In a former career, I spent nearly 2 ½ years of my life living on tropical desert islands, in Borneo and the Philippines.
I started off as a dive instructor on the tropical paradise island of Boracay in the Philippines for 6 months (way before Boracay became the tourist trap it is now). It was awesome – a 4km (2.5 mile) sunset-facing, soft white sand beach, palm trees, great beach bars, a floating ocean bar and spectacular SCUBA diving.
In addition to the day-to-day diving, I and a group of friends who were also diving instructors used to go out and pioneer new dive sites, which was great fun (apart from the time when we got caught in a storm at night that badly damaged the local Filipino boat we’d hired and the captain was ‘temporarily unaware of our position’ – lost! We survived though 😊).
One cruisy afternoon, a slightly battered 37-foot yacht turned up and anchored 100m off the beach. I was sitting in Cocomangas beach bar having a refreshing Red Horse (a Filipino beer) after diving with manta rays and grey-reef sharks at a spectacular dive site called Yapak, a 38m underwater cliff that plunged to 68m deep.
We didn’t get many yachts calling in to that part of the island, so it piqued my curiosity. As I watched, a couple jumped off the yacht and swam to the shore. They turned out to be 2 diving friends of mine, Huw and Mandy, who had left the island a few weeks previously to travel around.
They’d met this bloke who’d rebuilt the yacht after buying it as a sunken wreck and decided to join him. They were now looking for more crew to help sail the yacht across to Palawan then down to Borneo for a while, and eventually across to Thailand. They knew about my adventurer’s spirit and had come to persuade me to join them!
Surprisingly, I was extremely torn about what I wanted. On the face of it, it was an easy decision. Normally I was very spontaneous and would generally go with the flow and go wherever the next adventure took me. That’s how I ended up on Boracay.
But this was different. I felt like this was a big decision – literally a life-changing one.
I loved my life on Boracay. I’d got myself nicely established as the co-lead instructor in a local Filipino dive shop with a great boss and even better team of locals who we worked with in the dive shop and on the boats.
‘Mamma’ (the boss’ wife) had also taken me under her wing and looked after me as one of her own – she wouldn’t let me go out to work in the morning until I’d eaten her special fish-head and rice soup (it was a lot nicer than it sounds, honestly!), bless her.
I was earning great money and building my savings, which was extremely important to me considering I’d taken a huge risk spent literally my very last money (my reserve for a flight back to the UK!) on doing my dive instructor’s course a few months prior.
So giving up that awesome lifestyle, friends, my Filipino ‘family’ and financial security was a big thing. I didn’t want to make a rash decision that I’d regret. My gut told me this was a surprisingly weighty decision.
So, I stepped back from being my usual spontaneous, go-with-it-adventurer self and I sat and pondered. For several days.
People thought I was crazy. Huw and Mands wondered what the hell there was to think about – “get on the yacht, come on an adventure – just do it!”
My Swedish mate Fred thought I was mad to even consider giving up what I had on Boracay! It was such a sweet life, living on the beach, spectacular diving every day, beach bars and parties at night…
I was completely torn!
Bear in mind that at this time I’d just turned 30. I’d left the British Royal Air Force after 10 years and was travelling around the world, shaking off the shackles of what I felt had become a controlling, constricting military and a controlling and somewhat unhappy childhood before that, having escaped from living under the iron fist of an alcoholic father.
There were a lot of things at play.
I decided I needed to sit down and seriously work out what I wanted – and needed to do with my life. What was I trying to achieve longer term? What options did I have? What might the next step in my life look like? What did I actually, really, deep down enjoy about being here? What did I, deep down and being honest, not like (yes, surprisingly paradise can have some downsides)?
Would I stay and live in the Philippines longer term? What longer term prospects were there? What skills did I actually have? What skills might I need for the future? How would I get them? What would I do if I stayed here? Would the novelty of partying every night start to wear thin? What would I do then?
What would happen if I DID go on the yacht? There was a lot of uncertainty about that, as it was a very fluid plan…that would normally be extremely appealing to me, but I knew I needed to take time and think carefully. What would happen if I went and ran out of money? What was my Plan B…Plan C…D…?
In the end, stopping and taking time to consider all these things proved to be exactly what I needed to do. Rather than making a rash decision, I went through lists in my head and more importantly got them out of the spinning maelstrom of thoughts and wrote things down in my notebook (no smartphones back then!).
I made time to contemplate. I sat underwater in my SCUBA gear, on the 38m-deep rock-edge at Yapak with my feet dangling over the edge, staring out into the clear blue ocean and at the sharks cruising by. I laid face down staring down into the alluring dark blue depths, breathing very deeply and slowly to conserve my air so I could spend longer thinking, away from distractions (other than sharks and manta rays!).
