Approach production.

Welcome to Real Crime with Adam Shand I'm your host, Adam Shann.

It's been my privilege over the years to tell stories that reflect the amazing durability of human beings.

What people can survive when they have no choice never ceases to amaze me, and also how they live with the effects those moments have on them for the rest of their lives.

My guest today is in that cohort.

It was May fifth, nineteen ninety four and mister McManus was carrying out an arrest warrant on Grosser.

Derek McManus was a South Australian police officer, a member of the elite Special Tasks and Rescue Group, the Star Group.

It's the police squad so secretive few know about it.

He was a specialist sniper diver trained by the military elite Special Air Services Regiment the SAS.

In counter terrorist TAC May five, nineteen ninety four, Derek and his colleagues were carrying out an arrest warrant on a crook named Tony Grosser, who failed to attend court.

As he approached Ross's house, Derek was.

Shot fourteen times in less than five seconds with a high powered semi automatic rifle.

StarForce officers used to rescue helicopters down to the call of a wounded police officer.

Gunman's hold up in a farmhouse.

Two kilometers office stirred by way and is keeping police at bay.

Amazingly, two and a half years later, he returned to full duties.

His story literally epitomizes durability.

Since retiring, Derek has become an international speaker and trainer.

He provides insights and the tools for people to go beyond brasilience to durability and create sustained optimum performance.

And it's my pleasure to welcome you to the real crime Studio, Derek get.

Eight, Adam, absolute pleasure to be here with you.

I lot to start there.

We can't go past that moment May five, nineteen ninety four.

You've told the story a couple of times over the years, but I don't think anybody who's hasn't been in that situation understands how time stands still, what happens in those moments.

Yeah.

Absolutely, And there are a couple of moments in experience where time literally stood still.

There was the five seconds where the bullets were hitting me, seemed to take about thirty seconds to a minute, and it was essentially that pace of time.

But for me, it's a surreal experience.

I had prepared myself physically, mentally, and emotionally, and that's one of the most important parts.

The emotionally having some anticipation I'm going into Star Groups special Task and Rescue, sniper diver trained by the Essays and counter terrorism.

There was a reality for me that I may be shot and injured, I may be shot and killed.

Five years prior to the shooting, I had a conversation with my wife and I said, going in here and maybe shot and ninjured, maybe shot and killed.

If I die, what will your life look like?

Because I wanted her to be on the same page as me, facing this reality of if it does happen, what's it going to feel like for her?

So we had that discussion, and I love going into what that discussion was and how it handed out and what it meant.

But we had that discussion.

I then prepared myself and said, if I get shot and I don't die, what's going to happen in my mind and what's going to happen in my body?

And I knew that they would be diametrically opposed.

My mind would want to take over my body and my body would want to just collapse.

And I said, what's that opposition going to be?

And how do I actually manage it so I can get the best result that I want.

I had to reflect on other experiences that I've had.

Now, most people will tell you they've reflected on the moments that were really good for them, that they've done really well.

I reflected on the times and I have stuffed up as well.

Why did I stuff up?

How did I stuff up?

How can I improve upon that?

But then, what have I done well?

How can I take that?

So in nineteen eighty seven, which is seven years prior to the shooting, I was in another incident where somebody tried to shoot us.

We actually got into a wrestling match.

Because it was so close quarters, we didn't get our gun down.

We got into a wrestling match and the gun wouldn't be fired because it had to be cocked first.

It was broken, so it had to be cocked.

As we were wrestling, He's called out to his girlfriend, cocked the gun.

She's cocked the gun, and as she's cocked the gun, I put my thumb on the hammer of the gun to hold the hammer back so it couldn't be fired.

Now, as I was preparing to go into this star group, I've gone, if I do get shot, how was I able to stay calm and rational enough to think about that at the time and do that without any emotion and come out of that and be able to be lighthearted joking while still being extremely serious about the circumstances.

And how can I take that forward?

So that's what I reflect on try to going into the shooting.

And at the time the shooting happened, I think.

It was Mike Tyson who said that everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face.

Correct, what's the difference between the planning and the reality in that moment?

So for me, in my mind, I'd already been punched in the face.

I went into it with visualization, and we talked a lot about visualization for business these days.

I went into it for this circumstance.

So when I said what will my mind be doing?

What will my body doing?

I went into visualization mode and I put myself in that situation, and I felt it emotionally.

If I'm being overwhelmed, if my body's doing this absolute perfection is going to look like this.

Absolute chaos is going to look like this.

And I lived that scenario, and I said, if it turns out this way, how do I influence it to get it back towards this?

And because I'd gone through this visualization with such reality, and I'd never been trained to do this, this is something I just did intuitively.

But it did happen.

There was a moment immediately after the shooting where I'd been shot.

I fell to the ground, I rolled away, I got up despite massive injuries.

I leant against the wall and something else happened, and very happy to go into this story in greater detail, but my forearm had been broken in two places, so when I leant against the wall, my hand has literally folded back along my forearm.

