Lessons Learned for Vets
Lessons Learned for Vets
What Happens When You Can't Answer the "What Makes You Happy?" Question with Thomas McKenzie
What happens when the military career you've devoted your life to suddenly comes to an end? For Thomas McKenzie, a Marine who reached E9 before his 20-year mark, this question became painfully real when faced with undesirable relocation options. His powerful story reveals that military transition goes far beyond the job hunt. It's a profound journey of rediscovering who you are without the uniform.
McKenzie candidly shares how a chance encounter with the SkillBridge program became "the biggest blessing" during his transition, providing crucial time to process his service while weathering personal tragedies and relationship changes. Through working with thousands of veterans since, he's identified a dangerous "fallacy" that begins at recruitment, This is the misguided belief that military service automatically guarantees civilian success.
"I think transition out of the military is the single hardest thing that any human being that ever serves will do," McKenzie reflects. His analogy comparing transitioning service members to the Little Mermaid perfectly captures the challenge: observing humans from shore while taking advice from birds who've never walked on land.
The most moving moment comes when McKenzie reveals how a therapist's simple question, "What makes you happy outside of the military?," left him in tears, unable to answer. His breakthrough came through imagining his 90-year-old self on his deathbed, considering what he wanted to be remembered for.
Whether you're planning your military exit, supporting someone who is, or simply interested in veteran experiences, this episode provides profound insights into the emotional and psychological journey of military transition. McKenzie's message is clear: success comes with time, support, and the determination to discover your purpose beyond the uniform.
SeekNow and Drive Academy have chosen to sponsor this entire season of the Lessons Learned for Vets Podcast in order to increase awareness of the opportunities their company offers. You can learn more and apply at www.internwithdrive.com.
You can connect with Thomas McKenzie at https://www.linkedin.com/in/repurpose-mac/
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Welcome to the Lessons Learned for Vets podcast, your military transition debrief. I'm your host, lori Norris, and I've helped thousands of military service members successfully transition out of the military since 2005. Thanks for tuning in to hear the after action reports and real stories of your fellow veterans, who are here to help guide, educate and inform you as you navigate your own military transition. By the way, if you find value from today's episode, please share it with others, leave us a review and post about us on social media.
Speaker 1:On today's episode of the Lessons Learned from Vets podcast, I am excited to welcome my friend, Thomas McKenzie. Tom is well you might hear me call him Mac also is a retired United States Marine who has made it his mission to spotlight the often overlooked struggles of military transition. After 20 years of service, he now channels his experience into building solutions as the Director of Strategic Partnership and Recruiting for EBF and as a military training consultant with the GOALS program. Through advocacy, training and strategic partnerships, tom works to ensure no veteran navigates the shift to civilian life alone. It is no wonder we're friends, right, tom?
Speaker 2:That's right, lori, and I couldn't pick a better one.
Speaker 1:We've got the same mission, so I love it. So I know that we're going to have a lot of stuff to talk about today, but we always start the show with the same question, and that is tell me about your transition. How did that process go for you? Because you and I have talked. It wasn't the smoothest thing in the world right.
Speaker 2:So tell me about your military transition. You know it was. It was probably the best transition that you could ever get, in my opinion, lori. But I'll wind the clock back a little bit and just talk about how things ended at the tail end of my career. So yeah, I was 20 years in the Marine Corps and I spent the vast majority of my time on recruiting and had gotten promoted super, super fast, was a E9, before I hit the 20 year mark and at kind of the top of my career field, with like 10 more years to figure out what transition was going to look like for me. And so it wasn't even on the forefront of my brain.
