My biggest obstacle throughout this whole transition journey was my mindset. I had this negative view of the world, of others and myself. I protected myself and refused to be vulnerable. I’m a Soldier, I’m supposed to be hard, I’m supposed to be relentless and strong. But the reality was that I was scared. I always had a plan, I always had a mission to execute and now I was slowly moving into unknown territory where there wasn’t a defined mission, and everything was grey. The future had so many different paths, but was uncertain. I hated that.
The comfortable route was to take a military contracting job that was in line with what I was doing in the Army. It paid well and was in my comfort zone. But my instincts kept nagging at me and telling me that there was more. The more I studied and the more I networked, the more I realized that there was truly a big world out there. But I kept talking myself out of it. I limited myself to doing what the Army had trained me to do.
I was in turmoil and didn’t know what the future looked like. I had ideas and I was excited, but I’m also a realist and I wouldn’t put myself in a risky position without thinking it through. As uncomfortable as I was during this time, my mind was slowly opening to this world outside of the Army.
As I continued to read and study new ideas relating to real estate, money and entrepreneurship, I was still stubborn and set in my old ways of thinking. I was a ticking time bomb and I released my frustrations in regular arguments with co-workers, family and at times strangers who happened to look at me wrong. I was in therapy and it helped, but I was still struggling and angry.
I had a friend going through similar changes that attempted time and time again to get me in touch with my spiritual side. As far as I was concerned, I had no spiritual side. The more she pushed, the more I resisted and the more I got pissed. My wife tried pushing me down this path years prior and I dug in even more back then. I simply wasn’t open to it.
But this time was different. My mind was opening albeit slowly. I wasn’t happy. I was angry. At this stage in my life, I wasn’t talking to my family and I slept on the couch. I was going to the doctor regularly to update my medical records for disability, and my medical issues were becoming more and more serious.
There were no explanations for some of my medical issues except for lack of sleep and stress. I laughed. Stress? Who the fuck isn’t stressed? This is the Army! Lack of sleep?! Are you kidding me? I’ll sleep when i’m dead. At this point of my life I regularly got about 5 hours of sleep. This was what I believed I needed in order to be functional. Anything more made me feel too tired. Then my heart issues started occurring with more frequency.
My friend continued to send me highlights from a book she was reading, “Think Like a Monk” By Jay Shetty. This aggravated me. My wife had regularly sent me random videos of him speaking when I was deployed overseas. My nickname for him then was “Jay Shitty”. As far as I was concerned – we couldn’t be from more different worlds.
I respected buddhism more than any other world religion I had come across in my travels throughout the world, but I was not a spiritual man by any means. As far as I was concerned, world religion is half the reason we went to war. Religion was more of a problem than it was a solution. I believed that spirituality had its place in bringing peace, but warriors also had their place in the world by bringing peace through war. I was on the side of the warrior.
Even throughout all our fights during this time, my wife bought me a book called, “I Used to be a Miserable Fuck”. The title alone made me laugh and was worth a read. It was funny, it was raw, but above all, it was REAL. Of all the different ways my friends have described me, REAL is one of them and I was immediately drawn to it. I liked his outlook on life and I liked the positive feeling from it. I started reflecting, I started journaling and writing out my goals and my thoughts. This was a game changer. I felt like I had focus and control of my day to day thoughts and actions.
My friend pushed me again to read “Think Like a Monk.” I borrowed it from the library I lived next to so I wouldn’t spend money. I was apprehensive. Hell, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it pissed me off a little bit to succumb to something I had pushed back on for so long. I was curious though.
All I can say is this – it changed my life. I learned more about my thoughts than I had ever learned before. His positivity and outlook to life blew my mind even more. He took the lessons he had learned as an aspiring monk and applied them to the everyday person for practical use. I read it once and then listened to it as an audio book on my way to work. Whenever I was anxious about something, I would listen to it or read a chapter and practice it. It was enlightening.
I started looking at what I was surrounding myself with and started cutting off everything negative. I stopped watching the news, I stopped following certain social media pages, I stopped hanging around people who were constantly negative. I journaled more and I set goals for the year. I wrote those goals in present tense and wrote daily affirmations saying that I was in the process of meeting these goals.
The world wasn’t such a negative place after all. I was becoming more active during therapy and even telling my therapist about the book. Instead of focusing on controlling all the different things in my life that were making me angry – I learned to focus on one thing and one thing only. MYSELF.
I started to see what triggered me and I simply steered clear from it. I realized that everyone isn’t always out to hurt me and that if I wanted people to change, I had to be the source of that change myself. I wish I could say it was easy, but it wasn’t. As I write this, I still struggle regularly – but I’m nowhere like I used to be.
I started everyday journaling about gratefulness. The first month or so I had the hardest time coming up with anything to be grateful about. I wrote down stupid shit like, “I’m grateful for my blanket”, or “I’m grateful for my dog”. It was funny. But it changed my mindset and it made me happier. The future was still fuzzy, but was coming into focus. My mindset was changing and when you truly set your mind towards a goal – nothing can stop you.