I recently completed the Veterans Resilience Mentor Program and became an accredited Resilience Shield Mentor. That sentence still feels slightly strange to write—not because I doubt the achievement, but because of where the journey started.
Before stepping into that mentoring role, I also went through the Laughter on the Frontline program, a deeply transformative experience that challenged me to find perspective through vulnerability and humor. Completing both of these milestones back-to-back has caused me to reflect on a book I first picked up several years ago: The Resilience Shield. At the time, I had no idea that reading it would eventually set off a chain reaction, leading me through stand-up comedy and ultimately to mentoring other veterans through the exact same framework. The path between those points has been longer, messier, and far more personal than I could have imagined.
The Right Book at the Right Time
The Resilience Shield was published in 2021, and I first read it in early 2022. By then, I had been living with an official PTSD diagnosis for almost seven years. The diagnosis came in 2015, though the work of understanding what that actually meant occupied much of the time that followed.
Looking back now, I don’t think I would have been ready for the book immediately after my diagnosis. At that stage, much of my energy was focused on understanding what had happened, finding appropriate support, and learning how to navigate daily life again; recovery felt less like personal growth and more like pure survival. By 2022, however, I was in a different place. Years of therapy, mindfulness practice, Stoic reflection, journalling, and self-examination had given me enough stability to begin exploring a different question. I was no longer asking, What happened to me? Instead, I was asking, How do I build a meaningful life from here? The book arrived at exactly the right time.
The Part I Struggled With
Even so, my first reaction to the text wasn’t an immediate connection. Many of the stories shared by the authors who are former SAS soldiers and were grounded in combat and special operations experiences. They were compelling stories, but they felt worlds away from my own military career. I joined the Air Force as a teenager and spent my career as a Communications Operator before retraining as a CISCON when the mustering evolved, eventually leaving the service as a Sergeant. Because my role was to support operations rather than participate in combat directly, I found myself creating an invisible line between their experiences and mine as I read. Part of me wondered whether these lessons were really intended for someone like me.
Looking back, I realise that reaction had very little to do with the book itself. It was about identity.
For many years after leaving the Air Force, I carried an unspoken belief that my service somehow counted for less because I had not seen combat. It wasn’t a belief I would have admitted openly, and if another veteran had said the same thing about their own service, I would have challenged them immediately. Yet, we are often kinder to others than we are to ourselves.
The reality is that military operations depend on far more than the people carrying weapons. Communications operators, technicians, logisticians, administrators, engineers, health professionals, intelligence staff, and countless others all contribute to the mission.
Every role matters. Every person serves differently, and every person leaves service carrying different experiences. The turning point for me came when I stopped asking whether my service looked like the stories in the book, and started asking whether the ideas could help me live better now. Once I made that shift, I began to engage with the framework in a very different way.
A Different Understanding of Resilience
Like many people with a military background, I grew up professionally with a fairly simple understanding of resilience: you keep going, you get the job done, you push through discomfort, and you carry on because the mission requires it. That mindset absolutely has value, and military organisations could not function without people capable of performing under that kind of pressure. Over time, however, I have come to realise that endurance is only one part of the equation.
These days, I think of resilience as capacity—the capacity to adapt, to recover, to maintain relationships, to find purpose, and to continue engaging with life even when it becomes difficult.
What appealed to me about the Resilience Shield framework was that it treated resilience as something practical rather than an innate trait people either possessed or lacked. It was not a personality trait; it was a skill, and skills can be developed. Furthermore, it wasn’t just a collection of good ideas; the model is deeply rooted in research, backed by empirical evidence that proves its methodology. It gave me immense confidence to know that the tools I was engaging with were scientifically validated.
The Domains That Challenged Me
As I worked through the framework, three specific areas stood out and challenged me in different ways: physical resilience, social resilience, and purpose.
Physical resilience initially seemed straightforward. Military service places a strong emphasis on fitness and endurance, so I assumed I understood that domain well. Yet, living with chronic pain, PTSD, depression, anxiety, the aftermath of thumb surgery, and the realities of an ageing body taught me otherwise. Physical resilience is not simply about strength; it is about adaptation. It is about listening to your body instead of fighting it, and recognising that recovery often requires patience rather than sheer determination.
Social resilience was another area that forced me to rethink old assumptions. When you are serving, community is built into daily life. There are people constantly around you, shared experiences, common goals, and a sense of belonging that can easily be taken for granted. After leaving the military, I realised that connection needed to become intentional. Friendships required effort, community required participation, and relationships needed nurturing. The older I get, the more convinced I become that resilience is rarely something we build alone.