Speaker 2:Um, when I had pulled the trigger to decide to retire, um, I was kind of faced with the dilemma. I was not happy with the current place I was at and was looking to try and get orders uh closer to home, and that just wasn't in the, in the cards uh, for me in the Marine Corps. And when, when they gave me the options of of relocating to either Chicago or Los Angeles or somewhere else, it was the first time ever in my life that I felt like I can't do this anymore, and so it put me in a bit of a pickle because I knew I wasn't willing to relocate to those places. But I'm just the type of guy that believes that if you're going to continue to serve, your heart has to be a hundred percent in, and so kind of at that. At that point wasn't that enthusiastic about carrying on and leading the way that I needed to, did some deep soul searching and just realized that, hey, this was time to invest into me and it was time to kind of move on to greener pastures. But I didn't know what those pastures look like and I made just the decision hastily to submit my retirement paperwork. And I remember I dropped the paperwork and went to go visit a friend and I just remember sitting there talking to her. I have no clue what this is going to look like, not really sure what life is going to be, but I've got, you know, a couple of months to kind of figure things out and figure out what life is going to be.
Speaker 2:And at that same moment as I'm having that conversation, in walks a guy that I had recruited about 15 and a half years ago. He starts talking about a program known as Skill Bridge, which I was completely blind to and you know really, this program that he had cultivated and developed that allowed service members kind of the time and the opportunity to learn a new skill take some time to decompress. You know kind of figure out what the next thing was going to be. And when I had heard about this program the very first time I thought it might've been a scam. But of course, doing the due diligence because it sounded too good to be true, doing the due diligence realized it was a hundred percent real, it was an opportunity that was going to really set me up and then just yeah, having that previous relationship, had full trust and faith that this thing was going to work out and quite literally it was the biggest blessing that I had ever encountered in my career, because that time going through SkillBridge really allowed me to just process my service. It allowed me the opportunity to figure out where I fit in the world and kind of cleared up these misconceptions or these fallacies that I had in my head about what my true value was and where my passions were, know what life would have looked like. Because there was a lot of tragedy in that time frame in Skillbridge, in transition, where things that I had never considered started popping up and bleeding over into my life, and so to this day, I can tell you that that was the biggest blessing ever, 100% eye-opening, and it allowed me to just kind of gain perspective on who Tom McKenzie was as a person and what was important.
Speaker 2:I was lucky enough that at the conclusion of my skill bridge I was actually hired on to continue on with the organization and help build it into what it has become or what it became. But the time there was probably about the most insightful time that I'd ever had, because I had the opportunity to interact with thousands and thousands of service members through all different branches of service, every MOS, every walk of life, every circumstance that was there, and it was through those calls and just the conversations that I would have with those service members that it really kind of unlocked what my next passion would become, which is really the advocacy for service members and helping to dispel the narrative and the fallacies of what transition actually looks like and how transition should be done for every single service member that's leaving service. So, yeah, it was. In short, that's that's kind of what it was. It was a beautiful, tragic time, but probably the most enlightening thing that I could have ever gone through.
Speaker 1:I think that the fact that you did take that time to slow down and just figure out, like who am I? Like who is not? Who am I the Marine, like you'll, am I Like who is not? Who am I the Marine? Like you'll always be a Marine, right Never going to change. But like who am I, aside from that right? Like who's Tom? And I think that taking that time and being like I think it's um, it's a whole lot harder to dig into those types of things than it is to just shove it down and pretend that the issues aren't there. But, like you know, they can only shove so far and then it's going to explode. And you've got to, you've got to figure that out along the way, don't you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think that's the, that's the biggest thing, that leadership that's in the DOD. They don't, they don't recognize, they don't recognize it's. It's always the mission and prior to me starting my own transition, everything was always the mission. It was what needed to happen.
Speaker 2:Today I'm worried about my manning levels. The mission needs to continue. It will come at all costs. Forget the families, forget everything else, take care of mission and then everything else will work out. And that works while you're in. But when you leave that institution, when you leave that family of service members that you're with, and then you're left on your own and left with the family that you actually have, there is an empty feeling that is not easily replaced by most good things in this world. And when folks don't have that time to decompress and recognize that the relationships that they're going to carry with them outside of the military need to be cared for with that same type of vigor that you carried, you know that you brought forward towards the mission, that is like a missing component that most senior leaders that are in uniform fail to realize and they don't even really understand the damage that they're doing to the future of the military and the damage that they're really putting forth on those individual service members and their families.
