The hardest part of military to civilian transition is not finding a job. It is that nobody assigns you anything any more, and that the training you are about to box up is the most tested system you will ever own. Keep the planning, the discipline and the resilience. Change the setting, not the toolkit.
When I retired from the Army my mindset was: thank you very much, US Army, I am out. I put twenty five years of skills in a box and expected never to open it again.
I was ready to learn a new skill for the new role. There was no training. There was only doing.
It took about six months to work out how wrong I had it. Here is what I wish someone had said to me in month one.
Why is military to civilian transition so hard?
Because the military trains you to expect training, and the civilian world does not offer any.
The best thing about the military is that you get schooled every time you get promoted or change jobs. That is the advantage, because the same fundamentals get reinforced at every stop. Planning, resilience, perseverance and discipline are drilled again whether you are at Airborne School or the War College. A veteran carries that for life, once they realize it and accept it.
It is a double-edged sword. We are also trained to believe that a new position means learning something new, so when we take off the uniform we assume the old toolkit is irrelevant. That assumption is the expensive part.
What happens when you stop boxing up the training?
Things start working, and faster than the people around you.
Once I shifted, I used twenty five years of knowledge and experience to perform. I tapped into years of problem analysis and planning. I used the resilience, the perseverance and the discipline to get the job done better and faster than the people around me.
I went back to the fundamentals I already had: the Military Decision-Making Process and the Five-Paragraph Field Order. I used them to work out how to move forward, then I taught them to my peers and my students.
That is when I understood there is no magical business secret that the so-called business greats are using. What I learned in the Army is the best system I have, because it was tested in life and death situations.
Ask yourself what problem you have now that is more complicated or bigger than combat operations. The answer is usually none, and the irony of that lands hard.
Nobody tells you what to do any more
That is the shock, and it is bigger than the pay cut.
I spent my adult development years being told what to do. As a Green Beret I had enormous freedom of maneuver inside a mission, and I was still told which job I would do next and where I would live. What the standards were. What to wear. What time to be there. Nobody ever came to me and said, hey Otis, what do you think about a mission to stabilize the government of Haiti.
When you leave, especially if you spent your whole adult life in, you are told that now you get to choose. You have to choose. It is a shock to the system.
There is a second half to it that people miss. You do not only choose what you do. You set the standards of performance you will be held to, and there is no regulation and no commander supplying them. In uniform the standard arrives with the job. Out here you write it, enforce it on yourself, and nobody notices when you quietly lower it.
There is also a hidden cost to the old way that nobody mentions. As long as someone else is telling you what to do, you have somebody to blame for the crappy job or the bad posting. Once you strike out on your own path, there is nobody to blame for a failure but yourself. That is a heavy thing to pick up, and it is why the standard you set for yourself matters more than it ever did. That part is covered in accountability in the workplace.
Why is choosing harder than failing?
The guys I work with are not afraid of failing. None of them are. They are afraid of choosing wrong.
Part of it is fear of taking the wrong path. The bigger part is the inability to believe that this is who I am and this is what I want. That second one is the real crux, and it applies to everyone, not only to veterans.
Deciding what you want to do and going after it without feeling like a selfish jerk is the difference between living your life and waiting for somebody to tell you who to be. Almost everyone I coach comes out of service with an attitude of service and giving, and they experience the act of choosing for themselves as self-indulgent. I was the same way.
There is one more weight in the bag, and it has a name. Imposter syndrome. A deep-set belief that we do not deserve the success. Camden writes about that one directly in imposter syndrome at work.
I will spend the rest of my life taking the risk of pursuing what I want, and possibly finding out that it was not what I wanted once I get there. I would rather have that life than one where I am told who to be and when to be it.
How do you start when you do not know what you want?
You move. Movement beats waiting every time, and the arithmetic of it is unforgiving.
We all lose our way. Sometimes it is leaving the military after twenty years. Sometimes it is something traumatic. Sometimes it is a moment of clarity that says this is not who I want to be. All three produce the same sentence: I do not know what I want to do now.
