This is the first in a series of posts featuring Ashton Bishop, the Head of Strategy at Step Change Marketing.
Ashton's path has been an unusual one and in this post he reveals his rather remarkable journey to Step Change and how a fight early in life led to a series of counter-measures that resulted in his modern day quick thinking.
Run for your life!
Black eye and broken tooth! It’s alright, it did have a happy ending, I did get my tooth back. You know how they say, “You should see the other guy”. Well…he was getting shoulder rides, high-fives, dates from all the pretty girls while I was cowering away in a corner. This story had an indelible effect on me - this was my first encounter with bullies.
But look, maybe I’ve got to take some responsibility for that. You can’t go blaming other people all your life. Anyway, the interesting thing is that in response to this encounter I started running. I was about seven years old at the time and by the time I was seventeen, I was State Champion.
I’d run a time of 1 minute 56 which is a reasonable clip for 800 metres. In fact, it’s so quick that it would’ve won me a gold medal… in the 2004 Olympic Games …in the women’s division...close-but-no-cigar!
Everybody was Kung Fu fighting
Although I’d taken running quite seriously, when I was 17, I took up martial arts. I graduated with a black belt then a senior student degree in Kung Fu a few years later, and …
What you talkin’ about Ashton?
… at twenty-two I was at the World Universities Debating Championships in Athens as an adjudicator!
Legally cirku-fied
It should be of no surprise to anyone except myself that at 23 I’d graduated with a Law degree and of course by 24 I had run away with a circus!
Literally, it’s true - I had actually run away with a circus! It was a circus in Denmark called Cirkus Benneweis.
Beating the odds
When I looked back, I went “Wow! My whole life had been shaped and framed around bullies”.
I certainly believe that bullying is the lowest form of social interaction but from my perspective, here’s the way I see things now.
If you’re in trouble, try and talk your way out of it. If you can’t talk your way out of it, run and try to get the hell out of there. If you’re in a corner and you’ve got a fight on your hands, use your Martial Arts skills. If you get the hell beaten out of you… sue them using your Law degree. If you end up losing your case, lighten up on yourself and have a laugh - that’s when you run away and join the circus!
In the next post Ashton talks about how bullying and being the underdog is linked to his professional career.
Click on the video below to watch Ashton's entire story.