Speaker 1:I think that that kind of leads us into the next thing I want to talk to you about, because most so-called experts in the transition space they talk about landing a job, right, they say that that's the most challenging aspect of the transition, but you and I both know the job is not the one end-all, be-all right of that transition. So, in your opinion, like you said, you've met and talked to thousands of veterans at this point Like what is that biggest challenge facing the service members?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd say. In short, it's like what is the next purpose, right? What is the next mission that's going to drive that person forward? And to go back to your expert's comment, I don't claim to be an expert about anything. I just have shared experiences with thousands of service members and take the time to get to know them as people.
Speaker 2:But those experts that peddle that the job is the most important thing, you fall into one of two categories. You either are a former service member and everything worked out for you perfectly, and that's what you want to push on everybody, and that's fine and great on you. You just probably weren't that good of a service member because you weren't focused on the things that the vast majority of people are focused on while they're in service, or you got some sort of other ulterior motive out there who thinks that you can dictate what that looks like for all. And you're maybe not taking into the perspective that there's 230,000 people that leave every single year and a lot of them aren't afforded these opportunities to participate in programs where they can discover themselves. But I think ultimately, lori, what it boils down to is you need a little bit of time to decompress and really make sure that what you're going to go after next is the right thing for you to do. It's where your passion aligns and where your purpose is going to be, and that's a tricky thing. It's a tricky thing when you don't have the time and space. It's a tricky thing when you don't have people to give you the live advice on how things are happening in the marketplace, and you've never done it yourself.
Speaker 2:Right, these are all just ideas that you've heard from others, or ideas that you've crafted on your own, and the equivalent that I like to use when I describe this challenge is service members, in my mind, are like Ariel from the Little Mermaid. Right, they're sea creatures, you know, and we'll go back to one scene from the Little Mermaid and I'm dating myself with how old I am, because some people aren't going to get this reference but the Little Mermaid dreams of being a human being and walking on land, and so from the shore they can observe the humans and they can kind of get a feel for what they do over there. But the advice that they get comes from that crazy little bird that's flapping around, and the bird is kind of your senior leaders in the military talking to you about what life of being a human is and, quite literally, what ends up happening is these service members are taking advice from people that have never walked on the land amongst the humans. And so how do you decide, as the Little Mermaid, what type of human being that you want to be? And for those advocates out there that are experts in the field, like, who are you to dictate to the little mermaid what type of human she should be? Like?
Speaker 2:The reality is is folks, just no one's figured it out. No one. No one has figured out the solution, and when somebody does, they're going to be the richest human being on the planet because they will have solved one of the biggest problems that exist out there. But in my opinion, yeah, it's about finding purpose, and then it's about people like you, lori, who take the time to share the lessons, to bring other folks that can share their experiences, in hopes that we're going to wake the little mermaid up and have them go seek out other people, other experts that can help them kind of find their pathway. But for me, that's all it is.
Speaker 2:What is going to be the thing that you would want to do with your life If you won all the money in the world tomorrow and money was no longer an object. What's the thing that's going to get you up out of bed and have you pursue that as a passion? That's probably the thing that you should be doing as part of your transition, and if you can't figure out what that is, that's probably a sign for you either to stick around the institution that you're in or to start seeking some advice to help grab some clarity on that, because if you don't, you're going to be like so many of these other veterans whose dreams get dashed once things don't work out the way that they had them planned, and that's kind of what we're seeing perpetuated as folks transition on. They're just not whole, because they never left with the right goal in mind for them to go after.
Speaker 1:I think that finding purpose is something that's important, but I also don't believe that your purpose has to come from your work, like you don't have to make money, like that doesn't?
Speaker 1:I think the person that comes to mind when I think about this is Misty Moreno.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you're familiar with Misty, but she worked really hard in the corporate world for the last couple of years and realized like I'm missing my son's final years of high school, like I'm missing my son's final years of high school and I've missed all of these other years. And now she's, you know, making a lot less money, but she's living her life for her family and that's become kind of her purpose and and she's found it in a couple of different ways, right or also like so you can listen to a couple episodes with Misty on this show, and also I would, I would send you back to Mary Polanco, which you and I both know and so and she's got a lot of really good input on like how to like slow down and figure that out. But I don't, I don't know that you, you have to make money in your purpose. I think you know I've said it before like, sometimes, like our job funds our passion. Sometimes our job can be our passion, but it doesn't always work out that way. What do you think about that?
