S3 Ep 80 Aaron Hill: Finding Peace

What if calm doesn’t live on the far side of your to-do list? 

I share hard-won lessons from coaching two high performers on the edge of overwhelm and a deceptively simple practice that helped me respond instead of react at the dinner table.

From there, we take a seat at the theatre—steep rows, exposed sightlines, and a powerful performance from a friend who becomes his character night after night. That backstage glimpse opens a wider question: what’s the real cost of the roles we play at work and at home? We unpack masks as tools that protect and perform, and how they turn into heavy armour when we forget to take them off.  

Press play, try the questions at the end, and let me know: where did you notice peace today? If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review—it helps others find us and keeps the conversation going.

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Share These Reflections
• 1:09 The Illusion Of Peace
• 3:16 Fatherhood And Reactive Stories
• 5:21 Choosing Calm Without Control
• 6:45 A Solo Trip To The Theatre
• 8:08 The Cost Of Becoming A Character
• 10:06 Masks We Wear And Their Price
• 11:05 Permission Over Perfection

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to Forge and Resilience, real conversations for high performers facing transition. I'm Erin Hill, and join me as I talk with people about challenge change and the adversity they faced in life so we can learn from their experiences, insights, and stories. Today on Forge and Resilience, I wanted to take the opportunity to share a few insights from a couple of coaching sessions that that took place over the last week and the week before that. And also a personal insight from a trip to the theatre the other week. This also happens to be coming about because I'm having some technical difficulties with uh some editing and a flaw in in the audio of a recent episode, and my my mate Carl Lifelong Radley is still working on that. So get your finger out, Carl. I don't like doing these solo episodes, to be honest. Nevertheless, it is a great opportunity to talk about a couple of uh learnings that that that I took from these coaching sessions, even though I was delivering them. And that is around peace. A lot of the time we talk about it or make the assumption it's something that we'll reach once the dust settles, but from both the guys that I coached, it's not always in the absence of noise or in the dwindling demands or or or pressure. And they were both trying to create the space to wonder what it's like to stay steady within, to have a presence or awareness, irregardless of what's going on externally or in work. What made this poignant is both of these guys have experienced their own journey with with burnout. And so it felt like a very fine line that they were treading. I'm not insinuating they were close to burnout, but pressure doesn't always feel nice, especially if we're aware aware of it or have been there before. And I guess in their own separate ways they were asking, How can I fight peace amongst the storm? So that's the first part of today's reflection, the illusion of peace. And then I'll talk about my trip to the theatre. So in past careers, I've been quite a few situations where peace has felt really quite a long way away. But what makes my reflection on this interesting is that I'm not sure at that time if I had the awareness, the vocabulary or the the ability to actually process that and consciously choose a more peaceful or grounded response. I was too young, there's too much going on, and I like I said, I didn't have the self-awareness or development to be able to catch that, and that's absolutely fine. So to tell you a story from Band Camp doesn't really feel quite true. What feels closer to home for me personally is being a father to two young kids. When my wife often works night shifts at the hospital, and especially when they're younger, trying to tap into something and be the a grounded father when I'm feeling anything but has been a challenge to come from that place of peace, to come from a place of knowing rather than a reaction, especially at the end of a long day. And it's not that that to be peaceful or to find peace is everything has to be perfect. For me, it's about catching the story that I'm telling myself about what what I'm making this situation mean with kids crying, arguing, or dinner getting launched across the table when they're younger, and also just recognizing what is coming up for myself, not necessarily suppressing it, but catching it, accepting it, and at the right time being able to process or deal with it. And for me, that's what really helped ground me with that sense of calm, catching the story, being aware of it, and just recognizing actually part of what uh the story was was making the the kids and my ability to calm them or or parent them or to even feed them at times, not making that mean anything, that that is just a story and be able to step back from that. It was just that, stepping back from that, and sometimes that literally meant physically getting up out of the room, walking away, taking a breath, and then coming back so I can respond rather than react. And as I was coaching these guys, they were coming to their own conclusions. Both of them recognize that peace isn't on the other side of the achievements or order, but that maybe it's just something that has to be noticed and drawn out, something that has to be created from wherever we are stood, or whatever is going on in our lives. But yeah, we can build systems and routines