This was possible despite my becoming an industry hate figure at the same time. You should have seen what landed in my inbox every day – all from so-called ‘security professionals’. Yes, I know a bit about personal resilience. I'll be talking about it in the Core Courage programme.

I’ve written and published 4 books on the subject of security, and I'm so far ahead of the thinking of the rest of the security industry, I might as well be speaking in tongues. Real Security Doctor Limited is still in existence, but I have lost my taste for security as an industry and for security people as clientele. It’s too corrupt, too stupid, too lazy and too toxic. Few people are serious about doing it properly, and so I’ve done my time trying to help them with it. At some point, I’ll talk about it and the lessons I learned in the Energeia blog

What matters here is that, the purposes of Energeia, I’m NOT Dr Rich Diston. Just Rich.

I’ll explain.

My academic title (allegedly) confers some level of authority on what I say. I consider it to be dishonest and unethical to borrow my status from the security industry to try to give myself more credibility on other unrelated topics…such as coaching. Other people might do it, and that is their choice. I don’t. You can take from that whatever you will about the kind of man I am.

So ‘Rich’ will do just fine.

I do hold coaching certs, but nothing worth talking about. I have long learned the myth of formal education and certification as a means to assessing the value of someone’s contribution. You’re better off listening to what I say and watching how I act than looking at my post-nominals. You’ll work out for yourself whether or not I’m worth listening to or doing business with.

I’ve been a repeated failure. I failed at school, at college (twice), in the military, in a couple of businesses, in countless jobs and in one marriage. I was even bankrupt in 2009. A regular loser. What I didn’t lose was the lessons. It’s just that some of them I needed to resit a few times.

I have never ‘fit in’ and actively struggled to deal with most people. I’m usually the smartest person in the room, which is not a real problem until you learn that I am also usually the most honest. There’s no appetite for that.

It was no real surprise to me that I was diagnosed as autistic at the age of 51. I also have ADHD and eye-wateringly high scores on a number of respected psychopathy diagnostics. (Fun fact – psychopathy is related to autism, and also has its own spectrum. If you stick around here, I’ll talk about it. You’ll never have heard a perspective like mine on that subject.) My autism, ADHD and psychopathy are all in a fine balancing act, often complementing each other. That makes me highly unusual (and terrified of medication that might upset the balance.)

If everything you know about psychopathy comes from Hollywood or Google, you might be alarmed. That’s natural. Until you realise that not all psychopaths are baby-eating monsters. Many are found in operating theatres, GP offices, legal chambers, law enforcement, special forces…and board rooms – all contributing usefully. A lack of emotion provides clarity where it matters most.

I learned early on that I needed structures and rules if I wanted to live a long and productive life. In Dexter’s terms, I have my own ‘Dark Passenger’ to cage. So I embraced philosophy and psychology in an attempt to understand myself and work out how to function without destroying myself or anyone else.  Sure, I have the natural ability to step into the dark side (which can be very useful)…But I refuse. That is NOT who I will be, regardless of the temptation or justification I may face. Classical Stoicism quite literally saved my life - and several others over the years - not that they'd know it.

Why tell you this? I see no benefit to anyone in hiding who and what I am.

Forewarned is forearmed, after all. Take it or leave it. I live without apology. And so should you.

So…why coaching?

Many, many years ago, I took on a contract to teach security guarding at a college. It was one of the UK Government-funded programmes for getting people back to work after a long period of economic inactivity.

I quickly realised that teaching them ‘security stuff’ was not enough. It certainly wouldn’t help them to become effective security practitioners. What they needed first was help to become more effective people. As I listened to the stories about their lives, week in, week out, I realised that learning which fire extinguisher was which was not going to make things better for them. They needed better decision-making skills. Better thinking skills. And the courage to use them. And so, I started looking into developing coaching skills.

Of course, at first it was a matter of learning to teach others, not learning to use on myself. I was not attending my own sermons. Because I knew how the tools worked, I doubted they’d work on me anyway.

As my security career developed, I ran headfirst into the same problems, over and over again. And at speed. They weren’t problems of knowledge. They were ME problems. I spent a lot of time thinking that there was something ‘wrong’ with me. Enough people had told me so. I began to fear for my future.  I couldn’t stick a job, and lived hand to mouth for a long time.

And man, I was angry all the time. Even when I was smiling and ‘playing nicely’, in my head I was committing atrocities. And I hated myself because I knew no other way to be. It all had to be my fault. I was miserable, frustrated and isolated.

I eventually put the time in and did the work on myself. Is it finished? Not remotely.  Energeia, right? It’s never finished. The work is the result. The good news is that I am finally free – of anger, self-doubt and ‘failure’.

Have the lessons I learned helped others?

Absolutely. When I was working with security management practitioners, it became apparent that what they needed wasn’t more ‘security shit’. I’d been right all along. Because I had learned to (mostly) get out of my own way, I was able to talk to them in real, practical ways.

It turns out that what they needed was what a lot of people need, in all walks of life.