After a few days, I made the decision. And it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. Had I not taken time to ponder, I’ve no doubt life would have worked out drifting in another direction – I was always a go-getter. However, this time I had more purpose. I knew what path I wanted to take – and why. I was fully engaged in what I was doing.
I got on the yacht.
I ended up crewing the yacht for a couple of months from Boracay across to Palawan and down to Malaysian-owned North Borneo, Sabah.
Shortly after arriving in Kota Kinabalu, after an amazing sailing adventure (that’s the subject of another story – DM me and catch up for a chat if you’re interested!), I was knocking on hostel doors in Kota Kinabalu (KK) trying to drum up business taking back-packers out to the islands off KK. The yacht engine had given out after leaving Palawan a few weeks prior and we needed funds to fix it.
Opportunities tend to present themselves more when you put yourself out there, and as important, you tend to notice them when you have an idea of what you want and what you’re looking for.
During my ‘business development’ venture persuading backpackers to part with US$10 in exchange for a guided reef snorkelling tour and lunch on secluded island, I met someone who said their friend was a dive instructor who was leaving the 5* resort – and the resort was desperately looking for a replacement.
After all my deliberation I knew what I wanted – and this was exactly that golden opportunity! Excitedly, I went into the company’s head-office in KK and introduced myself.
Literally within 24 hours I packed all my belongings from the yacht and was on a plane then a boat to the Malaysia-owned dive paradise called Sipadan, off the East Borneo coast to work as a dive instructor and dive guide at a 5* resort on Mabul Island, right next to Sipadan, one of the world’s top dive spots.
It was spectacular! On my first dive I found myself in the middle of a spiralling school of 10,000 barracuda above another spiralling whirlpool of 10,000 Jacks (trevally), with about a dozen hawksbill turtles lazily milling around the stunning coral reef underneath, with the odd White-tip Reef Shark slicing through the clouds of purple and orange damsel fish!
I thought I’d died and gone to heaven!
That was great for a while, but knowing what I wanted from life from my Boracay ponderings – and then constantly updating the narrative – I decided to move on when an opportunity presented to a do marine research with the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. They trained me to become a researcher in exchange for me teaching their students to dive.
I then ended up doing research on Layang Layang, a 2000m deep pinnacle about 350km NW of Borneo literally in the middle of the South China Sea.
That led to working for the 5* dive resort ther
e, and in turn led me to setting up my underwater videography business, where I worked between the islands of Sipadan, and Layang Layang.
If I thought Sipadan was good, Layang Layang was another level! Several times a week I’d be filming guests from the luxury 5* resort diving with schools of 200-300 Hammerhead Sharks, 3m long Dogtooth Tuna, dolphins, Silver Tip sharks, manta rays, Grey Reef Sharks, turtles, schools of barracuda and jacks. I once spent 20 minutes playing with a huge female dolphin and her new-born.
That path eventually led me back to Australia, which was my first overall goal. There were a few other unexpected and interesting twists and turns in between, but I kept focused.
And here I am now, running Southern Cross Coaching & Development for the past 18+ years, living my purpose and mission: “Make the World a Better Place through Better, Neuroscience-based Leadership.
Doing what I do, I hear lots of stories about people who are often very unhappy in their roles. I see people who leap from one job to another without taking time to consider why, what they want, and what they’re aiming for.
People often ‘follow the pendulum’ – they’re unhappy where they are and react and jump into the opposite of that, thinking the grass is greener… Only to find the opposite isn’t what they want either and that the grass sometimes isn’t even green. So they leap again… and the pendulum keeps swinging.
People also get tapped on the shoulder and passively follow into their next role…and the next… then suddenly find themselves in an unhappy place wondering how on earth they go there – and are then often ‘golden-handcuffed’ into an unhappy position, trapped by the salary they need to pay the mortgage/ rent, etc.
When people stop to think about it, the reality is nearly always somewhere in the middle. The problem is, especially in today’s super-busy, always-on society, people rarely take time to consider what they really want.
That’s what our Assessing, Planning and Progressing your Career program does. Like me sitting on Boracay beach, it gives people valuable contemplation time for themselves.
Time to breathe, slow down, and proactively think and consider what their purpose is, what they really want in a job – and why. As well as linking these things to the practicalities of life outside and inside of work.
The program’s built-in tools are very practical and have been proven in many different scenarios from non-management staff to managers through to senior executives.
This program includes a psychometric assessment to assess participants’ personal Values and Motives (the GeneSys Values and Motives Indicator), as well other practical tools.
Participants are also given a structured framework that can be continued after the course.