And I was so well relaxed, so prepared for this, that I looked at it and I'm gone, damn, this is not a good day, and then got back on with doing what I needed to do.

So virtually in my mind I had been punched in the face.

It still came as a shock when it did happen, but I had the plan and I was able to implement it.

Now Mike Tyson, everybody's got a plan toil they get punched in the face.

He'd been punched in the face so often he knew exactly what to do, so when he got punched in the face, he came back at him.

And the classic example he generally talks about is the black belt karate.

You know, they've done all the scenario punching, and they've done the shadow boxing, they've done the virtual fights and all that sort of stuff.

But in reality on the street, when somebody punches them in the face and they're not expecting it, a lot of them just go, oh my god, what do I do now?

Because it comes unexpected.

This was not unexpected for me.

It's like your average uniform member who might go there through their whole career and not pull out their firearm.

Correct they go to the range for a little while each year, do their regulation number of shots, but too often when they get in the conflict situation and they've got to draw their weapon, the first six shots or most of the shots go wide anyway.

So most police officers are not prepared for this scenario.

And we saw this when we talked about your story.

It immediately draws comparisons with Desi Freeman in Porpunka here in Victoria and how those members went into that scenario.

The coroner will have his say and probably the Supreme Court as well about the decisions.

That were made.

But you've been on the ground exactly in that scenario approaching somebody.

Grossa was a delusional person, had a persecution complex.

He was deeply paranoid against authority, and you sort of knew that it was going to be a high risk situation.

Describe what happened.

So we did know it was going to be a high risk situation.

This is the third job that I'd been involved with him because when the cib were investigating him five years prior to this, and this is obviously thirty five years ago, he actually said any copy who comes near my place is going to get shot.

So we had a hint that he could be violent, but we had two jobs with him where he did absolutely nothing.

But that didn't mean we were complacent, and that's why our Star group to go and arrest him on this occasion because he'd failed to appear in court.

So we went to the front door of the house wearing full police blue uniform and flatfests.

We knocked on the door.

There is a YouTube video of this, so you can get to it via my website or just go to my YouTube channel.

You can see how I was approaching the house.

You can see how's knocking on the door and calling out to him.

Mister grossol, we want to talk to you.

There's no answer.

However, we've got a sniper sitting in the bush for the last twenty minutes.

We know he's inside.

We know he to be answering the door.

We knocked again, We call again, again, no answer.

We always go in with a very strict, very disciplined and thought through plan for what we're going to do, and everybody is briefed on exactly what their requirements are, but we always have them in the side of our mind.

If there is a better opportunity, and we see it on the moment, then we can take it.

Everybody knows how we're each other train.

We can roll into it.

Immediately.

As we were knocking on the door, I looked down the side of the house and five steps away from where I am there's a glass sliding door.

Now this is going to present us with a better opportunity, more efficient, more effective.

I went down the side to have a look at this door.

I was going to make an assessment.

Come back five steps, tell the sergeant, hey, there's an opportunity over here.

As I got within two feet of that door, he happened to be standing in an opportune place where he was waiting for us to come through his front door.

And if we'd come through his front door, he was way him to shoot whoever was first, second, third in.

However, from that position he could also see me as I approached this side door, and he just turned and started to fire, and he fired eighteen times and hit me fourteen times.

Not all bullets and not all penetrated into my body, but they were good, solid hits.

One was a piece of shrapnel in my right wrist and that severed an archery, so I count that as a significant hit.

Another one broke my forearm in two places, severed an archery in there, obviously a significant hit.

Two bullets into my stomach lost forty five centimeters of bow.

Two in my left thigh, missed the femeral artery by the width of a piece of paper.

One went through my right achilles tendon and severed eighty percent of the thickness, and so I got and stood with twenty percent of my achilles tendon still holding together.

And I still only have twenty percent of my achilles tendon now.

And the other ones either hit the ceramic plate and didn't penetrate, hit a piece of equipment on my thigh, or they were either bullets or shrapnel that just cut through the skin enough to need stitching.

But it was hit fourteen times.

And then I was dealing with two sevadar trees, massive life threatening injuries to other parts of my body, and I fired back.

I managed to roll away, I managed to get to my feet despite those injuries.

Stagger around the corner, have that moment of reflection and lightheartedness which breaks at tension and allows us to be more created.

Then I went around the corner, I collapsed to the ground again because I didn't have the energy or the strength to be able to hold myself up.

And I was lying on my back for the next three hours waiting for the boys to come and get me.

And for the three hours I was lying on the ground, I had every confidence they would be there as soon as they safely could, and I was fully conscious for that three hours.

And the siege raged around you Sapaul admitted to firing seventeen hundred and sixty rounds in that exchange.

YEP, amazing, and he fired similar He fired about two thousand rounds as well.

