By COMMIT Coach and Friend Jason Roncoroni

It took Odysseus 10 years to return home after the Trojan War. What stands out is that the time it normally takes to travel between his homeland in Ithaca and the battlefields of Troy is about a week - two tops. This ancient tale provides an important metaphor for the challenge of coming home - crossing that threshold between the world of adventure back to the ordinary world. It doesn't happen on the day of your separation or retirement. It is a process - one that is unique to every service member, and depends on factors relating to your identity, the duration of your service, and the intensity of your service.

Arguably, you can effectively “transition” from one job to another relatively quickly. You change your signature block, business address, and LinkedIn profile. That’s not what I am talking about. I am talking about the transition between different worlds and states of being - the deeper expedition of self-discovery that occurs when you cross that threshold back into ordinary society. Your retirement date represents a seminal moment of personal transformation. It is an incremental step, not always the final one. Personal transformation is hard. Hard enough to turn a weeklong excursion into a 10-year odyssey.

Identity Awareness and Well Being

Let’s start with how you see yourself outside the uniform. What you might expect along this journey is largely dependent on your level of self-awareness and personal well-being. Self-awareness relates to the intrinsic qualities that define who you are - namely your values, strengths, and sense of purpose. These are the drivers and motivations that will influence your personality, perceptions, interactions, and intentions in the world. Understanding how these intrinsic impulses guide and direct your thoughts and behaviors requires active reflection to recognize how they influenced your journey thus far. That understanding provides the guidance that reveals the way forward.

What complicates this process are the unconscious biases and emotions that alter our objectivity. Negative emotions such as guilt, regret, and fear can slow, change, or halt progress altogether. Making an interpretation based on fear or other emotional triggers could launch us on a trajectory towards the wrong destination. The path is inherently uncertain. There will be temptations to quit along the way. It happens. As you read this you might think of those veterans who remain trapped in their own purgatory between the life that was and any life beyond the military. The indicators are quite obvious - failing personal relationships, substance abuse and related unhealthy habits, isolation, and even despair. Some cross through this void quickly. For others, it may take some time. The condition of your ship matters. Take care of the ship, and it will take care of you.

Duration of Service

Another factor with biological and psychological markers involves the duration of your service. The longer you are in the military, the harder it becomes to leave the military. The human brain is considered fully developed at age 25. The adult personality is 95 percent formed by age 35. So, if you join the military when you are 18, one quarter of your neurological development occurred in the military. If you stay for a career, then almost your entire adult persona was shaped through a very specific culture with norms and expectations distinct from the civilian world. The research suggests that forming new habits takes anywhere from 18-254 days with older adults leaning toward the higher end of that continuum. Evolving habits and personal recalibration of intrinsic motivations requires time.

This factor suggests that a safe estimate of transition should be at least nine months. That assumes that you have any idea what new habits will allow you to experience positive emotion, purposeful forms of engagement, nurturing relationships, meaningful activities, and worthwhile achievement. In other words, the nine-month estimate is the best-case scenario assuming that you know who you are, what you want, and how you can contribute to society in a meaningful way beyond the military.

Intensity of Service

Quantity, or time, is also influenced by quality, or intensity. The incidence and frequency of exposure to extreme life events may significantly impact your personal transformation. A service member with only one term of enlistment or service obligation could have a more challenging transition than someone with two or three decades of military service, depending on the nature of their service. The process of healing, recovery, and recuperation from psychological trauma and the residue that comes from combat deployments will increase and adversely impact the personal transformation. This presumes that the service member ever seeks therapeutic protocols to address these injuries. Too many simply attempt to drift in the scuttled ship from one world into the next with a blind hope that they won’t sink along the way.

The nature and intensity of assignment experiences can impact the mindset of a transitioning service member. A strong sense of belonging and esteem from particular units or leadership assignments can set lofty expectations for an individual’s reintegration back into society. Belonging and esteem are psychological needs. Some military experiences can set a seemingly unattainable standard of culture, camaraderie, and shared identity. The service member so loved their sense of belonging that they don’t believe anything better awaits on the other side. If you don’t believe something better awaits on the opposite shore, why would you ever embark on this hazardous journey?

Esteem can be more challenging for members of elite organizations and former senior leaders. When leaders feel valued and respected with a certain level of authority and responsibility, it is natural to have a negative reaction when told to “take a step back” as they leave. Growth is a spiritual and developmental imperative for the human condition. You either grow or you die. This isn’t about rank or position. This isn’t a call to make every military leader a c-suite executive in the corporate world. This is a mindset challenge. We are only inclined to move forward if and when we recognize an opportunity that puts us in a better mental, emotional, and spiritual place than the one we leave behind.