Speaker 2:No, I agree with you. I mean, look, let's not lie, there are bills to be paid out there, right, but that shouldn't be the thing that you're pursuing, right. You should not be pursuing a way to pay the bills. You got to pursue what the actual passion is, and so if it works out to where your work aligns directly with your passion, then great. I mean, that is the dream scenario.
Speaker 2:But I think, more importantly, when we talk about finding purpose, that's really the whole point of this what is the thing that you would do with your time? And that's probably the thing that you should be doing, and to the degree where there's just about a job there are so many jobs in this country You're not going to be in a position where you are completely penniless. But finding a job that gets you up in the morning, that makes you passionate, or finding a purpose that reignites that passion, that is the key to a truly successful transition. If you can make them both align, fantastic. If not, you hope that that passion is going to be enough to fulfill you.
Speaker 2:And if it truly is the passion, the thing that gets you out of bed every single morning, you're doing better than most do, and I think that's that's really for me leaving the service. That's the thing. What is what's going to be the thing that you can put your the same type of energy and vigor into that? You did your duties while you were in. If you can solve that problem, I promise you at some point the right opportunities to sustain are going to be there, but they shouldn't be the focal point of what you chase.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, I like that and, by the way, I feel like my very favorite analogy I've ever heard was just the one you painted of Ariel and scuttle talking about being a human, and it took great self-control to not start singing. I want to be where the people are, because I grew up in that same time.
Speaker 2:Well, I ripped that off, Lori. So, look, I took that from Josh Atkinson, so I have to give him a hundred percent credit for that. But it's the best parallel that I've, that I'd ever heard, and it's and it's so, and it's so, absolutely true, because just far too many folks these days, that's what we're doing in this SkillBridge world. We're trying to tell people that corporate is the way to go, or these suggested pathways are what you should be doing, and great on you if that's your cup of tea, but that's not the vast majority of service members' cup of tea. They don't know whether they even like tea, but we keep pushing this agenda.
Speaker 2:It doesn't do right by the service members. It might do right by those organizations or those experts, but it does not do right by the individual service member and the individual service member and the individual service member and their families. They are the true stakeholders in transition, and so when these experts give their expert advice that's just my number one question In whose interests are you advocating this message? If it's not the service members? It's not really fair, because these are the people who have selflessly sacrificed their lives in order to protect and preserve the freedoms that we have, and that's just that's where my body of work is now. Lori is trying to make sure that we advocate for those that don't necessarily know how to advocate for themselves.
Speaker 1:And you know, I think I never imagined when I started this that I would be at this many episodes, to be honest with you. But what I think I knew already but I've learned it again and again is that, like, transition is as diverse as the amount of people that do it Right. So we got 200,000 a year approximately. So there is no one size fits all. You know, and I know we have a lot of one size fits all programs, but I don't. I wanted people to hear stories of other unique individuals so that they could see, like there's 180, some different ways to do this, that stories that I've told go find your own way, but here's some guidance along the way, right? So I like that a lot. So, um and, by the way, josh Atkinson is the master of analogies, so he is um, okay. So thousands of veterans you've worked with over the last two years. You've seen their struggles firsthand, like, what were some of the biggest surprises to you about those struggles and what are some of the most common struggles?
Speaker 2:Okay. So I'm going to tell on myself, because I was a bad boy while I was in the Marine Corps, but not on purpose, I promise you that. But for me it comes down to this is that service members believe a fallacy from day one, and what I mean by that specifically is when a young man or woman comes in to enlist or join a branch of service, the conversation with the recruiter man tends to go somewhere along these lines Like hey, stud or studette, when you join X branch of service, let me tell you what's going to happen. You're going to learn discipline, you're going to learn leadership, we're going to teach you a skill. You're going to have all these benefits and the education benefits at your fingertips. Life is going to be golden, but it's not going to stop there here. Let me tell you what else is going to happen. You know, four or five, six years down the line, when you get out of service, people are going to be jumping up and down because of the skill sets that you have, bar none. So when you join X branch of service, your success is going to be guaranteed because you've done something that so few people do, and it's not that a recruiter man really is deliberately trying to lie or mislead. It's because that is what we commonly just all believe. It's the fallacy we all buy into, and there's nothing that could be further from the truth than that statement that I just gave you there.
