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Hello and welcome back to Beyond the Uniform. Long-time listeners know that Beyond the Uniform is a free podcast designed to help the military community succeed in their post-service careers. Normally, we do that by interviewing Veterans and world renowned experts on career paths and topics designed to inform, empower, and equip our listeners. Occasionally on Saturdays, I deviate from that normal Monday & Thursday format to have a more informal discussion around professional and personal items. This is one of those episodes, entitled, Behind Beyond the Uniform.
I have one admin item for today, two professional items, and then a schmorgasborg of personal items. For those of you who have listened to the last few Behind BTUs, you’ll remember that I just got back from a week of camping in Death Valley with 50 other men as part of a yearlong men’s workshop led by John Wineland. I’m still riding the wave of a fantastic time with these men, and I’ll share more about that if you stick around for the personal section at the end.
I am also EXCEPTIONALLY fired up, because on Wednesday of next week, I’ll be interviewing both Jocko Wilink and Leif Babin for Beyond the Uniform. That’s the highlight for me of the last three years. Such an honor to interview them. If you don’t know who they are - Google it. We’re not giving a lot of background int his talk - we’re going deep, so do you homework in advance.
But first, one admin item. We currently have 5 events at BeyondTheUniform.org/events, and we’ll be adding another two shortly. If you already registered for any of these free webinars, you will have likely received an email letting you know that we had to modify the time for 3 out of 5 of those webinars. If you haven’t registered for these events… there’s even more time to do so now. Those events, as listed at BeyondTheUniform.org/events are:
Sales 101 - Tyler Johnston from episode #313 will be leading this. He and I connected earlier today - it is fantastic information. I’ve been doing sales for 10+ years in various capacities, and I learned a ton in just the teaser we walked through today.
Discovering your Values - my wife, Rebecca, is going to walk 5 attendees through a live exercise that she does with her CEO and VP of Sales clients that helps them identify and live in alignment with their values.
Interviewing 101 - I’ll walk through some basic tactics to help you get ready for your first or 100th interview.
Veterans in Finance - a very high-level overview of a few potential career paths in the Finance Industry, which is the 4th largest industry Veterans go into after their military service.
And Veterans at The Big Three, a part 2 of our Veterans in Consulting webinar.
That’s it for our admin items. I wanted to cover two professional items related to two unreal interviews I had today.
The first is with Shannon Gregory, who works at Excel Energy. Shannon is such an awesome guy. His military career includes time in both the Marine Corps and the National Guard, and so he has faced multiple transitions. Although this is a sponsored interview, and I’m very grateful to Xcel Energy for their financial support of BTU, we intentionally only talked specifically about Xcel for about 4 minutes. The rest of the interview is extremely dense - Shannon talks about resumes, and how he has nearly a dozen version of his resume based on to what job he is applying. He talks about being Clark Kent - not always revealing your super powers. yes, you may have dozens and dozens of crazy stories from the military, but based on the position to which you’re applying, you may just pick one choice gem out and leave the rest in the bag, unused in both your resume and your interview preparation. We talk about networking - Shannon has received several jobs and - more importantly - very helpful intel about the jobs to which he is applying - due to his approach to networking. We talk about dealing with depression, we talk about how most of what you need in your civilian career you learned in the military, but it is ALL about lifelong learning - about building skills and adding to them every step of the way. Shannon is a great example of this - he’s held three different jobs and also earned his MBA leading up to his role at Xcel… while he may have gone directly into the energy industry, his circitiuos route was exactly what we needed. and we talk about the Energy Industry - why you don’t have to be a navy nuke like me to go into the energy industry - we talk about all the disruption and changes going on, and how they NEED fresh perspectives, like Shannons, who has no direct background in energy.
I loved our conversation, I plan on staying in regular contact with Shannon. That episode will air on November 14th as episode #325. Which means I need to edit it this weekend! Gotta love it when that happens.
