There is academic reasoning behind this behaviour.

Psychologist John Suler described the “online disinhibition effect” in 2004: people may disclose more or behave more intensely online than they would face-to-face. Among the factors he identified were invisibility, asynchronicity and minimisation of authority.

More than two decades later, the principle is arguably even more relevant because digital communication is no longer something we do occasionally at a computer.

It follows us everywhere.

The smartphone creates psychological distance.

You do not see the recipient’s facial expression while typing.

You do not experience the uncomfortable silence after an accusation.

You can send something from your bedroom at midnight that you would never say across a boardroom table at 9am.

That distance can create recklessness.

During years of investigative work, including corporate investigations and human intelligence, I have repeatedly learned one basic lesson about people:

When people feel secure, they tend to relax their defences.

The digital world can manufacture precisely that feeling.

But there is a fundamental difference between an unguarded conversation and an unguarded message.

One leaves a memory.

The other may leave a record.

Corporate security has become heavily technological.

Organisations invest millions in firewalls, endpoint protection, encryption, access controls, penetration testing and cybersecurity awareness.

All of that is necessary.

But there is an uncomfortable question worth asking.

What happens when the person carrying the information walks outside the security perimeter?

The US National Counterintelligence and Security Centre specifically advises companies to assess additional risks created by international travel. 

Its Secure Innovation guidance warns that foreign travel can expose companies and their employees to additional security risks, including threats to intellectual property, technical knowledge and commercially sensitive information.

This matters because intelligence does not necessarily mean a classified government document.

For a corporation, intelligence can include various elements such as a potential acquisition, an unreleased product, a pricing strategy, a litigation position, a tender, a client issue, a vulnerable supplier, a research breakthrough, or an executive succession plan.

One apparently insignificant piece of information may be commercially meaningless in isolation.

Combined with ten other pieces, it can become intelligence.

That is the principle of aggregation.

The traveller, therefore, does not have to carry a document marked “SECRET” to be valuable. 

Occasionally, their most valuable asset is knowing who knows what, who reports to whom, who is unhappy, what the organisation is planning, and where its vulnerabilities are.

That has financial value.

I’ve known physical injury in circumstances considerably more serious than a gym.

My body carries a history that includes war, boxing, training, accidents and, more recently, walking 321 kilometres on the Camino Primitivo.

For much of my younger life, toughness meant continuing.

Pain? Continue.

Tired? Continue.

Problem? Solve it and continue.

There are circumstances where that mentality is necessary. There are also situations where ignoring these signals is incredibly foolish.

Thailand reminded me of the difference.

At 53, ignoring every signal from my body isn’t courage. Occasionally it is ego dressed as toughness.

An injury may require adaptation. Fatigue may require sleep. Recovery may require doing nothing when every part of your identity screams that doing nothing is weak.

I began to understand that longevity isn’t about proving how much damage you can absorb.

It’s about remaining capable of returning.

That lesson applies equally to business.

A leader who never stops eventually performs poorly. An organisation permanently operating at maximum capacity doesn’t necessarily become resilient; it may simply become fragile.

Human beings are no different.

We tend to imagine giving up as some dramatic declaration.

I quit.

Life rarely works that way.

Most of the time, there is no announcement. Instead, we begin negotiating.

You’ve worked hard. Take today off.

You can do it tomorrow.

One missed session won’t matter.

Nobody is watching.

You’re tired.

You deserve a break.

You’ve already done enough.

Every one of those arguments can be completely reasonable.

I think this phenomenon is why so many goals disappear.

We don’t necessarily abandon them. We slowly renegotiate the conditions until the original commitment no longer exists.

One missed morning becomes two. The project that was supposed to start this month is postponed and pushed to next month. The business idea remains in a notebook. The gym membership continues to debit the bank account while the person paying for it waits for motivation to return.

Nothing catastrophic happens.

We simply drift.