and control mechanisms to engineer calm, but but what if that shows up when we just let go? When we can take a step back, even if that's just for a moment. The illusion is that once we fix, quote unquote, everything will finally rest. As most of us know that that work, that journey never really ends. So we'll probably keep postponing what it is we're seeking in this case, peace. Or can we choose to come from that place? So for me, as a father sat at the dinner table with fish is usually the best one to get in thrown, isn't it? Because nobody really likes to have to eat that when they're younger. It's coming from that place of peace, not necessarily trying to create perfect peace. And the reflection I offer you as I start to close out this first piece is what would peace look like for you if nothing physically changed around around you? And so the other day, after quite a while, I I went to my theatre. Unfortunately, my wife couldn't come, so I decided to go on my own anyway. And I'm not gonna lie, I sometimes I felt a bit of a throbber in the past doing those sorts of things, and that feeling was still there. But again, ironically, I could catch that, not recognize it as true, just just as a story that I happened to be telling myself and let go of it. What was interesting about this theatre, it's almost like the stage was in the middle. So if you imagine a football pitch with the goals at either end, and it's surrounded by seating, this theatre was like it didn't have any seating behind the goals. That's where the actors came in and out, and I was facing another part of the crowd. We were sat opposite each other. Not a particularly big stage, but it's very, very steep. I couldn't help but feel really quite exposed. I set way above everybody else, but the people behind me were even higher. So I had a quite even though I'm like four or five rows back, I had a the feeling of being really quite high, quite open, quite vulnerable. I happen to know the the act, the lead actor who's also appeared on this podcast, Francesc, and it's always interesting watching somebody perform that I know in past I would get really quite nervous for them. Um and that wasn't so much the case with this. I was I was able to be present for the for the show. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Um it was really quite interesting and challenging from a language perspective, which means I didn't actually get all of it, at least I didn't intellectually, but my heart definitely did. There's a lot of things that really landed quite easily, or that that landed quite heavily and brought on quite a lot of emotion, which I was surprised about. It reminds me how far ahead of our our heart and our intuition goes if we let them. But after the show, I was I spoke to the actor very briefly, or I spoke to Francesc very briefly, um, congratulated him on a great performance. Um very quick chat before I made my tracks, but he he remarked at how exhausted he was from each show. And I think they do uh a show every night for around a month on this particular play. Um, just how exhausted it is and how demanding the acting is, and physically I can see that they're moving around quite a lot, but it's the emotional part that there's what's incredible for me is that certain actors are so bought in and infested into their character, they become them. And I've I still only can grasp at that. I can't fully hold it, but I could definitely sense it. In fact, even in the podcast, Francesc Francesc talked about the the weight of playing a a suicidal war uh uh character, the emotional baggage that he had from stepping into that character night after night after night and the needing to recover. And it got me thinking about acting, the price of acting. Whilst he is not that character, he becomes that character for a few hours. He walks like him, talks like him, thinks like him, behaves like him, and that that can come at a price. And it got me thinking about the masks that we all wear in everyday life and how exhausting that can be when we're putting on a brave face, if that's anything what we feel like, or when we're pretending we're happy and grounded, even though we're feeling incredibly sad and lost. I guess every mask starts with a purpose and that's to protect or perform, to lead, give an impression. But I guess sometimes over time we can forget to take it off or give our real face time to show. I'm not suggesting we have to bring everything all the time to work or express everything fully and openly to everybody, but definitely creating the space to let what is present with us breathe, to let it be heard, to air it, to convey it. I guess in my past, it's been exhausting trying to set stay on course with a pretense, but the end all I did is really distance myself from myself and therefore from others. They didn't really know who they were talking to or what character they were gonna get. So maybe this isn't an invitation to us to drop the mask entirely, but to ask ourselves who am I really underneath all of this? Where can I openly express myself? And so the mask has its place, but it also has a poor price just with peace. Authenticity isn't necessarily found in perfection, but much more closer to permission, to rest, to feel, to be. It's not in the absence of struggle, but the courage to walk our own paths, to stay slightly truer to our own journey. And if this reflection has landed with you today, then take a moment in the middle of your busy or noisy day to ask yourself what if peace is already here? What would today look like if I came from a place of peace?