Self-Awareness… the Most Overlooked Skill in Transition

Most service members, especially Special Operations Forces (SOF) and combat arms,
spend their careers learning how to assess everyone and everything around them using all of their senses. They can read terrain on a map, read a room, identify known, likely, and suspected threats, evaluate capabilities, manage resources, identify malfunctions in their weapon system by sound and feel, and recognize risk before it develops into a problem… but… they struggle when it comes to themselves. We spend so much time looking outward that we rarely reflect inward until something is seriously wrong.

Research in performance psychology suggests that you can’t perform optimally or
develop the necessary skills without being self-aware. If you don’t understand who you
are, your needs, your likes and dislikes, your strengths and weakness, your subtle cues
and warning flags, you will never be able to meet your fullest potential. More
importantly, as you transition away from a community that understands you through past shared experiences such as deployments, selections, and training cycles, and into a world that is new, you will struggle to connect and feel ‘off’ but never truly understand why because you haven’t taken the time to understand your own mind and body.

Is this completely your fault? No. Combat arms, and SOF as a whole, is all about
pushing yourself to the next level. You are told from the beginning that you are always
being assessed and that you need to earn your Beret (Tab, Scroll, Trident, etc.) every
day. Even when you take leave you are training yourself for the next evaluation, the next
deployment, the next training event. You don’t listen to the cues your body is screaming
at you because there is no time to slow down and breathe. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
What was functional on a team becomes dysfunction after transitioning from the military.
The problem comes when the mission changes. The challenge in separating from the
military isn’t just in finding a new job, but it is in adapting to a new environment, a new
culture, a new identity, a new set of rules that you have to figure out as you go. The
winners of this transition aren’t the ones with the most spectacular resume on the finest
paper; it’s the ones who are the most self-aware and can adjust to their needs as they
arise.

Conducting Mission Analysis, on Yourself

One of the things SOF is known for is its ability to plan, assess, and rehearse. We can
spot strengths and weaknesses in each course of action (COA) while assessing
available resources, identifying constraints, and determining what is needed to be
successful. SOF service members always go a step further and look at what can cause
mission failure and then develop contingency plans for when our plan goes to shit,
because it will. You’re expected to apply the principles and objectives of the original plan
to a dynamic environment and the ability to do that comes from preparation, planning,
war-gamming, and rehearsals.

Where is this level of planning when it comes to transitioning out of the military? Sure,
we focus on degrees, certifications, companies who are pro-veteran, the all-important
dollar, but these are secondary to a more fundamental question that we should be
asking: Do I understand myself well enough to know where I will thrive?
Being self-aware is key here. Being able to accurately understand your strengths,
weaknesses, motivations, values, habits, fears, and the impact you want to have on
others is the starting point. Without this understanding you are planning a mission
without knowing your own capabilities, you don’t know your resources, you don’t know
the environment, and you certainly don’t know the Most Likely or Most Dangerous
COAs such as jobs falling through, unforeseen health problems, financial woes, etc.
As a community, we have what is dubbed the “blind spot problem”. In combat the
greatest danger is the threat you never see. This same principle is applied to your
transition out of the military. You know your strengths; everyone will tell you how to sell
yourself and how great you are. You know that you’re disciplined, resilient, you know
you can solve problems under pressure, perform when the stakes are high, you can
work long hours in shitty situations, all things that were very beneficial in training and
combat.

What you might be missing are your blind spots. Perhaps you struggle to delegate
because you prefer being in control, maybe you get frustrated when others don’t
demonstrate the same sense of urgency, maybe your communication style is perceived
as abrasive outside of the military culture, you might even miss that your identity has
become so connected with your role in the military that you can’t even envision who you are outside of it which then can distort what types of careers you want to move into. Blind spots are dangerous because they influence our decisions without our awareness.

The goal of self-awareness isn’t to become less confident; the goal is to become more
accurate and efficient. Our blind spots can influence behaviors, decisions, even our
nervous system. What is primed for combat might spike during day-to-day events
without us even knowing and result in our sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight
response) sending our bodies into over-drive because of triggers that we completely
missed.

360 Degree Feedback Method
How do we improve self-awareness? I am sure you have all heard of journaling,
allowing your internal voice to manifest on paper, but this isn’t it. Rather, let’s look at the problem and see if we can collect actionable intelligence using the 360-Degree
Feedback method. This is a simple and effective approach to develop self-awareness in a method that is familiar to our community. Just like collecting intelligence on an objective, we are building out the full picture, looking for obstacles, threats, or anything that will influence the outcome of our mission.

If you were planning an operation, would you rely on a single source of intelligence?
Absolutely not! You would gather intelligence from multiple sources to create the
clearest possible picture of the reality of the situation. The same principle applies here.