I have spent much of my professional life investigating behaviour, people, and information, and there is something fascinating about this process. A sequence of insignificant decisions often produces significant outcomes.

The same principle applies to discipline.

It usually fades gradually rather than disappearing all at once. More often, we relinquish it away through small permissions that seem harmless at the time.

And Thailand has given me plenty of opportunities to negotiate.

There is a popular image of discipline that makes it look dramatic. Early mornings. Sweat. Boxing gloves. Exhaustion. Consider adding an inspirational quote beneath a photograph.

The reality is far less cinematic.

Sometimes discipline is simply lying in a perfectly comfortable bed in Thailand, hearing the rain outside and conducting a private negotiation with yourself about whether getting up is really necessary.

Nobody here is ordering me to train. There is no commanding officer waiting outside my door. 

No competition depends on today’s performance, and nobody back home would know if I skipped a session. 

I could easily explain it away as recovery, enjoy breakfast, sit beside the pool and start again tomorrow.

That freedom is what makes the experiment intriguing.

When there is no punishment for quitting, you discover how much your word means to you.

My life has given me unusual opportunities to learn about pressure. As a war veteran with a special-forces background, I encountered a version of it very young. Later came intelligence work, investigations, business, boxing and challenges I voluntarily chose rather than circumstances imposed upon me.

Earlier this year, one of those choices took me 321 kilometres along the Camino Primitivo in Spain.

I started that journey with expectations about what walking the Camino might teach me. Instead, damaged feet, pain, solitude and eventually walking much of the journey alone taught me something simpler: there are kilometres in life that nobody can walk for you.

People can encourage you. Coaches can guide you. Family can love you. Friends can believe in you. But eventually your foot has to take the next step.

Thailand is teaching me the same lesson in an entirely different language.

When I arrived at training, Coach Woody said something that stayed with me. He explained that professional athletes often train twice per day and told me that what I was doing at my age was admirable. 

I appreciated the compliment, but it sparked another internal dialogue about age, discipline, and especially limitations.

How do we know what our limitations are?

I’m surrounded here by young people from different parts of the world. Some are incredibly fit. Some are fighters. Some are faster, stronger and younger than me, and I’m sure many of them can recover much faster than I can. 

I have absolutely no problem admitting that because I haven’t come to Thailand to pretend, I’m 24 years old again.

I came here to discover what a man approaching 54 can still do.

There is a big difference.

As we get older, I think sometimes we start creating limitations before we have even tested them. We tell ourselves that certain things are no longer for us. 

Maybe we’re too old to start training. 

Too old to change careers. 

Too old to start a business.

Too old to travel alone. 

Too old to learn something completely new.

Perhaps some limitations are genuine. Eventually all of us will encounter them.

But I would rather not invent mine.

I want to discover them.

And you cannot discover your limitations from the comfort of your bed. You need to begin something. You need to try. You need to put yourself into situations where you don’t already know the answer.

Thailand is doing that for me now, but I have experienced the same lesson in many different forms throughout my life.

When I walked the Camino, there were moments of pain, exhaustion and uncertainty in a country where I didn’t know everything around me and couldn’t control what the next day would bring. 

People could encourage me and people could offer me advice, but nobody could walk those kilometres on my behalf. When your feet hurt, they are your own. When the road keeps going, eventually you have to decide whether to keep going with it.

Military training taught me another version of that lesson. War exposed me to circumstances that I would never wish on anyone. Business taught me again. Boxing continues to teach me.

Different environments, different stakes, different stages of my life, but one principle keeps returning.

Eventually, you are left with yourself.

When something beautiful happens, there is nobody immediately beside you to share it with.

You see an incredible sunset and instinctively want to say, “Look at that.” You finish a difficult training session and want to tell somebody how you feel. You discover a great restaurant, see something funny on the street or experience one of those small moments that somehow makes travelling worthwhile.

Then you realise that no one is sitting beside you.

For me, this is far more challenging than organising flights, accommodation or transportation. You can usually solve those practical problems. 

