Justin Langer: Tommy Herschell helps those struggling to ‘find their feet’, but he had to find himself first

There is a moment in every honest conversation when the room changes. The voice softens. The eyes glass over. The mask slips. I watched it happen again and again this week, when I met a fellow Aussie named Tommy Herschell. Tommy founded Find Ya Feet, an Australian not-for-profit that runs workshops in schools, sporting clubs, corporates and prisons. Their tagline is disarmingly simple: One solid conversation can shift change in a person forever. After three days with Tommy, who is here in India visiting his great mates Matty Hayden and Mitch Marsh, I believe everything he is saying. I’ve felt like crying more times this week than I can count, listening to him tell stories about the struggles of school kids, farmers in drought, blokes in maximum security and elite athletes; all who are carrying impossible pressure and silent anguish. Pain, as Tommy has discovered, walks around in plain clothes, of all colours and sizes. From his own painful experience, Tommy shared with me his story. “I was filling up a Coke bottle for 20 years,” he said. “Shame, embarrassment, fear, anger; I’d jam it all in and screw the lid on. And one night, it just exploded.” Tommy’s tough but is not afraid to cry. I have seen him tear up several times as he recalls his experiences. He was 10 when his parents split. No one taught him what to do with the hurt, so it came out sideways. He was the loudest in class, the smartarse. As an adult, drinking and posturing became the mask. Twelve years as a surf journalist, surfing extraordinary waves and sobbing in lonely hotel rooms at night. The night the Coke bottle exploded, he was 35, melting down and in tears crying for his mum. Instead, his wife handed him the phone. On the other end was Neil Pringle, a Sydney rugby league hardman from the 1970s. Even though he is 30 years older than Tommy, he is one of his best mates. Tommy was about to do what he always did to Neil, cry, play victim, hang up. Before he could do that, Neil said: “Mate, f..k off. Don’t do this shit anymore.” Tommy was about to slam the phone down when Neil delivered the line that changed his life: “I’m saying this because I love you. You’re better than this. Your missus deserves better. And, as your friend, I am telling you, you also deserve better.” Being a man who had been through so much grief in his own life, Neil refused to let his mate keep drowning. Tommy walked into rehab the next morning, where a therapist named Elizabeth chuckled at him and said: “Darling, I’m excited. You’ve behaved your whole life like a wounded little boy. Now, I’m going to teach you how to be a functioning, healthy adult.” In a sense, that is now Tommy’s life work. Taming the inner child and becoming a functioning adult. Find Ya Feet was born in a Year Two classroom. Tommy was teaching when he noticed a kid coming in every day exhausted, acting out. “You’ve got to get good at listening to the quiet ones,” he says. He pulled the boy aside and showed him he was hurting for him. The kid teared up. His parents fought all night; he slept on the couch. Tommy pointed to a couch at the back of the room. “Mate, come in and sleep as long as you need,” he told him. Some days the boy slept 10 minutes. Some days till lunch. When he woke, he was a different child, engaged, curious, kind. Tommy thought, I wonder how many kids exist like this. What Tommy has learned is that when you know what is going on with others, it’s only then that you can help or support them. Around the same time, Tommy met Bastien Madril, a 15-year-old from Darwin with Ewing sarcoma (bone cancer). On the day he died, Bastien asked his parents to hold him up so his feet could touch the earth one last time. His mum rang Tommy with the final words her boy left behind: “Love life, don’t waste it.” Tommy hung up and realised he was wasting his own life. Bastien’s final words were a brutal wake-up call. A kick up the arse, as Tommy puts it. The name Find Ya Feet came later, when he heard NRL commentator Phil Gould describe a struggling team: “This team can go on and win this game, but they need to find their feet. They need structure, framework, and discipline.” At that moment, the penny dropped again, and Tommy thought that is exactly what I need right now. Tommy’s mate, and mine, Matty Hayden, has been one of the many helping hands through Tommy’s journey. Matty sat him down for three days and taught him what no one had, “have a plan, a goal, an outcome for every conversation. Structure. Discipline. Framework. The magical three.” Then Matty added one more key element. They had just walked out of a heavy Find Ya Feet workshop, when Tommy turned to Hayden and said: “Mate, I reckon we may have saved a life today.” Matty turned him around. “Stop with your ‘maybe’s’ mate. With conviction in your message, you ‘will’ save lives, not ‘maybe’ save lives. Conviction in everything you do is the cornerstone of influence and change.” Two weeks later, a Year 12 boy stayed behind after a workshop. He was shaking and crying. Tommy told me how the boy “had taken his old man’s gun, put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger”. It hadn’t gone off. Before that workshop, he was literally planning to go home to try again. But the one thing that stopped him, was listening to his other mates opening up with their own struggles, their own stories. It was at that moment he knew that he wasn’t alone in life’s complexities. Doctors, the school and his parents were brought in. A month later Tommy watched him mucking around with his mates and laughing; just being a normal fun-loving kid. Tommy works in all spaces. He says: “The moment one starts to share, it turns out blokes are world-class listeners when you give them permission.” What he has learned is that whether it is an NRL club, a school kid, a prisoner, or a CEO, it is always the same. People stay quiet when he asks them: “Who puts a mask on to cover their pain? Who won’t tell their mates of their troubles because they don’t want to be a burden?” But that’s the whole thing. Someone listening. Someone caring. Someone who can help. Tommy works with girls as much as boys and I asked him if there was a difference between them. He has learned through his work, and the women in his life, a phrase at the heart of every Find Ya Feet workshop for women and girls: ‘We need to let women roar”. He told me about a girl who’d just moved schools and stood up in front of strangers to say why she was there. She had been sexually assaulted at her previous school. Tommy didn’t probe. He asked her one question: “Where did you get the strength and the courage to tell us what you just told us?” She started talking about her mother and the women who’d shaped her. Then, a girl four seats down, found her feet, stood up and said: “Thank you for the courage you have just shown.” Tears flowed, respect was earned, the fog in the room lifted in real time. Through conversations and sharing, it is amazing the connections that can be developed. Sometimes that’s a smile across a hallway. Sometimes it’s the Find Ya Feet ‘Trucky Nod’. The ‘Trucky Nod’ Tommy tells me he got from an old trucker in a Broken Hill roadhouse, one lonely night on the road. Eating his steak and eggs, he simply looked up and said, with a smile and a nod, “I see you mate”, before going back to his own business. We don’t all need to be a counsellor (as important as they are) but we do need to be a great mate. We need to stop saying, ‘she’ll be right’ when he or she clearly isn’t. Sometimes we just need to listen and give people a platform, so the release of pressure is gradual not like an exploding coke bottle. Tommy Herschell is one of the most important blokes in Australia right now and most of the country has never heard his name. Find Ya Feet doesn’t pretend to be the answer to everything, but does give people the tools for that one conversation, the one that lifts the lid, the one that every now and again may save a life.