When the Fear Kicks In
Nobody talks about it. That's the first thing you notice when you're new to this kind of work. Everyone around you is switched on, professional, getting on with it, and the unspoken rule is that you do the same. You don't sit around a table and discuss your feelings. You just get on with the job.
But fear is there. It's always there. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or hasn't been in a situation where it was genuinely warranted.
I'm not talking about nerves before something kicks off. That's different, that's useful. Nerves keep you sharp, keep you paying attention. I mean the other kind. The kind that shows up at two in the morning when everything is quiet and your brain decides that now is a good time to run through everything that could go wrong. The kind that sits in your chest when you're in a location where you know, rationally and clearly, that the situation could deteriorate faster than you could respond to it. That kind.
The thing I've learned over the years is that fear is not the enemy. Fear is information. When it shows up, something in your brain has done a risk assessment and flagged a result you don't like. The mistake people make is either ignoring it completely or letting it take over. Neither of those works. You have to do something in between, which is acknowledging it, working out whether it's telling you something useful, and then carrying on.
In a mining security context, the fears are specific. They are not vague or abstract. You are not worried about failing a presentation or saying the wrong thing at a dinner party. You are worried about concrete, physical things. Whether the information you've been given about a location is accurate. Whether the people you are working alongside are who they say they are. Whether the perimeter is actually as solid as it looks on paper. Whether your exit routes are what you think they are if something goes wrong.
There is also a particular fear that does not get talked about at all, and that is the fear of making the wrong call. In environments like this, decisions happen fast. You do not always have the luxury of thinking something through carefully. You act on training, on instinct, on whatever information you have in that moment. The possibility that you could make the wrong call, and that the wrong call could have serious consequences, is something that sits with you. You manage it, but you don't make it disappear.
What I've found useful, and this is something that's come with time rather than anything I was taught formally, is having a clear pre-operation routine. Not elaborate, nothing ritualistic, just a set of things I do before anything serious begins. Check kit. Go through the plan once more in my head. Identify the two or three things most likely to go sideways and think briefly about how I'd respond. Then stop. Draw a line under the preparation and switch into execution mode. The thinking is done. Now you just work.
The other thing that helps, and I suspect this is true of most people in this line of work, is focusing on what you can control and genuinely letting go of what you can't. That sounds straightforward. It isn't. It takes a long time to actually be able to do it rather than just say it. But once it clicks it changes how you operate. You stop burning energy on variables you have no influence over and you put that energy into the variables you do.
Fear doesn't go away. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that experience makes you fearless, because that's nonsense. What experience does is give you a working relationship with it. You know what it feels like, you know what it's telling you, and you know how to keep moving regardless.
There's also something else, something harder to articulate. When you've been in situations where things were genuinely uncertain, where the outcome wasn't guaranteed, and you've come through the other side, you carry that with you. Not as arrogance, nothing like that. More as a quiet kind of confidence. You've met the fear before. You know you can keep going when it shows up.
That's about as much as I can put into words on this one. Some of it you'd only really understand if you've been there.
Ollie