Building the Picture
Let’s start with SIGINT, it’s in your hand. Look at your phone, your screen time usage,
most frequented websites, what apps do you use the most? Are they building you or
weakening you? Doom scrolling social media? Probably need to fix that. Getting daily
reps on the SOFLETE app working on your fitness and nutrition? Definitely a building
up.
Take Action: Take a minute to assess your use of technology and how much of your
day is distracted from focusing on your desired end-state, and also look at how much of your day uses technology to benefit and support your self-development.

Next up HUMINT. Human intelligence is talking to those closest to you. Start with guys you know who will tell you the stone-cold truth.
Take Action: Ask these trusted friends/co-workers the hard questions:
- What is my greatest strength?
- What is my biggest blind spot?
- What type of civilian role or environment do you think I would excel in?
- What do I do that makes others better?
- What do I do that makes others worse?
- When I leave, what is my legacy?

The goal isn’t validation, it’s accuracy. It’s about actionable intelligence that you can use to strengthen your weaknesses and bulletproof your strengths. It is about learning the things that you demonstrate about yourself to the world that you don’t realize. The value of this feedback is not on hearing what you want to hear, it is about discovering what you cannot see on your own.

When you receive feedback, don’t stand or fall due to a single person. One person
might offer a personal preference, but if you receive the same feedback over and over
again, pay attention. If five people tell you that you struggle to listen and think before
solving problems, that might be an area that needs focus and development.

Finally, MeINT… okay, so that isn’t a real intelligence method, but for this it fits, trust me. You need to take time to recognize the signals your body has been trying to send you but you haven’t been willing to hear. Most of SOF and combat arms live sympathetically dominant lives, meaning that your body is always ready to go at a moment’s notice.

Your body is flowing with adrenaline and even though your resting heart rate might be low, your blood pressure might be low, your nervous system and hormones are in a
dysfunctional state.

What does it look like to be sympathetically dominated? Tension in your musculoskeletal system, digestive disturbances, sleep and energy dysfunction, cardiovascular issues, increased anxiety, brain fog, memory issues, emotional instability, difficulty relaxing, compulsive busy-ness, hypervigilance, and a number of other things related to your
history.

Seem familiar in any way? Your body has been sending signals for a long time now, so
it’s time to be aware and do work as you go to the next chapter of life, after the military.

Take Action: Find a comfortable place to lay down with minimal distractions. Start at
the bottom of your feet, down by the tip of your toes and take a moment to just be
present. What do you feel? Next, focus on the top of your feet, then ankles, then work
up your legs, and continue working until you get to the top of your head. Where is the
tension, the pain, the areas that just feel ‘off’? Take the time to reconnect and listen to
your body.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Finally, I have something that may be difficult to hear about the next phase of your life,
but it is important. While civilians might respect your military service, they might be
impressed by your background, none of those things automatically create trust or
credibility in your new career. Every organization evaluates people based on the value
they provide today, not yesterday, not on your GWOT deployments, today. The guys
who transition most successfully are the ones who understand how their military
experiences translate into value for civilian organizations, and they use their skills,
values, and worth to their advantage.

Leadership, decision making, team building, problem solving, adaptability, these are the capabilities that matter to them. Being self-aware helps you to identify which parts of your experience create value and which parts have become part of your personal
mythology. When you face the transition monster, you are going to need to answer a question that some people never answer completely because they are scared to or because they don’t have the self-awareness to separate their identity from their occupation.

“Who am I when the uniform comes off?”
Being self-aware of your strengths, weaknesses, purpose, motivations, and how you
influence those around you is key. Once you recognize the things about yourself that
made you successful in the military, you will see that they still exist regardless of your
job title. The mission changes, but you don’t.

Here’s your mission for the week
Task 1: Interview 5 people who know you well and will answer you honestly. Record
their answers and look for patterns. Highlight your strengths and identify blind spots.
Look for opportunities. Most importantly, resist the urge to defend or explain yourself,
just listen.
Task 2: Do an assessment of how you spend your time each day. Look at your screen
time and app usage on your phone, where are you spending your time? Keep a log of
what activities you do throughout the day.
(One of the best drills I ever did for this was called “The Hour Log”. Every hour for a
week I wrote out what I did, where I went, and who I was with. At the end of each day, I
would make a note about what energized me and drained my energy. At the end of the
week, I assessed it for wasted time and where I could be more efficient. You don’t need
to go crazy with a week-long hourly log, but find a way to reflect on how you spend your time each day.)
Task 3: Take an honest assessment of the feedback from steps 1 & 2, reflect on where you are and where you want to be. Where do you need to grow, where do you need to soften, what do you bring to the table and how can you learn to apply it to your future career field? Come up with a plan on how you can better yourself based on your needs.

The next chapter of your life requires the same thing that was needed before every
mission, an accurate assessment of the situation, resources, and obstacles. Self-
awareness is where that assessment begins. You have some tools to use, so let’s get to work.

Keep going.