resilience and process improvement. Ben's first career spanned 24 years in the Australian Army, with the majority of this time spent in the Special Air Service Regiment. In this capacity, Ben served on multiple operational deployments and was decorated for leadership in action, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. So we're doing all this

training and we did a night-time exercise, mock assault, on the Treasury Casino in Brisbane, just near the river there. And I remember flying in these Blackhawks, you know, pitch black, like basically hopping over bridges along the Brisbane River, so low and fast, in our black suits, ready to sort of assault this thing. And we flared over the casino and sort of roped down onto the top of this iconic building in Brisbane. And I just

remember thinking, like... this is amazing you

know this is a real kind of once in a lifetime boys and adventure awesome opportunities developing good resilience habits um in your day-to-day life gives you that basis to deal with we joke about the zombie apocalypse but you know shit

who knows what is around the corner

fuel crisis is going to sort of result in in terms of ways we need to change our lifestyle and And the very same, particularly some of those mindset aspects, you know, that ability to focus on the stuff you can't control, you know, to look at sort of the things that you are grateful for and that reframing aspect. I think these are very tangible tools that we can use when our status quo gets upset and it's easy. this concept

of we're all going to die which is obviously a fact yeah clearly is that that can be one of two things it can either be confronting and scary or it can be liberating and i think can we choose to look at it as that liberating way of looking at life right because we're all going in the ground right and i think you know it's going to end but how can we enjoy it and do the best job possible while we're here and learn from it right Welcome to the One True Measure podcast. I'm your host, Blake O'Connell. Episode number one. It's a big one. And I'd be remiss in not acknowledging all the people that have helped us along the way to get to this point. The larger One True Measure team, Jack. There's so many people that we could say thank today, especially the team at Magic. Out there, Christian, Jade and Sam, all the team for making this happen. And speaking of people as part of our team, what a really awesome segue to have this man on the podcast today. Huge mentor of mine over almost the last four years. I had to look that up. Yeah, yeah. Almost four years. Huge influence in what we're doing here at One True Measure and a great place to start. And in the words of my wife, bringing out the big guns on episode one. Yeah. Welcome, Ben Prok.

Thank you, mate. If this is the big guns, it doesn't bode well for the wider podcast. But, mate, it is an honour. It's awesome to have had some involvement from the cheap seats in terms of seeing this come to fruition and to be sitting here on the first episode of what's no doubt going to be massive.

I feel very humbled. Thank you, mate. And you've been huge so