The Steps & Actions You Can Take

This kind of transition doesn’t happen in isolation. Life goes on. How you manage other life stressors matters. The strength and quality of relationships with family and your social network with friends can ease or increase the burden of this process. Making choices and partaking in activities that support your physical and mental well-being can affect your energy, stamina, and resilience. The totality of these factors means that everyone’s transition experience is unique. The time it takes will be different for each transitioning service member.

So what can you do about it? How do we manage the risk and chart a productive path across the dangerous waters to reach the shores of life beyond the military? Here are some of the best practices:

1. Start early. Transformation happens in its own time. You may not be able to control how long it takes, but you choose when you start. You can work all the way up to your retirement. That won’t truncate the process. It's still going to happen in its own time based on your wellbeing, duration, and intensity of service. As a planning factor, consider beginning the process of self-discovery 12-18 months before your separation date. Understanding your intrinsic drive will increase the clarity and confidence necessary to continue forward progress. The longer you wait to start, the later it will be if and when you arrive at your destination.
2. Engage Your Support Network. The journey may be an individual endeavor, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it alone. Start your mental and emotional program of rehabilitation now. Don’t wait until you start your retirement physical to start talking to behavioral health professionals. This is so much more important than your disability rating. As for looking forward, professional coaches (like the Commit Foundation) will increase your sense of clarity about your unique identity and confidence regarding how you might apply that identity in what happens next. This is the necessary step before you start looking for a job. Finally, engage your network. Now. Your network includes everyone who was a large or small part of your journey to this point. Reach out. Let them know where you are. Trust me - they want to help you. Let them do that.
3. Shift Your Focus. You can look at this challenge from the perspective of leaving. You may even feel like you are quitting the team. Here’s the thing: Everyone leaves. Nobody stays forever. You can also look at this as an opportunity. As uncomfortable as you are with this process, you can set an example for others on how they might begin their own journey of personal transformation when their time comes. Once you state that you are retiring or leaving, everyone will be interested to see how you are doing it because they know the day of their casting off is inevitable. This is an opportunity to lead. If hardship strengthens relationships, transition presents an opportunity to deepen your bonds with the people you care about the most. After all, aren’t they a major influence for your decision to leave the military in the first place?
4. Grace. Don’t be so hard on yourself. A big part of this transformation involves grieving a part of your persona. The warrior shaped and defined a large part of your life. Don’t be surprised if you actually experience those stages of grief. The tenets from psychology, philosophy, and even religion suggest that the process of transformation is best described by the extremes of death and rebirth. Something has to die to create the space for something new to take its place. You will have good days. You will have bad days. You may take one step forward only to take two steps back.
5. Actively Manage Your Risk. I often hear people describe certain employment opportunities as “the easy button.” There is no such thing. Taking a familiar job in a familiar industry reduces the inherent stress of learning an entirely new job in a completely different industry while trying to navigate this transformation process. The first job doesn’t have to be the last job. I like to call this employment strategy a “step out” job - where you step out of the uniform but continue a very similar professional endeavor. This strategy frees up some of that mental and emotional bandwidth to explore and grow. You can’t find the ideal fit while you are still in the process of personal transformation. Consider all the professional and personal domains of your life. Assess the stress across each of these factors involving family, total well-being, employment, relationships, and lifestyle. Take an active role in implementing mitigation strategies that give you sufficient time and personal bandwidth to address them in a healthy way.

If you’ve read this far, I hope that I’ve made my point. There is no correct answer to the complex question I posed in the title of this article. There are too many unique and distinctive factors that shape your personal transformation journey. What worked for one person will not necessarily work for you. This is an extremely dynamic process. Any advice you might receive might seem useful, but its value is myopically and anecdotally limited. Once you embark on the sea of personal transformation, your perspective changes. You learn. What looked right when you were standing at the threshold might not be what looks right now. To conclude that ⅔ of military leaders change jobs in the first two years is a failure of transition is incorrect. It is just part of a process of nonlinear growth and development that takes time. It depends on personal awareness and well-being, the duration of your service, and the intensity of your experience. All that said, you can better prepare yourself for this transformation by starting early, engaging your support network, shifting your mindset, practicing grace, and actively managing the risk factors. Even Ulysses made it back to Ithaca, and when he did, life became something greater than he ever expected. That is what waits on the other side. Perhaps the question isn’t about how long it will take, but rather when you are ready to start.