Speaker 2:So I'd say that in a lot of cases, even though that there are service members that feel that they're super prepared and maybe have gone out of their way to put themselves in pretty good positions, you don't know what that's going to be like for yourself until you start to go do it on your own. And so programs like SkillBridge open the door for that education process to take place and they're a little bit more forgiving on your most precious commodity being your time to kind of figure out where you fit in the world. And if you do it the right way and you have enough time to kind of figure things out, I truly do believe that you'll find the right opportunity, the right resources there if you put effort in towards that transition. So that would be number one is you just you got to stop believing the fallacy. The earlier that you get exposed to that and really understand not just say that you understand, but really understand that you can start taking valuable steps that'll put you in a better position to win. So that would be number one, just the struggle from the fallacy.
Speaker 2:Number two a lot of folks don't really take the time to reflect on what type of work they're going to get into. They start chasing titles, they start chasing pay bands, they start chasing work that they think that they'd be okay with, but they've never taken the time to really examine that for themselves and then ask for expert advice, input, injects to kind of help shape where they go, and so a lot of them start down that pathway and then they continue to walk down that pathway because it's been the plan and they don't necessarily know how to register and adjust. And again, if you don't have the opportunity to participate in a SkillBridge program and you're in the midst of everything else that comes with transition, it's very easy to keep walking down a pathway that's not going to lead you to a place of success. And so that'd be. Number two is take the time to learn from the experts. You need to talk to people that are doing the thing you think you want to do, and then you've got to go out there and examine whether or not that's really where you fit into the world. That would be the second common thing I see is they pick something for the wrong reasons and go after it, and then, lastly, it's not respecting how difficult this is going to be. You're entering a world that you probably have never been part of.
Speaker 2:Most people who join the military do it at a very young age, don't have a ton of life experience on the outside, and this is kind of the first and only thing that they know. And, to be quite honest, you never really left your parents. Even if you joined the military at 17 years old, you never left your parents because you always had other military parents that were in there, kind of guiding you through the process, taking care of every need that you had. And so when you start to make this transition out of the military, yeah, it can be absolutely disastrous if you think it's just going to be this rose garden that you cruise through.
Speaker 2:I think the transition out of the military is the single hardest thing that any human being that ever serves will do, and a lot of the reasons for that is we're sometimes so grateful to not have to do the regular duties that we were doing that we get this moment of like ah, I'm free and life is so good because I don't have to go deal with X, y or Z person that was making my life miserable, or X, y or Z duty that made my life more miserable. And yeah, it really comes down to that. You get lost in that nostalgia of something new and something fresh, but you don't respect how hard this is and you don't put in the same type of effort on the front end when you have time to really change the course and speed of where it is that you're going to land. So it's kind of a lack of respect for how difficult this is going to be. That can really disrupt service members. And again, without programs like SkillBridge, without the time to get the earned or learned experience that's going to come with this, it becomes like this insurmountable mountain to climb. Some people dig in, they'll make it to the top, they'll go through their own battles and then they're never going to talk about whatever happened to them during that time frame.
Speaker 2:Others just aren't going to make it. They're not going to make it to levels of success, success and they're going to settle for where they go and then you've got the third rung of a veteran that probably should have never left service, probably wasn't even that good of a service member, but they're just going to kind of life's just going to hit them and hit them hard and they're going to turn to devices to cope with all of that. All that rejection, all that failure in a negative way, with all of that rejection, all that failure in a negative way. And they are part of that 22 per day, 38 per day, whatever your number is that are going to succumb to other things, and it's just, it's not a great scenario. This is all. It's all derivative of the fact that we are Lori. This is what it comes down to.