The more difficult aspect is the absence of someone immediately available to share the highs and lows, to seek an opinion from, or to turn to when uncertainty arises.

And yes, sometimes fear appears as well.

I don’t think we should be embarrassed about admitting that. I certainly am not.

Human beings are social creatures. We need conversation, friendship, companionship and connection. We require individuals with whom to share laughter and, at times, those who can reassure us that everything will be alright. Being independent doesn’t suddenly remove those very human needs.

But perhaps there is something else we need to learn as well.

We need to know that when those people aren’t physically beside us, we can still function. We can still make decisions. We can still progress.

That experience is personal, but it is not unusual. A language barrier is more than a significant inconvenience. It can affect employment, social participation, confidence, and whether a migrant’s previous qualifications are recognized or properly used.

OECD research has found that foreign-born adults are more likely to work in lower-skilled occupations and earn less than native-born workers. 

Language proficiency, literacy skills, and the country in which qualifications were obtained explain a substantial part—although not all—of these inequalities. 

Migrants educated outside their destination country are more than twice as likely as native-born workers to be employed in low-skilled occupations. 

Importantly, the OECD also recognizes that discrimination, limited professional networks, and information gaps can remain influential even after language and skills are considered. The OECD report highlights the relationship between skills proficiency and the labour market outcomes of migrants.

The evidence matters because it confirms what many migrants experience personally: language is essential, but it is not the only barrier. Migrants are often told to learn the language, work diligently, and trust that everything else will follow. That advice is partly true, but it is incomplete.

Learning the language is essential. Hard work matters. But neither automatically removes every barrier.

When I arrived, I was not an empty vessel waiting to be educated. I was a trained and experienced person who could not yet translate that experience into a language Australians understood.

There is an enormous psychological difference between having nothing to say and being unable to say what you know.

People looked through me. Conversations moved faster than I could process them. Humour, slang, and cultural references passed around me. A simple interaction could become a test of confidence.

It was frustrating and, at times, humiliating.

But silence also created an unexpected opportunity.

This is my story.

I know very well what it means to fight for a voice because my journey into the digital world didn’t begin in a comfortable office with perfect Wi-Fi.

It began after the war in the former Yugoslavia.

After spending five years in conflict, I arrived in Australia to work in the diplomatic corps with English that was, at best, functional.

Imagine that feeling.

You enter a profession where every word carries diplomatic consequences, yet you’re still wrestling with grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation.

When I eventually left diplomatic service to build a new life and raise my family in Australia, my English had only marginally improved.

But I have always loved communication.

So, I refused to stop learning.

• I kept studying.
• I kept reading.
• I kept listening.
• I kept speaking.

Even when people doubted me—and, let’s be honest, who would seriously expect a migrant speaking his fifth language to build a career in Australian media?

Eventually, to everyone’s surprise—including my own—I found myself behind a radio microphone.

That microphone changed my life.

It gave me confidence.

It taught me discipline.

It removed my fear of public speaking.

Most importantly, it showed me that communication creates opportunity.

That experience eventually led me to build my own platform, “Life The Battlefield”.

Through it, I share the lessons accumulated throughout an extraordinary career: the resilience of a soldier, the analytical mindset of an intelligence officer, the discipline of a diplomat, the pragmatism of a business owner and, more recently, the practical realities of building influence in the digital world.

Today that platform reaches hundreds of thousands of followers across multiple channels.

Not because an algorithm decided to be kind.

But because I stopped waiting for someone else to give me permission to speak.

That is why I’m sharing this story.

If I could build a recognized platform in a foreign country while speaking my fifth language, every business owner has the opportunity to build a digital presence they genuinely own.

Myth #1:

“I’ve Got Instagram and TikTok. Why Would I Need a Website?”

I understand the thinking.

Social media is exciting.

It’s fast.

Loud.

Flashy.

Full of dopamine.

You post a video, use a trending sound, attract thousands of views, and suddenly feel unstoppable.