So for the entire three hours that I was on the ground, he was just firing, reloading a thirty round magazine, and firing again.

For the entire three hours I was lying on the ground, and ironically, when he was shooting, I felt comfortable because when he was shooting, I was able to identify where he was in the house by where the sound was coming from.

The majority of the time he was in the roof of the house in the attic, and so I was comfortable.

From that place, he could not see me or shoot me.

So while he was shooting and up there, I was able to relax.

When he wasn't shootings, when my mind started racing again, where is he going?

Is he coming out?

Is he searching for me?

Is he hunting me?

And I had to use every bit of strength in my mindset to be able to control my panic, control my shock, keep my breathing in control, and slow down my heart rate so that I didn't bleed out.

Through these two seven archeries all the rest of the injuries.

That would be a real possibility.

So you had the presence of mind at that moment to realize, if I stay calm here, I'm going to survive.

If I panic, I'm dead absolutely, And that came from the visualization beforehand, saying what will my body want to do and what will that impact be, what will my mind want to be doing, and what do I know I should be doing?

And how do I get from there to here?

And you know, it's the classic where am I now?

And where do I want to go to and what do I need to do to get there?

But that came from the visualization beforehand.

So what happened next in this siege?

So I was lying on the ground for three hours, and to give you a little bit of an insight into what was happening in my mind, I had every moment of reality saying that with the injuries that I've got, I'm going to have very serious consequences coming forward, and knowing that it could cause death.

There's no ways about it.

I could die from what I've got here.

But when I looked at the worst case scenario if I was to get out of this alive, I started thinking I may spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, and I had to try and figure out how I'm going to make that interesting.

And this is while I'm lying on the ground and he's firing and shooting, and my blood is pulling on the ground next to me, and I'm starting to think, how am I going to make life interesting if I'm going to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair?

And I thought to myself, I played basketball, I could maybe play wheelchair basketball.

I like to tell people I've got a bit of an ego, don't shy away from it.

And my ego kicked in, and I'm gone, do you know something, I'm damn good at basketball.

I may be able to make the Paralympic team.

And the Paralympic team they are traveling the world and I'm not traveling the world at the moment.

Actually, there could be a bonus in this.

Now.

I don't know if you know anybody in the Special Forces.

I'm sure you do.

If a copper has got an ego, this big, ours is this big?

That ego kicked in And while I'm lying on the ground, my body's closing down.

He's shooting blood pulling on the ground.

I start thinking to myself, if I make the Paralympic team add something to what they're already doing, we may be able to make the Paralympic finals.

I may end up with a gold medal.

It's a good way of distracting yourself.

It's a good way of distracting myself.

But I've analyzed what I was doing there and I've now put it into a model and it's the first step in five drivers for success, and that was creating a sense of optimism.

Where I was was not a great place.

You talked about preparing your wife for this possible eventuality.

Yep, I've got no doubt that news is spreading pretty quickly.

What's going on there.

Yeah, she doesn't know that your would, I presume, But were you thinking about her and your kids?

I was thinking about my pa.

It's a contentious point between my wife and I because I will admit I was thinking about my children and it wasn't a lot of thought about her.

I've been open about that.

But the one thing that I wanted, and I identified this to her five years beforehand, I said, if worst case scenario happens, and we discussed the fact I may end up in a wheelchair, and I said, even if i end up in a wheelchair, so long as I'm able to interact with my children, I'll be happy.

So this is about accepting responsibility for choice, for behaviors, for consequence, but also the future after consequence, right, and that conversation, anything better than death is a bonus as long as I'm able to interact with my kids.

And for the three hours I was lying on the ground, it's the one thing that gave me the drive, the determination, the focus to keep on fighting.

I wanted to be there with them for their birthdays, their weddings, their trials, their tribulations, just be there to interact with them.

And that is definitely what kept me focused and driven to keep fighting.

Because lying in the pool of blood broken limbs, it'd be tempting to feel sorry for oneself, but that wouldn't have helped you.

Now and again, I go back to those four steps of responsibility, and I love talking to corporates about that.

Except responsibility for my choice, my behaviors, my consequences, both good and bad.

Going into stargroup, sensational life, all the boys toy you could ever ask for, but also the chance that I may be shot and injured or may be shot and killed.

I accepted responsibility for that, and I accept responsibility for the future if it does happen.

Worst case scenario, I may end up in a wheelchair?

What will that look like?

And if we can get people to start thinking this way every time they make a choice about what behavior is going to take, then we can design better outcomes.

The challenge we have personally and in business is that people go, oh, listen, I'm going to do this.

I hope it works out well because it's worked out well for other people, so it should work out well for me, rather than going to know something.

We don't have the finance to fund failure, we don't have the expertise to be able to do this.

So taking this opportunity or this chance may actually destroy us.

We need to say no.

And if we can get people to just take on those four steps of responsibility, it can change the way people perform and also help them to take ownership moving forward than going oh, it's not me, I didn't do it.