Speaker 2:People in this transition space, people that are in transition.
Speaker 2:They're trying to treat symptoms instead of the actual disease, and that's where it is.
Speaker 2:It's a reactive situation instead of a proactive approach, and it's because folks that have gone through the transition and have been traumatized from it they're not all digging in saying this was my shared experience, learn from me, this is what I went through, learn from my mistake. And because there are so many veterans that don't talk about their stuff, they don't relay that back to their people in uniform. We continue to see these unsuccess stories, or these failure stories, repeat themselves, and that affects the entire veteran narrative, to where, instead of you know, a group of people who should be empowered to go out there and rule the land, we're seen as this broken community of broken people that are half value to our you know, to our counterparts that, just you know, chose a corporate lifestyle or or to go the college route, and that, to me, is just about the most egregious crime that could ever exist, um is that we just don't do enough to help support our people along along the pathways and make sure that they get better landings.
Speaker 1:Once everything's said and done, Okay, that was a lot of thought and bad right, that was a lot of like it's there's, it's broken, it's it needs to be improved. What do you see as the successes? What do you see as the keys to the people that are doing it well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so those who get their time back and those who are really reflective on what they very deliberate and intentional with what they want to accomplish next, they're going to take that same vigor, drive, skill set that they developed and they're going to leverage that for success. And that's what I've seen is people go through this entire emotional cycle of trying to figure out where they fit in the world. And once they fit that, once they find that and once they figure out where they fit in, they are going to do what service members do best, and that's accomplish the mission for themselves and kind of get repostured in this next phase of life. That's where the success comes is when they have the time, when they have the support, when they have the resources that are around them, and then they put those resources to use. Yeah, I have not I've yet to meet a service member that, with those three things, not accomplish the things that they've set out for themselves.
Speaker 2:It's just, it doesn't always align that way, because you're talking about roughly 30,000 service members. 25, 30,000 service members get opportunities in the time and space to do that properly, and then we have 200,000 people a year that don't. And so we're just, we're talking about. We're talking about transition with people that have that opportunity. What about the folks that don't? That is a scary, scary thing. I'm more interested in meeting those human beings that just have their terminal leave to get things sorted out and figure out how they achieve their success, because those are the really true success stories. They'd probably be better at telling us how to achieve success than the time I've spent in this space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, and I think that you know we only fail when you quit trying right. Like you know the the old proverb of like you know, fall down six times, get up seven Right, and so, um, I want people to hear what you're saying, but I also want them to know that it doesn't mean that you're broken or that you're unlike everybody else who's doing in this so easily and so well. Because I think the person that comes on here and says like oh my, my transition was a breeze, everything was great, I fit in perfectly, I found the perfect job, I, everything was fabulous I think they are liars. I think that they're, you know. I think it's like social media right, we only put the good stuff on social media.
Speaker 1:And I know like every single person struggles with something in this process. Like every transition is a struggle. You know, transition from not having your kids in the house, like my transition of being a full-time caregiver for my mom, like all of these transitions are struggles. And anybody that tells you it's a breeze is either not telling you the whole story or is not honest with themselves. And I just want you to hear me say that if you're struggling currently, it's not because there's something wrong with you. It's.
Speaker 1:Maybe you need to take some steps backwards and address some of the things we talked about, like figuring out what you want to do, figuring out who you are, figuring out you know what didn't work the first time, right, so don't keep repeating those same mistakes like we talk about. Don't keep spraying and praying and hence sending out a hundred resumes, you know. Don't keep doing the same thing you've always done in the military because you think it's all you can do or all you know Like. Really take the time to own this process for you and your own unique needs, personality, situation, right.
Speaker 2:No dead on.
Speaker 2:And the other piece that I'd put out there with in that same context there, lori, is that don't be discouraged by failure and don't be discouraged by pain, right?
Speaker 2:Because pain is really a sign of two things One, it's a reminder that we're alive, because if we're not experiencing pain, we're probably not alive.
