Chevy Rough: On Failure
Performance and mindfulness coach, Chevy Rough, lets us in on his experience with anger and self-destruction, where it took him, and what he learned from it
words by Chevy ROUGH & Will HALBERT
In a social climate that practically forces us to present ourselves as high flying and perpetually motivated, it pays to be honest and open about our failures and how they affect us. It’s important to understand that failure doesn’t define us, but that it’s often a necessary part of a longer process, and almost always a learning experience. Chevy Rough talks us through the stresses of success and the unforeseen calamities of raising a dog. EJ
Fatherhood was – and remains – one of my biggest fears in life. My red thread of self-destruction goes back nearly 25 years, to when my old man left the family home. He was an angry (dare I say lost) dude on occasion, but I was his doting son who craved his attention, and when he left for Bermuda overnight, my path of destruction was set.
In my twenties, I fuelled the abandonment and anger with drink and drugs, until a moment of clarity one Christmas morning, surrounded by coke and wrapping paper, nudged me in a new direction. I found runn-ing, running ignited change, change led to a new career in well- being, and that new career led to me being on the BBC. In 2017, I was tasked with coaching ten mentally-diverse and beautiful humans to the London Marathon. ‘Mind over Marathon’ was a roaring success, however, my health wasn’t. After 6 months of filming and giving my all, I took my first antidepressant, as the end credits rolled.
Over the following months, I stepped back from any responsibility as I navigated chronic stress from years of abuse, changing careers, starting a business and then comm- itting my all to the TV project. On the quiet days, I realised how lonely I was, but my anxiety stopped me from wanting to hang out with humans, so I had a brainwave: I’ll get a dog! Apparently, they’re ‘good for your mental health’. Sadly, I didn’t read the warning label first: it doesn’t apply to puppies.
If you take one thing away from this story, let it be this: puppies will unearth all your shit, and you need to be ready to face it head-on. Lose the dreamy visions of sunny, daytime walks and prepare to take a ride into your soul as you ponder the end result of tying him up somewhere and never coming back. ‘Someone will find him, he’ll be fine,’ you think. ‘But he’s chipped, damn it,’ you quickly remember.
Within weeks of getting little Dudley, I started to refer to my house as Guantanamo Bay. I’d often sit staring at him in his crate, pondering who was actually in the cage, me or him. He quickly became known as the “Hammer of Hither Green,” “The Weapon,” and generally a complete mistake on my behalf. The dark clouds came back in force and then the worst happened.
Red mist, something that scares me to my very core. I’d spent years putting my arms around the angry young man who had kicked the shit out of himself and the world, for so long. I can’t remember exactly why it happened; I just remember snapping and my voice scaring Dudley to his core. As he backed into a corner, I backed up through the years of pain to be confronted again by the trauma of my past. I was my father in that moment, the man I had promised I would never be. I had failed.
Over the coming months, I began to pull away more and more, keeping dog father duties to a minimum and fighting reasons to blame him for my sadness. My wife sensed it, and it began to cause ripples in our home. Then good news came, I had been offered a consulting role that would involve a lot of travel. Finally, I could bring the conversation of rehoming him to the table as a benefit for him, and not me.
At this point, you need to know that we are all, in part, sums of our previous experiences. These experiences get filed away in the subconscious and are continually being referenced to inform us of how we think we should think and feel, when new situations arise. My wife’s experience of fatherhood was also one of abandonment, so when Sophie saw my shit playing out, it caused pain. Thankfully, I had come far enough in my journey to be able to recognise that, and it was her sadness that flicked a switch.
My biggest fear is not being angry like my dad; it is walking away from my children as he did. So here I was, living out that fear, I had created my own destiny and was getting ready to repeat history. I was trying to walk away from the representation of fatherhood in my life.
It was that moment that ignited a crucial principle in my coaching methodology: Lean in. As humans, we want to avoid pain, we hunt out safety through the path of least resistance, thinking stress is the enemy and living in fear of failure, worried we are not enough and stressing over what others will think. The truth is, we have to stress test a system to identify its flaws, only then can we keep working on making it stronger. To do this, we have to lean into failure again, and again and again. Making it a deep practice, where hopefully a new skill will form the other side, through time, patience and resilience. Through working with Dudley, he’s setting me up to be a good dad to my children. One who can show love and not walk away when the going gets tough.
From that day onward, I swore to myself I would burn the boats and never look back. Working through the failures with Dudley has set me up for fatherhood, and for that I owe the little dude everything. It’s not all roses every day, but that just means I get to put more reps in where it counts, setting me up for the future.
Thank you, Dudley x CR