I'm not going to tell anybody.

Let's take ownership of it and move forward positively.

You certainly did.

One who wasn't taking responsibility.

Was Tony Grosser?

In fact, later on when he's in jail, Yeah, he finds God and he talks about the fact that it was a miracle that I wasn't killed, forgetting the fact that he was the one that precipitated that situation.

How was he not killed?

I mean, I think it's a credit to Sapol that he wasn't killed and taken alive what happened.

I completely agree with you.

It's a credit to Sapold.

It's an absolute credit to Star Group because most people go your mates must have been so angry with him, they would have taken him out in an instant.

And it is a credit to the professionalism of Star Group, and that's how we are taught and driven and managed.

But certainly, while I was on the ground, if he had presented himself as a target and he was still threatening me, it would have been like that and he would have been shot, disabled and whatever that might have meant for him.

But he would have been disabled so they could get into me earlier.

But he didn't present himself as a target.

He hid.

He was very, very tactical himself.

And when I was taken out and the siege went on for another thirty eight hours after I was taken out longer siege in South Australia.

When he did present, there was certainly an opportunity that if somebody had been vindictive and malicious, they could have injured him at that time.

But again it goes back to the professionalism of Sapole and of Star Group that he was treated with the greatest respect because we knew that anything that we did would endanger any future court proceedings and it's just inhumane to be able to do those things.

We have a responsibility to treat everybody the best way we can to get the right outcome.

Because no matter what he had done, if he was shot and killed, that would have been reviewed frame by frame in slow motion in the Supreme Court.

And the fact that you were wounded wouldn't have prevented people being he held accountable on your side.

No, absolutely not.

And as you take action like that without true justification, it becomes murder.

There is no two ways about that.

That is very omnipresent in our minds in everything we do, that everything has to be done legally, morally, socially responsibly to make sure that everybody has the best outcome, and people are held account by the courts, not by an individual.

So what happened in the end, So he stayed in the house for forty one hours or er and Sapole, how do I say this succinctly, Sapole essentially coached him out.

He became exhausted.

They presented an opportunity for him.

Well, they actually knocked down half the side of the roof so that he was completely exposed, but that still took another three hours.

He came out, he was arrested, assessed by psychologists, psychiatrists, and as you strived in the beginning, it was a good deal of paranoia, but completely saying otherwise, and he was taken to court.

It took us two and a half years to get him to court for the first trial, and that was a trial that lasted about a month long as barrister represented him.

He was found guilty twenty two years jail, eighteen years non parole.

He appealed and won the appeal, so we went back to court another two and a half years later, so we're now talking five years after the shooting, and this time he didn't have a barrister.

He couldn't get representation and he decided to represent himself.

I was in the witness box for five days, being questioned and ridiculed and harassed by the person who had shot me fourteen times.

Absolutely exhausted at the end of it.

The trial lasted three months.

At that time it was the longest trial ever in South Australia.

Twenty three years jail, eighteen years non parole.

Again, the penalty and conviction was upheld.

He appealed, appealed, appealed, went all the way to the High Court.

Both penalty and conviction were both upheld and he spent twenty two years in jail.

This happened thirty one years ago, so for the last nine years he has been walking amongst us.

Yes, he was released in twenty seventeen, but there was monitoring after that.

But Yes, that experience you describe of going to court and the frustrations of that, and it's just an endless cycle of appearances and things often contributes to the development of post traumatic stress disorder.

Yes, reliving it over and over and it's usually not the one event.

It's the drip drip in the bucket and these sorts of things.

I mean, you're back at work within two and a half years back at the Star group, Yes, how did you approach that whole elongated process that you've faced.

Well, my thinking of taking responsibility and relation to the shooting carried forward into managing my mental health moving forward after the shooting.

So part of that visualization is I said to myself, how is this going to affect me mentally?

Emotionally?

Nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks.

These were all reality that happened for other people.

If they do happen for me, how will I manage it?

So five days after the shooting, through my hand in there and said, get me a psych.

I want to talk to a psych.

It took Sapole three months to get a psych to me.

That's another discussion altogether.

But when I spoke to that psych, I ran through what my thinking was be the visualization, the conversations that I had, the responsibility that i'd taken, the future thoughts that I had, the fact that I'd had nightmares but they weren't recurring, the fact that I'd had bad dreams but they were always good outcomes, even though they were struggles during the dream.

I'd had panic attacks, but they weren't recurring, and I was open about all of this and because of the way my mindset has been set up in that taking responsibility and looking future focused, the Pike said, Derek, psychologically, you're doing absolutely perfectly.

There is no PTSD.

Yes, you've had some effects, but it is not PTSD.

And I didn't need any ongoing therapy because he said the way my mind works and my openness too are having challenges and changes in my life.

If I did need psych I would come back and see him, and I was completely open to that.

So I'm very, very fortunate that what happened to me was actually post traumatic growth, not PTSD.