Purpose was perhaps the most significant challenge of all. Leaving military service often means leaving behind an identity that has shaped your life for years, leading to the questions that many veterans eventually encounter: What matters now? What am I contributing? How do I want to spend the years ahead? For me, purpose gradually became less about rank, position, or achievement and more about values. What kind of person do I want to be? What do I want to give back? How can I use my experiences to help others? Those questions continue to evolve, but they remain central to how I think about resilience.
Knowing Isn’t the Same as Practising
Reading the book gave me a framework, but what changed my life was putting those ideas into active practice. Over the past several years, I have become far more intentional about my own recovery than I was previously.
A pivotal turning point in this practical application came in 2025, when I participated in the Female Veteran Resilience Retreat. That experience truly consolidated the information I had attained from the book, allowing me to see how the framework lived and breathed within a community of peers. Following the retreat, I went deeper, attending individual sessions specifically focused on the Mind and Body layers of the shield.
This targeted work allowed me to apply the theory directly to the realities of my own life. I began journalling consistently, deepened my mindfulness practice, and continued studying Stoic philosophy, which I had been exploring since 2016. I became more aware of what I could control and what I could not, grew more intentional about my relationships, and, perhaps most importantly, learned to give myself grace when I needed rest.
That may sound simple, though it was not always easy. Many of us spend years believing that resilience means pushing through, but I have learned that it also involves recovery, maintenance, reflection, and self-awareness.
The practices themselves are often quite ordinary: journalling, walking, meditation, exercise physiology, pilates, conversations with friends, community involvement, writing, and knitting. None of them are particularly dramatic. Their power comes from consistency rather than intensity.
Finding Another Perspective Through Laughter
Following that deep internal work, the Laughter on the Frontline program introduced resilience to me through an entirely different lens. The program combines stand-up comedy, storytelling, public speaking, and resilience training in a uniquely veteran-focused environment. Participants work alongside professional comedians, develop personal stories, and ultimately perform in front of a live audience.
On paper, it sounds like an unusual combination, but in practice, it works remarkably well. What struck me most was that resilience was not being taught through lectures or theory; it was being actively experienced. The process required vulnerability, stepping outside familiar comfort zones, and trusting both yourself and the people around you.
One of the greatest benefits for me was meeting veterans I might never otherwise have crossed paths with. Listening to their stories reinforced something I have learned repeatedly throughout my recovery journey: none of us are carrying our experiences entirely alone. Humour has always existed within military culture, but the program showed me another side of it. Humour creates connection and perspective, reminding us that difficult experiences do not have to define us completely.
Becoming a Mentor
The Veterans Resilience Mentor Program felt like a natural continuation of the journey that began when I first opened The Resilience Shield. When I was accepted into the program, my first reaction was gratitude, followed closely by a sense of responsibility—and, if I'm honest, a touch of imposter syndrome. Who was I to mentor others? What gave me the right? The answer eventually became clear. Mentoring is not about having all the answers, being perfectly resilient, or having solved every problem. It is about being willing to share what you have learned while continuing to learn yourself.
By the time I entered the mentor program, I knew I had done the work. Not perfectly, and certainly not completely, but consistently. Years of recovery, self-reflection, mindfulness, retreat validation, targeted mind/body work, and community learning had brought me to a place where I could support others while continuing my own growth. Becoming accredited did not feel like the end of a journey; it felt like a commitment to continue it.
Resilience Is a Practice
One of the things I appreciate most about the Resilience Shield framework is that I encountered it at the exact right time. Had I picked it up immediately after my diagnosis, much of it might have felt overwhelming or abstract. Seven years later, after doing the hard work of recovery, I was able to engage with the ideas differently.
The framework did not replace therapy, mindfulness, community, journalling, exercise, or self-reflection. Instead, it helped organise many of the lessons I had already begun learning, giving me language for experiences I had struggled to describe and a structure for continuing to grow.
Looking back, resilience was never built by a single book, program, conversation, or breakthrough moment. It has been built through years of showing up for the small practices that help me stay steady. Sometimes that has looked like mindfulness or Stoicism; sometimes it has looked like exercise, asking for help, or accepting that rest is the most resilient choice available.
The Resilience Shield gave me an empirically backed framework. The 2025 retreat and individual sessions consolidated it. Laughter on the Frontline gave me another perspective. Finally, the Veterans Resilience Mentor Program gave me an opportunity to give something back. Together, they have reinforced a simple idea: resilience is not something we achieve once and keep forever. It is something we practise. Day by day. Choice by choice. Relationship by relationship.
And perhaps that is the lesson that took me the longest to learn. Resilience is not about becoming tougher than life; it is about learning how to keep engaging with life, even when life becomes difficult.