Speaker 2:But two, and more importantly, it's in a lot of cases in retrospect it is a sign of growth. So if you're in that, in that situation where things aren't going perfectly and it feels painful, it feels uncomfortable, look, I'll just tell you right now, don't, don't give up the fight, because there are people like Lori, um, uh, like me, other veteran advocates out there that will take the time to try and help you figure it out. You just you have to keep, you have to keep after it to find the right folks that will help give you that context. But as long as you have that will to succeed in, that will to growth, I promise you, if you, if you stick around long enough, the right person's going to come across your life that that can change it. So you just have to have that same type of tenacity and grit as you go through this foreign, uncomfortable, not fun time that you're dealing with okay, but you know, I think, um, for any time we go through something kind of hard and terrible.
Speaker 1:When, once we're through it, we can look back to that and and really like think about the things we learned through it, think about the good that happened in it.
Speaker 1:I, you know, I talked about my daughter a lot on the show and her and I just last week, were talking about, you know, last year when she was going through her surgery and we were, her and I, were in new jersey in a ronald mcdonald house, you know, and just the two of us trying to help her get back on her feet and but we actually had a lot of laughs during that time and and she learned so much about herself during that time and, boy, that was like the hardest thing she's done and gone through as a 20 year old kid, you know.
Speaker 1:And but I think she's now able to look back at it, look back on it and go like gosh, that was really hard but like I did it, I made it, I and here's where I am today and I think that just know that that that look back is coming for you, that you can come back to this time, that if you are struggling and and find like what was the turning point? Like what was, where did the change start? Where did that little seed get planted that will grow into something in the future? But you got to cultivate that garden yourself like you. You can't expect somebody else to grow your food for you in this case. You know that was a terrible analogy. Josh would be so, so dismayed by me.
Speaker 2:But I think it was a perfect analogy, because you're, you're dead on there, laurie, it's, it's, you're, you're 100 correct, it's. It just comes down to, there's gonna be the bright light. You gotta, you gotta hold on and understand that there are people in the space that have walked where you are and probably experienced that, and want to see you come through. And if you don't come across that person, then you can be that person for somebody else. You just got to keep on fighting and keep on putting the effort through, and then that bright light is going to be there for you.
Speaker 1:You got to open your eyes to see it first, though, right. Yep absolutely your eyes to see it first, though, right, yep, absolutely, um, you've been. You're pretty open about the fact that you got support, assistance through this process, and you shared a story that, um, like a therapist, asked you what makes you happy yeah tell me that story yeah, um.
Speaker 2:So as I, as I started my transition out where it's probably like midway through my transition, life really started to crumble all around me. So I'll kind of give out the crumble Because, again, I was riding high professionally and everything was good, but life just unfolded. So, yeah, I was in a relationship for a long, long time and as soon as I decided to retire and pull the trigger, that relationship was no longer there and she decided that we're done. So that was kind of like one blow to the ego, and not necessarily disruptor, but that was kind of one Number two. You go from being kind of the man in your career field and having subordinates and people that like constantly engage you and then you're no longer part of that mission set anymore and the phone calls stop coming in and that starts to kind of hurt the ego because your friend circle tends to get a little bit smaller.
Speaker 2:For me, I had some deaths in the family, kind of back to back to back. I had some deaths in the family kind of back to back to back, so had my grandmother pass away just tragically out of nowhere while I was still in Skill Bridge, which added this like extra layer of responsibility, because now my mom is responsible to take care of my grandfather and I kind of feel inclined to be able to take care of them both. And so you know that's a new struggle that I'm dealing with in transition. And then grandfather passes away too, within a couple of weeks of my grandmother passing away, which throws my mom in a situation where she can't live where she is living anymore, and so now there's this extra layer of like what are we going to do to take care of mom? At this point, some other personal relationships kind of burnt in the wake, and so I find myself kind of in one of those weaker moments of did I make the right decision? Is this, am I doing the right thing? Should I be here?