Right, How interesting you know you're so organized about this.

A year after you had that experience, I was in a township in South Africa and we got carjacked six guys with guns who were drunk, and they wanted to kill us.

They attained us for half an hour.

And I'm the son of a psychiatrist, right, And I've been in that stree to hundred times in dreams, right, hundreds of times, getting shot, not getting shot, getting away, remaining the all kinds of stuff, kids appearing to me, all kinds of things.

I never had any therapy whatsoever.

And I should have.

I wi't look back, and I realized should have.

I was trying to be tough and get back to work.

I was a free large journalist.

I didn't have time for that.

But you decided that you were going, and much against the grain of those years.

By the way, oh yeah, absolutely four.

They weren't doing that sort of stuff as course as I do now.

Certainly not the tough guys.

The tough guys were not doing it.

And I say that inverted Commas and I don't know where that came from.

I can only put it down to my parenting that made me open to that vulnerability.

Intuitively, I knew it was what I needed to do.

But it's not because I felt weak.

I didn't feel like I was breaking.

It was just I wanted that insight.

They've got more expertise than me.

They've seen people who have dealt with it badly.

They've also seen people who have dealt with it well, and I wanted to pick their brains about what the experience might be for me.

And again, it's responsibility for choice, behavior, consequence and the future afterwards.

Here I am I've been shot.

This is not my choice, it's my circumstance.

But what does the future look like, what are the behaviors from here?

What's the experience I'm going to have?

What might the good, what might the bad be?

And if it does happen, how do I handle it myself?

The best outcome?

And the reading research that I've done recently, most people see that you either have PTSD or you have a good outcome.

The research that's coming out now is they coexist.

You can have PTSD but still have good insights and good life afterwards.

Even though you have PTSD.

PTSD is not isolated and a conviction to a terrible life afterwards.

You can have some PTSD and still have good life as well.

And so that research, I think it's going to open up the minds of people dealing with PTSD from military or emergency services or any form of PTSD.

I have a friend who got PTSD from a very bad step parenting.

She was a step parenting.

It wasn't pretty and she's got PTSD from that.

And the model can help anybody going through those challenges.

Hmmm.

I think I should go for some therapy now having this because I still see the nine come and see me afterwards, Adam, I still see.

That nine mil Barrel pointed at me, and I can still see our sound records.

We were shooting television and sound recorders, negotiating for our lives.

He was from that area and their attitude was we should just kill these people and take their car.

Fools, what are you doing in the South African township.

I think that has profoundly affected me.

But I think everyone's life, whether a police officer or a journalist.

So if you're out there in the wilds, there's going to be trauma.

But I think your attitude about preparing oneself for it and recognizing it and having a plan is a good one.

Absolutely.

Again, the research that I'm doing shows an insight into the fact that within every eighteen month period in our life, there is some sort of trauma.

Now this is not a physical trauma.

It might be the hot water service bursts when you're having a party.

It might be the children have to go to hospital.

It might be the car breaks down.

It might be you have a breakup in your relationship divorce.

Eighteen month period, there is some sort of major incident which could be traumatic, or it could be just do you know something, this has happened, let's manage it.

Let's move on.

I think there are too many people who go I want a good life and I don't want anything bad to happen.

But let's be honest.

There are highs, there are lows, and we need to just be able to go, Okay, this is a low period.

What can we do to manage it.

We are not the first people on the face of this earth.

We have been here for millennia and there has always been highs and lows and challenges.

No matter who you are, no matter how much money you've got, how much bad parenting you've been exposed to, We've all had it.

So let's accept the reality that we are going to face challenges, have some idea of what we're going to deal with, some idea of how it's going to affect us feelings, emotions, and some idea of how we're going to be able to manage it.

It doesn't mean that we're not going to suffer.

It doesn't mean we're not going to be upset, doesn't mean that we're not going to be going, oh my god, this is terrible, but we can proactively prepare to manage it.

I've been talking to a Grand Prix motorcycle racer who had a very serious accident, and he came back to racing and he found that he could never approach a corner the way he had previously.

He could never have that confidence and faith that there was nothing around the corner that was going to hit him or or clide into whatever.

How did you return to your service having gone through that experience and survived?

You know, this is something else that I absolutely love to talk about, is the choices we make and the circumstances we throw ourselves into.

I was able to go back to stargroup because I was absolutely passionate about that world.

I absolutely loved it.

But I didn't do it as a risk taker.

I did it as a risk manager, and there's a very different perspective and mindset around both of those.

The racing car driver going back into the racing and absolutely committing himself even though he didn't have faith, that is risk taking.

I went back in and I had staged introduction back in.

I went back into training to see whether I would balk or get scared, or what my actions would be in training, and our training is very realistic.

For anybody who's played paintball and knows that it hurts, come play with us.

We have high tech paintball, so our training is very realistic and I went back into that and absolutely loved it.