The other conversation I had today was with Micah Fink. If you listened to my conversation with Stacy Bare or my recent conversation with Dan Cnossen - if you liked the flavor of those conversations, you’ll love this one. I shut up as much as possible during my time with Micah - he is a force to be reckoned with. He had a thriving career until 9/11, where he was in New York when the towers fell. He ran into the towers, dragging out whoever he could, and swore in that moment to kill whoever was responsible. He wanted to be an army ranger, he ran into a Navy recruiter on the way to enlist, and signed up to become a Navy SEAL instead. After ten years as a Navy SEAL and 4 years as a paramedic, he moved to Montanta. Wackinenss ensued. It led him to start a non-profit called Horses & heroes. I’m betting money that you will donate to this organization before the episode is over. It’s incredible. If you google Micah Fink and Heroes & horses, you’ll find his TedX talk - we’ll list it in the show notes as well. What Micah talks about in this TedX talk as well as in much of our interview is how important the struggle is. This is something he learned in his 1,110 days - 13 deployments - in which he was deployed to combat zones, but even more so when he returned. He took up gardening for a time… he tried brushing away all sediment, keeping the seeds as safe and undisturbed as possible. All of those seeds die. And Micah talks about how we’re doing that to the Veteran community by often coddling them - doing the work for them - prescribing them medications, trying to keep them from the very pain that will heal them. And so, Micah and his team take a different approach. They take 30+ Veterans into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights where they face austerity and challenge. They have water, coffee, meat and veggies… not a whole lot else. They ride 400-500 miles on horses. They learn to shoe horses. They take philosophy courses. They wake up at 4AM to workout, and work all day until 10PM. They provide tools so that each individual can mine who they are.
There are so many incredibndle sound bites from this interview. Two that I loved the most are:
Struggle is what gives us value and everyone is trying to take that away.
AND
You earned a masters degree in other people’s ideas, but you’re a first grader in you.
This is an inspirational interview - Micah is a natural speaker and getting a lot of experience speaking publicly about his work. I want to see them succeed. I’m going to order one of their hats as part of my donation. They are awesome.
That is episode 327, airing November 21. Watch the TEDX video prior to it if you at all can.
That is it for the professional section of this episode. I’d like to delve deeper into some personal items - no need to stick around if that does not interest or serve you.
I’m going to go a bit deeper than normal here, and so the Too Long Didn’t Read is: I don’t believe the path to self improvement can be done in isolation, and I don’t believe it can be done in comfort. My experience so far has been that it requires other people on the journey, and will require you to get out of your comfort zone… often far outside of it, as we’ll get into.
As many of you know, in March of this year, I started a men’s program called the Embodied Mens Leadership Training. It’s led by John Wineland, who I am really hoping to have on the podcast soon.
It was a pretty circuitous route leading me to this work. I’m committed to doing this work for the next two years, if not longer - that’s how valuable I find it. When my wife and I were living in San Francisco, we did a year of training called Non-Violent communication - it is basically empathetic communication training. It was very helpful to me personally and to us and our relationship. During that training I met a guy, Dan, who feels like an older brother to me. After we completed that training - which he had done for 3 or 4 years - we decided to take another course, called Voice Dialogues. This was actually led by a guy named Tim Kelly, who himself is a Navy Veteran. I tried to get him on the show recently but he declined. Voice Dialogues - sometimes called parts work - as I understand it is based on the premise that we each have many different parts inside of us. None of them are good, none fo them are bad, but all of them want to be seen and heard. For instance, there’s a part of me that wants and LOVES to get shit done. This part of me works hard, is focused, does not get distracted. This part of me has done wonders for me in the military and in my civilian career. And, when this part of me is involved in my marriage, it leads to less than ideal outcomes. So, the premise of this work is understanding all the parts within us so we can consciously choose which one we want in charge at what point in our life. It’s like George Washington in the crossing of the Delaware painting. George is in charge, he’s choosing different people to do different things as the leader. That’s how I envision it - the George Washington part of me understanding each parts value, and being more conscious about which part leads and when. And it’s equally important to not suppress or discount any part - even the part of me that wants to kick and scream and be an asshole… even that part serves a purpose or is trying to serve a purpose.