Setting a destination in your GPS and then sitting in the parking lot does not change the drive time. The arrival estimate keeps ticking while the trip stays the same length. The moment you start moving, you are closer.
- Pick a direction, even an uncertain one. Not the answer. A direction.
- Take an action this week that only makes sense if you meant it. Small is fine. Reversible is fine. Theoretical is not.
- Open the box. Write down what you were trained to do well, in plain words, with no military vocabulary in it.
- Find one person who has already made this transition and ask them what they got wrong, not what they got right.
- Expect the first six months to feel like failure. Mine did.
- Reassess with real information, which you will not have until you have moved.
If you do not know what you want, pick something and move toward it. Would you rather spend your life waiting for something to happen to you, or spend it moving toward something you think you want today? That is the whole choice.
Where do you find the tribe you left behind?
Among other veterans who are building something, and the difference is obvious within about five minutes.
Camden and I spent three days at the Institute for Veterans and Military Families Veteran EDGE conference, which exists to help veteran entrepreneurs start, run and grow a business. I reconnected with a guy I served with and had not seen in more than twenty years. We learned plenty from the breakouts and the speakers. The real value was the connections among the people attending.
The relationships we had in the service were irreplaceable. The ones formed inside the veteran tribe become a source of resilience, and the ones inside the veteran entrepreneur tribe are another level again, because these are people going through the exact business struggles I am.
There was not one transactional conversation the entire time. I asked a fellow veteran with a very successful business how Tribe and Purpose could help him. Instead of the usual no thanks, we are good, he paused, thought about it, chose his words and gave me a real answer. You do not get that at a chamber happy hour. You get pitched there.
I saw the same thing again at VETS26, a week with more than a thousand veteran entrepreneurs, this group focused almost entirely on federal government work. An outsider would expect very little cross-talk when everybody is chasing one very large client. Every conversation I had and overheard was about how to help another veteran's business with a connection or an idea. Companies offering the same services were talking about how to work together.
Not one of the struggling businesses played the victim. Every one of them had a plan to get to the next stage, a backup plan, and a fail-safe. That is a veteran habit and it is worth more in business than most people realize.
Find your tribe. Build your tribe. Move away from transactional relationships and put yourself among people who want you to succeed. More on why that works in how to build a strong team.
Where to start
Open the box. Write down, in plain civilian words, the three things the military trained you to do better than the people you are about to work with. Planning is usually one of them.
Then take one action this week toward a direction you are not certain about. Certainty arrives after the movement, not before it.
If the piece you are missing is a group of men holding each other to a standard, that is the Steel Men Tribe. If you want to work through the choosing itself with somebody who has done it, that is one-to-one coaching.
Do this work with other men doing it too
The Steel Men Tribe is a brotherhood of men who hold each other to the standard they set for themselves.
See the Steel Men TribeFrequently asked questions
What makes military to civilian transition so difficult?
The military trains you to expect training at every new job, and the civilian world offers none. So people box up twenty years of planning, discipline and resilience on the assumption that a new role requires new skills. That assumption is the expensive part, and it usually takes about six months to notice.
Are military skills actually useful in business?
Yes, and more than most veterans believe when they leave. The planning fundamentals, the Military Decision-Making Process and the Five-Paragraph Field Order among them, were tested in life and death situations. Very few business problems are more complex than combat operations.
Why is choosing a direction harder than risking failure?
Most transitioning service members are not afraid of failing. They are afraid of choosing wrong, and of believing they are allowed to want something for themselves. People who spent a career in service often experience choosing for themselves as selfish, which is what makes it hard.
How do you start when you do not know what you want to do?
Pick a direction and move, because waiting does not shorten the trip. Setting a destination in your GPS and sitting in the parking lot leaves the drive time unchanged while the arrival estimate keeps slipping. You will not have the information you need to reassess until you have moved.
Where do veterans find community after service?
Among other veterans who are building something. Veteran entrepreneur groups like the IVMF Veteran EDGE conference run almost entirely on mutual help rather than pitching, including between companies offering the same services, which is not how most business networking works.