The first job that I went back to, I was in the outer courdon, way away from the action, and people were watching me.

I was watching me.

I then went to the innerccordon.

I then went to the arrest team.

The arrest team see the offender when he's brought out of their premises.

I then went to entry team.

And at every stage I was assessing myself, but I also knew and accepted and expected everybody else to be watching me and judging me as to how I was going to perform.

Now, most people would be intimidated by that.

You've got to trust me.

Why are you judging me?

No, I would be exactly the same, So that didn't intimidate me.

You've got to watch me.

And the thought in my head is if I balk at any stage, I'm out of there, because not only does it put my life in danger, it puts my partner's lives in danger as well, and we've got to think about everybody involved.

So it was very, very stage, but I was passionate about getting in there.

The conversations I like to have with people around.

That sort of stuff is in policing.

There are people in particular who get into child sex offender investigation and they find this becomes too overwhelming for them.

Oh my gosh, it's too bad.

But I can't leave because people think I'm weak, people will think I'm not good enough, people will judge me where They've got to say, do you know something this environment is not right for me.

I want to go and find something that I really enjoy, I'm passionate about, and go and do that.

But they stay there because they don't want to be judged or they don't want to feel weak themselves.

And unfortunately, I've had one friend who took his life because it all became too much for him.

And we need to make better decisions about what we're passion about.

Another example I quickly want to give you is I've got an accountant, and she is an absolutely beautiful lady.

She could never be a stary, she could never be on the end of a trigger and take someone's life if she needed to.

I can tell you right now if I became an accountant, it would send me round the twist.

Because she is passionate.

She stays up at night worrying about my numbers.

We need people to follow their passion because that's where they're going to be happy, and we need to be bold enough to go to know something.

I'm not enjoying this.

And so if at any stage I went back into stargroup and I said to myself, do you know this is too much?

I don't like this?

Or if a member of my family had said this is too much my family were more important than the job, I would have found a different passion.

It's one thing to have a near death experience, which you had, but it's also something else to be part of a team that takes a life and the impact that has on members.

Can you talk us through what that's like.

Have you been in that situation as well.

I've never had to take a life.

When I fired back at the guy who shot me, I did hit him with a bit of shrapnel that came from a brick, and there was a bullet that skipped across the lower back.

So I've certainly shot and hit someone, but I've never taken a life, and I've never been part of taking a life.

But again, this goes down to I've visualized the fact that if and this was in particular to dis job.

I'll give you that scenario.

As we approached the house, I was running through the scenario in my mind.

I know that his wife and two very young children were in the house, and if he started shooting, which was a real possibility, I was going to need to shoot back into the house.

And if I'm shooting at him and his wife or one of his children are standing near him, I may shoot them accidentally.

And I had to prepare myself.

If I shoot them, how am I going to feel?

How is it going to affect them?

And I'd already justified in my mind that I am trying to protect the lives of myself or my partners.

I'm trying to stop him if somebody else gets hit.

It is not something I'm doing deliberately, and that's going to affect me in a certain way.

But I needed to be able to be comfortable with that.

I took it even further that if I shot him and he had died and I ran into one of his children, when they turn eighteen twenty and they meet me and they approached me and they say, you killed my father.

I've had a terrible life as a result of that how am I going to feel eighteen years, twenty years from now?

And I'd run that through my mind and I felt like I was reasonably well prepared that I can sit comfortably with.

I was trying to do the right thing and responding to the behaviors of the offender, and it was him that had caused the situation I was responding to.

It have to take responsibility for I fired the shot.

I took the life of whoever it might have been.

But I had to prepare myself for what would it feel like?

How would I answer that twenty years down the track.

So I don't know where I get that mindset from, but I find that it is appropriate.

I work with kids in schools who are dealing with bullying, being excluded from friendship groups, dealing with learning activities.

I'm about to go and work with some MI five retired officers in London and deliver an executive retreat for how people can run their businesses in life better.

The philosophy that I'm coming up with by reflecting on what I did, is universally applicable and it could be applied to what can be judged as the most menial challenge.

But I like to say that kids going through bullying, kids going through being excluded.

Some parents go, oh, isn't it cute?

In five years time, they'll never remember it.

It really doesn't matter.

We don't have to deal with it too much.

I can tell you right now that is life and death to that five year old child that I have been excluded.

Oh my, it's the biggest thing that's happening to them.

It needs to be given the reality that they perceive it to be and then put into context and everything else.

But what I talked about these days is universally applicable, and I love putting it into scenarios for absolutely anybody.

Indeed, police officers and soldiers on that ilk use black humor to get through things.

Oh yeah, in your case, your colleagues had a nickname for you, which I think is I wouldn't say it to you, but I guess they could.

What was it had so many holes?

Well, I welcome anybody to be able to say it to me because I embraced the dark sense of humor as well.

And they certainly called me Sprinkler for a little while and after another drink of water.

It's just terrible image, but it's quite funny.

