The Discipline That Transferred and the Discipline That Didn't

I came out of the military with a lot of trauma that I couldn't put my finger on any of it.

I've always been a straightforward kind of person, but the Marine Corps supercharged that in a very big way. My wake up call didn't start until probably the second or third civilian I made cry.

For about a year after I got out, I wouldn't go hiking in the mountains. I wouldn't do a lot of these things that I love. I love them now and I do them very regularly, but then it was just the middle finger to the military. I was forced to do this stuff for six years.

I struggled with empathy before the military, and after the military it wasn't part of my vocabulary at all. I've learned that mostly through the mirrors of my personal relationships. If you don't get that down, you're going to have a long hard road.

I learned validation as part of empathy. I don't seek validation from people. I don't comprehend why people need it so much, and I couldn't get it through my head. I had to learn that you can validate somebody, give credit to the experience they're having, a very real felt experience to them, without agreeing with them and without enabling them further.

For a long time I showed up in my relationships, and they would clearly say with their words what they needed more of from me. It was really hard for me to acknowledge that something is valuable for them. I feel like for the most part I've got this down, but I probably still slip up here and there. Even in the last year I'm checking in with myself.

I have known from the time I was a teenager, even before the Marine Corps, that I have a habit of taking on too much. Our marketing company was going well, with clients all over the country. I was really trying to pace myself and make a smart decision. I was waking up and hitting the gym, then getting to my office and waiting for my team to show up. I was working all day, trying to be home at three o'clock for my kids.

After a while I had to relocate my clients to friends who had a similar business, because I didn't want to provide less of a service. I tried to do right by everybody involved. Then I trimmed that business down and focused everything on the studio.

We bit off quite a bit more than we could chew. We took on a six thousand dollar a month overhead with that studio. I was having to come up with the difference, so I was taking other jobs as a CMO with other companies. I'm even more careful about my bandwidth now than I was back then.

I still had insecurities, even coming out of the Marine Corps, in different spaces and different circles. A lot of imposter syndrome that I had to overcome for a while.

I didn't grow up learning emotional intelligence or self-regulation or co-regulation. I wasn't learning this stuff from my parents.