I enjoy that energy too.

Social media is an extraordinary tool.

But it becomes dangerous when businesses mistake borrowed attention for ownership.

Let’s strip away the illusion and face reality.

When your business exists only on social media, you are not truly a business owner in the digital sense.

You’re a tenant.

The rent isn’t always measured in dollars.

It’s plagued by uncertainty, constant adaptation, and dependence on algorithm changes made by companies whose priorities may have little to do with yours.

We’ve already watched this phenomenon happen repeatedly.

Facebook once rewarded businesses with extraordinary organic reach before progressively shifting towards paid promotion for business pages.

Instagram and TikTok continue to evolve their recommendation systems, prioritizing different formats and engagement signals as commercial priorities change. 

Businesses that rely exclusively on those platforms often find themselves constantly adapting to rules they cannot control or influence.

This isn’t criticism of social media companies.

It’s simply the commercial reality of operating on platforms you don’t own.

Research consistently shows that businesses perform best when social media functions as a discovery channel, while websites, email lists, and owned content become the primary environment where trust, education, and purchasing decisions occur. 

Industry studies from organizations such as HubSpot and the Content Marketing Institute continue to demonstrate that owned media remains one of the strongest long-term business assets because organizations retain control over both their audience and their content.

That brings us to the first crucial truth.

Social media captures attention.

Your platform builds trust.

And trust—not algorithms—is what ultimately drives sustainable business growth.

To understand how Zersetzung worked on the ground, forget the Hollywood image of secret agents in trench coats dragging people into unmarked cars.

The Stasi operated far more subtly, relying on what they described as “operational psychology.”

They even established their own university—the Juristische Hochschule Potsdam (Stasi Law School)—where officers studied intelligence operations, behavioural science, and psychological methods. 

They didn’t simply learn how to recruit informants or conduct surveillance. They conducted doctoral research to explore how fear, uncertainty, and social isolation could weaken an individual without resorting to physical violence.

Following German reunification, millions of pages of STASI records opened millions to researchers. 

Those documents revealed just how systematic these operations had become. 

Psychological disruption was not the excess of a few rogue officers; it had developed into an organized bureaucratic process supported by operational manuals, planning documents, and formal directives.

Imagine coming home from work.

You walk into your apartment, start making coffee, and notice that the painting on the wall is hanging a few inches to the left.

You didn’t move it.

The following morning, you reach for your coffee jar and discover it has been placed among the dinner plates. Your bedside clock is suddenly running exactly twenty minutes slow. Nothing has been stolen. There are no signs of forced entry.

If you reported the incident to the police, claiming someone was breaking into your home simply to move clocks and coffee jars, most people would conclude that the problem wasn’t your apartment—it was your state of mind.

That was precisely the objective.

Stasi operatives secretly entered the homes of political opponents to make tiny, almost invisible alterations. Initially, victims questioned their memory. 

Soon they questioned their sanity. Eventually, they questioned everyone around them—including members of their family.

At the same time, a parallel operation unfolded beyond the front door.

False rumours circulated through workplaces alleging corruption or collaboration with authorities. Anonymous letters damaged friendships. Careers quietly stalled. University admissions mysteriously disappeared. Promotions never arrived.

The victim usually saw these events as uncoordinated.

Instead, they concluded that life itself was collapsing.

The strategy reflected an important shift in Cold War thinking. Arresting dissidents often generated sympathy and international criticism. 

A psychologically exhausted citizen, by contrast, attracted little attention because there was no obvious evidence of persecution. 

Friends observed someone becoming withdrawn. Employers noticed declining performance. Families witnessed anxiety and depression. 

Only a few suspected these outcomes could be deliberately engineered. The most effective political opponent was no longer the one in prison but the one who had simply given up.

After months of this treatment, many individuals became socially isolated, emotionally exhausted, and psychologically broken.

The regime no longer needed to imprison them.

On paper, they remained free citizens.

They had already been defeated.