Somebody else came up with and it was a female police officer came up with the nickname of Donald, and I've gone away, Hang on, my name's Derek.

She's gone No.

From now on, it's Donald because you forgot to duck and the name has become creative.

And the thing I love is it is dark sense of humor, and it is light hard, and it does break tension, but nobody has done it disrespectfully, and they've always said in their minds, is Derek capable of managing this?

The other thing that I'd like to say about the dark sense of humor is I have seen too many police officers dark sense of humor absolutely crack up laughings, crack jokes, then fall over with depression.

Because the dark sense of humor can break the tension for the moment, but we still need to do the work in the background to manage those experiences and put them into context.

Dark sense of humor alone is a very dangerous thing, but it certainly has its place, and I completely embrace it and love it, and it's continuing today.

At the time of this incident, I don't think people were even talking about PTSD.

I talked about shell shock or depression or different things.

Do you think we're managing to get better these days?

Is there a recognition that it is such an insidious thing PTSD?

Yeah, the first mention of PTSD was by military and it was certainly surface level.

But the first mention of PTSD goes back to the seventies.

You know, we've still talked about shell shock and not recognizing that it was actually something that we could manage.

We are managing a lot better these days.

It's very much accepted and people understand what they're going through, and that understanding creates insight, creates comfortableness.

Okay, what I'm dealing with is actually reality.

It's not just me, it's other people as well.

There is a way to manage it, and we are more open to talking about mental challenges, mental health issues, and our mental well being.

The challenge that is still out there is that employers are not employers are paying lip service to it.

Yes, we understand it, and we want to give you help and all the rest of it, but we still see those members being pushed aside and not given opportunities, not given promotions, and not embraced completely.

It certainly needs to be managed, but it needs to be embraced and supported.

Going back to my model of what are the choices we're making, What are the consequences we can find ourselves in.

What does the future look like?

The more we prepare ourselves beforehand for the reality that I'm going into the army, I may be shot and injured, I may be shot and killed, or as you said, I may shoot someone.

How's that going to make me feel?

We will get taught.

You know, you're allowed to justify it.

And I don't have a religious background.

People with religious backgrounds, this is affecting them morally, and they're making choices that they're not comfortable with.

But the better we can prepare them for that physical as well as the mental and emotional challenge, the better chance we've got of them having good outcomes afterwards.

Certainly, May five, nineteen ninety four was a pivotal day for you, and I wonder whether, given what you're doing now, you could almost give a perverse vote of thanks to Tony Grosser, that vivid moment as because part of your toolbox as you do what you do now.

I smile, Riley.

I love the way you have put that, and it describes it perfectly.

I actually spent another twenty three years in the job.

I retired in twenty eighteen, but having a perverse sense of thanks to him, I completely embraced that he did open up opportunities for me to have a look at my own behavior, my own thought process, which my personal overview of this, and it fits within that philosophy.

My personal overview is I went to work, I got shot, I fell down, I got up, I got better, I went back to work, and that's how I saw it when I spoke to my wife, That's how I saw it in my visualizations.

But because of what's happened to me, people have said to me, what were you thinking?

How did you do that?

How did you know to do that?

And as a result of me being shot, thank you, Tony, I've now been able to share that with other people.

Very quickly.

I got approached by corporates to come and tell the story, and I literally said, no, not a chance.

I don't want to.

I do not want to stand on stage as a hero, because the heroes are the people that saved me.

The Blood Service came to me and said, I used a stack of blood.

Would I like to say thank you to Blood?

Donors and I've gone absolutely I can say thank you all day long.

And that was telling the story, given the details, all those things the corporates wanted.

But this wasn't about me.

It was about me saying thank you to the blood donors.

And it was the blood donors that started asking these questions what were you thinking and saying, oh my god, you have changed my life, and I'm going, no, you changed my life.

But it gave me the insight that there is greater, deeper messages in here that I'm able to share.

So I stand on stage, I run workshops to share that with other people, because you.

Do bring this message to a diverse range of audiences.

And one thing I noticed in your material is you delineate between resilience, which most people are familiar with, it's a common term now, and durability.

What's the difference, So resilience as it's commonly accepted, is there a ability to encounter problems in counter failures, breakdowns and bounce back.

And most people are going, I will be resilient when something goes wrong, I'll activate my resilience.

And we are now hearing in corporate impersonal in schools, you need to be more resilient people are now getting resilience fatigue because they're hearing it all that often resilience is accepted as their ability to bounce back.

What I talk about with human durability is our ability to sustain optimal performance, and optimal performance is the very best you can possibly do in the circumstances.

I just wrote a post today for LinkedIn and my other socials that in stargroup, I was trained to perform at one hundred percent one hundred percent of the time absolute peak performance.

If I didn't do that, it was not acceptable and people would possibly die as a result of it.

But at the time I got shot, if I'd tried to sustain peak performance, that would have meant that I kept on running, fighting, shooting, trying to break into the house I would have done because I would have exhausted my body.