Anyways, after Voice Dialogues, Dan and I co-led a book group on the book No More Mr. Nice Guy, which is an episode you’ll find in our archives. And after that, Dan invited me to a workshop with John Wineland. I signed up without even looking at the website - that’s how much love and respect I have for my friend Dan.
And I flew out to California - this is all last March, in 2018. I went to a weekend workshop with 30-40 other men. IT’s was at a place called Wolf Connection, where wild wolves are rehabilitated. Seriously bad ass environment for this sort of work. And John’s work blew my mind. It was way outside of my comfort zone, way different than any of the work I did previously. At the time I was involved with two different men’s groups here in Denver, one of which I still do. It was wildly different than each of those groups.
I came back to Denver feeling more grounded and a better man and husband that I’ve ever been before. I promised myself that - 9 months later when the next yearlong program opened up, I would sign up. I did, and this past year has been exceptional.
So this trip to Death Valley was our final week together in person - we’ll continue to meet weekly online for the next month. But it was a capstone sort of experience. 50 men, in Death Valley, camping, practicing from 6;30AM every morning until around 10 or 11pm at night. We had time for solitude and reflection. Much of our day was pretty structured. A lot of the work we have done this year is around breathing, around grounding, around being more aware of what is going on inside us and around us. So we did a lot of physical practices to this end. If you’ve heard of or done any Kundalini Yoga - I had not until this program - we do a fair amount of Kundalini Yoga. And we do a lot of activities that get you out of your head, and get you to find blindspots in your life.
I’ll share a few of the things I learned, but will skip over many of the activities. I don’t want to cheapen the experience by rationalizing it, explaining it, or trying to share why they were so life changing.
I will, however, give one example. One of the feelings that I uncovered this last week through John’s work was a strong sense of self-loathing. There were about 1/4 of the men there who had similar experiences. And so one experience around this sense of self-loathing was to fully express that self loathing - to own it - not to suppress it, not to hide from it, not to try to bury it, but to embrace it, to be seen in it. We did this exercise in a group of four men. For me, two of the men - with my consent - grabbed my arms and held me. The remaining man stood in front of me, maintaining eye contact with me. And I was give two minutes to express my self-loathing as much and as deeply as I could. To struggle against these men, to give voice to the self-criticism that happens in my head and often just below the surface. Two minutes is a long fucking time. And for those two minutes the men held me back, gave me something to struggle against, since the masculine needs struggle. That was much of the conversation I just had today with Micah Fink of Horses and Heroes - how deeply we need challenge and struggle. So I had two minutes to let it out - not just acting out something that I’m ashamed of, but to be seen and witnessed by these other men. To have that one man in front of me, looking at me, taking it in, not judging me, accepting me. And then afterwards to look at each of the three other men - see their love and acceptance. See their support. I can only imagine how strange that all must sound to many of you, but I found it to be an extremely powerful, healing experience.
Not all of the things we were doing like that, but they weren’t far off. Shifting my thinking around different areas of my life. Being open to seeing where I am out of integrity. Seeing where I need to reinstall new software - where old thoughts, patterns, and beliefs are holding me back and no longer serving me. And doing all of this in the desert of Death Valley, it was really incredible.
I’m still processing a lot of what I learned, but I did want to share a few items that seem relevant.
The first is how good it feels to have time away with other men who are committed to becoming better men; who are committed to making an impact in our families, communities, and world. How good it feels to have honest and vulnerable conversations - to drop the bullshit, drop the meaningless chatter about pop culture and things that ultimately don’t matter, and talk about what is going on in our lives.
I’ve come to know, respect, and love the men in this group. And that was it’s own realization. I don’t think I’ve said “I love you” to another man outside of my family in my adult life. I imagine many of that comes from the Naval Academy and my time in the Navy, where a lot of my experience had tinges of homophobia. And it felt awkward - but also great - to say “I love you” to many of the men in this group. To express love, to be open to love, and feel the commitment we have to each other as we each try to be better versions of ourself.