Speaker 2:And it just brought me to the point, lori, where there was a moment where all this tragedy was going on and I was starting to kind of feel like a victim myself. And in fact I was leaving a C&P exam, you know, with the VA. They were evaluating me for my VA disability, and I remember, as I left the office, the last thing that they tell you when you complete those appointments is they say, hey, thank you for your service. And in that moment I was just enraged, upset, a little bit dejected, because here it is, I'm dealing with all this tragedy and the only thing that you can give me is thank you for my service. It just it kind of set me over the edge to the point where I just I realized that, hey, this is I understand why people like do things like take their lives now, because so much bad can happen in such a short amount of time and I don't necessarily have a way to process all of these things that are going on.
Speaker 2:So I did what I thought was the right thing at the time and I sought out help from a therapist and was in my initial call with my therapist and, as she's kind of asking me these questions, just asked me questions to get to know me a little bit. She asked me the question what is it that makes you happy? And you can't use work and you can't use your time in the Marine Corps and you can't use anything from your military service, like, what is the thing that makes you happy? And literally in the car, as I'm taking this call, I just start crying and I say I don't know, I have no clue, and that right there, just my entire identity, my entire life, wrapped up in my career, other people, factors that were going on.
Speaker 2:I realized that I just did not do a very good job of nurturing me and so, kind of through this process, that was the thing that we went to. She was trying to help me find other things to occupy my time, other things that made me happy. And we still couldn't get anywhere, and it had been a couple of weeks. And so then she goes to this. She's like all right, tom, I've got something, I've got a way to get through so we can figure out what's going to make you happy, what's going to keep you on track. And I don't want you to even think about what makes you happy anymore. I'm going to take you to a dark place and I want you to think from here.
Speaker 2:And so, tom, I want you to flash forward to the point where you're 90 years old and you're on your deathbed and you're just about to go, or you've just passed and you're back at your funeral, and I want you to tell me the words that you want people to remember you by, the things that are the motivating factors, like what's your best known for, and I want you to just come up with a list of words to share with me about who you want to be defined as as a person. And that was a whole lot easier for me to do because I really started reflecting back on everything I'd done in the past and kind of looking forward to what it was in the future. And in that timeframe I came up with eight words that I wanted people to know me by, regardless of what body of work I got into or what I ended up doing. From those eight words and over the course of time, with her kind of just helping me along the way, I started to come up with my own mission statement that incorporated those words and that really became the catalyst that moved me forward through the transition overall.
Speaker 2:But had I never taken those steps, had she never been patient enough to help put that in perspective for me, I probably would have been stuck in the same situation that I was sacking all of my value in life towards the things that I accomplished, the reputation that had been earned, and I wouldn't have gotten to the point where I had gotten myself through it. So yeah, if you're in that situation yourself and you're having a hard time trying to find your purpose or find happiness. Start there, think about where you are when you're just about to leave this earth and think about the words that you want people to define you as or what you want to be remembered by. That's a pretty good starting point to help you kind of realize where it is that you where it, what it is that you can do to get yourself through those tough times.
Speaker 1:I think that is amazing advice. I, I, I really like that. I have about five more questions that I have ready to ask you, but I think that that is the perfect place for us to end for today, and you and I aren't going anywhere. We're gonna, we're gonna talk again, I know, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think, uh, now I'm gonna have to sit down and think about it and I recommend all of you do the same so well, I really appreciate your time, lori, because I'm happy to be here whenever you want me and, yeah, I got all types of things that we can talk about. So I'm here to support you and everybody that listens to what you do. But I'm just going to tell you, as a guy that's been in this space for a little bit of time, what you do to impact people is unlike anything else that really exists out there. It is 100% wholehearted, true and pure, and so I just truly appreciate the efforts that you take, through all the adversity that comes with being in this space, the fact that you are an advocate, the way that you are, it's beyond admirable. So I just appreciate anything I can do to help you. Yeah, it's just, it's an automatic. Yes.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you, tom. I appreciate you. Thanks for listening to today's episode. My goal is to give you actionable strategies to help you learn to market your military skills and smooth your transition to the next phase of your career. If you learned something valuable today, share it. Subscribe to our podcast and our YouTube channel, leave us a review and write a post on social media about the lessons that helped you today from this episode.