Intuitively, I had this vision, what's my mind going to want to do?

What's my body wanting to do?

What can I do to influence it to be able to sustain optimal performance?

Four things I needed to do.

Control panic, don't let panic control the situation, control shock, our body's physiological response to physical or psychological drama.

Slow down my heart rate, slow down my breathing, because if I can control those four things, I will bleed less and I will survive for longer.

And this was sustaining optimal performance.

I was also highly aware that as I was lying on the ground and couldn't get myself up, I still had my pistol in my hand and he was still possibly going to come out to get me, so I was prepared to shoot if he did come out.

That was the very best I could do, was to sustain that optimal performance.

And this goes into every other aspect of our life as well.

As I say, it's a diverse audience that I speak to, and everybody can relate to I talked to hairdressers, they can relate to it.

I talked to tradees, they can relate to it.

Because we all have our own challenges, and as much as mine was being shot, I'm able to put it into context that what is your challenge is what can you realistically expect to encounter in your life as a result of the choices you make or the circumstances you find yourself in, And how's that going to make you feel?

And how do you manage that to get the best outcome afterwards.

That little bit of having open, honest, confronting conversation right at the very beginning makes a massive difference.

At Poor Punka, we saw two members allegedly murdered by Dizzy Freeman.

A third was wounded.

We saw I think almost twenty officers pin down for that period and there now having to deal with that day.

If you could speak to them, what would you tell them?

A lot of them are going to be feeling survivor guilt.

Now, why wasn't it me right?

And that is just unrealistic, but it's very normal.

The feelings of what could I have done?

What should I have done?

How could we have been better prepared?

These are very normal thoughts, and that is the biggest challenge we have.

I failed, somebody else wouldn't have, and so we need to rationalize that I was doing the very best that I could under those circumstances.

I've never been in a situation where I've been shot at before, and that's a huge reality check for anybody.

It was certainly a reality check for me when I didn't get shot.

Fortunately, I had something that I could respond to straight away, But for most people it's something that is overwhelming The other one is the police officers who were shot in Queensland a couple of years ago.

There was a survivor from that, and she's going to be going through that same emotion.

What could I have done?

What should I have done?

How could I have saved their lives?

Why did I survive?

So getting around the mindset of this is actually normal is one of the biggest challenges.

So I would be encouraging them just to eat, except that they were doing the best they could.

No, I'm not suggesting anybody did this, but even if they got to the point where they were so absolutely petrified that they froze on the ground and didn't do anything, it's the first time they've been there.

That is normal for some people.

Other people, depending on their background, their experience, their exposure, training that they've done, can respond differently.

My question to them would be, if we get into this circumstance again, what would you like to do beforehand to prepare yourself better for it?

And when it did happen, you know what you did on this occasion, what would you have wanted to do if you had a perfect scenario, And how can we now train you for the mindset as well?

As the physical and intellectual response and what would be a better performance later.

Now, the other question is do you still feel comfortable going into those scenarios, Do you feel prepared, do you feel like this is something you want to do, or would you actually like to take a different career path.

Go into crime scene investigation, go into dog squad, whatever it might be in the police department.

Or come and take a career break, go and become an accountant, go and become a finance breaker, become a bus driver.

And I say bus driver because that's one of the things.

If my children had not wanted me to go back into stargroup, I would have been quite happy to become a bus driver a solo as I was able to interact with my kids.

That was my greatest passion.

So the question is do you feel comfortable going into it?

Do you still feel the same confidence as you were talking about the racing car driver?

And if you don't make a decision to take a choice that you are going to be passionate about leaving this job now after that incident is not being a coward, it's being sensible for you.

Derek, great advice.

What an amazing career.

I'm going to thank you for your service.

It's a bit of a cliche, but I think your service continues through your work now.

Thank you.

I think there's something in there for.

Everyone about optimal performance, about resilience and also coming back.

Thank you so much for your time, Adam, absolute pleasure, absolute honor to be in this discussion with you.

Loved it.

Thank you, Thank you so much.

That's Derek McManus.

What an amazing story.

And my heart does go out for the officers who were there at Poor Punker when Desi Freeman allegedly murdered two of their colleagues and we died another.

And they're going to struggle, and I hope Victoria Police looks after them.

But I think the stuff that Derek's talking about here has some applications to us all.

And I'm sitting here realizing now that when I had my dear that experience, I did nothing but try to tough it out.

And I'm sure there are people out there.

I know we have police officers who listen to the show.

Probably it is time to have that bit of therapy.

I've had it since I should have it before, but it's never too late.

Now, if you have any.

Crime you'd like to report, please call crime Stoppers one, don't hundred, triple three, triple zero.

If you don't trust the police, you can always email me and I'll send the material onto the police.

Adam Shanner, writer at gmail dot com, Thank you for listening.

This has been real crime with Adam shanned