Lessons in resilience from SAS Who Dares Wins star
How can you face and overcome your fears? How do you remain positive if you’re stuck in a negative mindset? And what’s the best way of dealing with life’s biggest challenges?
These are just some of the many questions which SAS Who Dares Wins star Sean Anthony Sherwood has been tackling with Telford College students.
He has been holding a series of workshops with students on the college’s automotive and construction courses, designed to show them how to boost their resilience skills.
The workshops have covered a wide range of topics including dealing with adversity, understanding failure and how to respond, social emotional communication, facing fear, exposing fear – and repeating the process.
Sports teacher Sean reached the final of the sixth series of Channel 4 show SAS Who Dares Wins and is now a motivational speaker and behaviour and engagement role model.
He was invited back to deliver the workshops following a successful and popular talk he gave last year as part of Telford College’s ‘wellbeing week’.
He said: “You’ll never ever overcome a fear if you hide away from it. Your fear could be heights, confined spaces, it could be failure, it could be not getting on with somebody – whatever it is, the only way you will come close to overcoming it is by exposing it.”
His message to the Telford College students was: “Thank you to all who took part. Continue to grow, continue to develop – this is how we evolve and become the best version of ourselves.
“The feedback has been overwhelming, and this is the reason the platform has grown so much.”
Sean grew up in the Moss Side district of Manchester to an Irish father and a Jamaican mother. Where he lived, witnessing violence and hearing shootings was a normal, regular occurrence for him.
His father spent 10 years in prison and he moved with his mother from a multicultural area to a predominately white community.
As a result, he suffered extreme racism which he never told anyone about. To combat the abuse, he would pretend to wash his bike with bleach but instead would scrub the bleach on his arms to lighten his skin tone.
Reflecting on his time on SAS Who Dares Wins, Sean said: “The experience for me was by far one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.
“Physically and mentally, my mind, body and soul was taken to its depth. This is what makes it unique!
“I’m incredibly grateful for everything I’ve learned and whole heartedly returned to civilian life a better person than I was before I started the course.”
