I joined the Combat Ready team in September 2022 thanks to Remo Ojaste. In 2011, we served and studied together at Võru Battle School. At that time, I was a motivated and willing junior non-commissioned officer, with two missions in Afghanistan behind me.

My further service in the Estonian Defence Forces, the Defense Academy, another mission, family life and various ventures have given me a lot of experience on how to cope in life. There have been good moments and also those that taught me the most about how things could be done differently.

When I first met the Combat Ready team, it turned out that a lot of good people, whom I had met in the past during my service, had become a team member there already. Since September, I have gone through practically all the Combat Ready courses and have done a lot of self-examination in the last four months. I looked at my life, my time in the service, and my endeavors from a new perspective. I saw many experiences where I could have behaved differently. And also situtations where I had done the right thing.

I could have applied many of the things I learned on the battlefield earlier in life. But back thene, no one had formulated these lessons in such a way that one could immediately understand HOW to apply them, or I didn’t have the ability yet to make the connections myself. Of course, this does not apply to everything, because the discipline and order of the defense forces have helped me become the person I am today – physically active, educated, able to communicate in different languages, disciplined and open-minded.

I have 14 years of leadership experience behind me, which I can now pass on to others and also apply the knowledge I have acquired to my own civilian life.

During the trainings, I always speak honestly about what I have learned from my own life, I give examples from the battlefield, and together with the audience, we look for those spots that would help us become even better people and leaders. Because as we know – a person learns all his life and two heads are always better than one!

See you at the trainings!

Aleksandr Afanasjev
Combat Ready Instructor