I realized how little I let love into my life, not just with men. It made me think that often with my son Bodhi, I’m letting his love in through a small straw. he has this ocean of love he’s sending out, and I just clamp down and don’t let it all in. With my wife, I had the overwhelming sense of how much and how deeply she loves me. There as well, I don’t always let that love in. I make up stories, thinking she’s out to get me, or she’s fighting my career, or she wants to dominate all of my time. Instead of seeing all of the love she has for me - it may be packaged differently than I’m expecting, but even her nags, even her wanting more of my time, is her way of expressing her love. And it feels like at times I’m accusing her not of loving me, or valuing me, or whatever my story is, when in fact I’m just closed, and not open to her love. I felt this with God - or the universe - or the world, or whatever you want to call it. How often I behave as if the world is out to get me; as if God is trying to punish me; as if the universe is trying to teach me a lesson. When in fact there is unlimited love out there, waiting for me and all I have to do is be open to it - I don’t have to earn it, I don’t have to deserve it, I don’t have to behave a certain way - just unconditional love, available on demand.
I learned about how much fear I have. John has this concept he calls “the emerging world” - how we have deep seated beliefs that taint the world that emerges around me. In business school, we called this concept confirmation bias - that if I believe red cars are better than black cars, I will notice every red car that is better than a black car, I’ll notice all the evidence to confirm that belief, and dismiss (even subconsciously) all the evidence that is contrary to that. So, in John’s version of the emerging world, we delved in to discoing some of our deepest beliefs, even if they occur below the surface of our conscious. One that I found was: the world is not safe. All the ways I behave in which I believe the world isn’t safe - how I worry about my wife and son’s safety, how i worry about my career and finances, how I worry, worry, worry about a million things outside of my control. And we worked to reverse many of these deep seated beliefs. For that example: the world is not safe - I worked with a phrase that to me seemed the opposite: the world is my fucking playground. It really resonated for me. And then, when I got back to Denver, I got to take my 9 month old son to a gym class, and got to see this first hand - the way he saunters around the gym like he owns it. He doesn’t have an ounce of fear. He plays where he wants to play. He does what he wants to do without feeling self conscious. There is no fear of getting hurt, of being rejected by other kids, of not kicking the ball right or climbing the toys in the right way. he just has a blast - he just does his thing, he has fun, he does what feels right, without a second thought. He is my role model in that; the world is my fucking playground.
Anyways, if you’re listening to this point, I’m guessing some of this connects, some of this seems fucking weird, and that’s all ok. My intention in sharing all of this isn’t to have you sign up for John’s EMLT group. It’s not to have you look up to or down on me for choosing to do this sort of work. I just wanted to share my experience and encourage you to find some tribe - some community - some group that is outside of your comfort zone. Where the men or women of the group are committed to deepening in their life, to improving who they are, to making a bigger impact on the world and being a better version of themselves. That may be in church, it may be in a men’s or women’s group, it could be in a book club, it could be at an event like Tony Robbins. The more the event or group scares you, intimidates you, or makes you want to judge it and make fun of it, the more that is likely a group where you will grow. Just my $0.02.
Lastly, I’m noodling a lot these days about starting a second podcast. I’ve been talking with Steve Bane a lot about this for months. One of the ideas I’m thinking of is related to all of this. It’s to take the personal side of these BBTU episodes and turn it into an entire series. The format would be really different and would include a lot more live audio from events, conversations, etc. If that in any way resonates with you, please let me know - I’m in a major information collection phase in figuring out where I want to extend when it comes to podcasting.
And that’s all for this week. Monday’s episode is with Verizon, Peter Vanderloo, the happy lawyer. Thursday’s is with Excel’s Shannon Gregory. Both of them are fantastic episodes, so please tune in. Both are also with companies who donated money to what we’re doing at BTU so we can continue to do this and even expand… so you extra support on these two episodes is greatly appreciated. Take care and have a wonderful Veterans Day.