Welcome, Service Academy Philosophers

If you're a service academy graduate, I urge you to dedicate some time right now to philosophy because, like it or not, you're probably in conflict.

You're both gifted and cursed.

Your gift is the sum of character qualities that earned you a coveted spot in the academy plus your experiences that built upon and added to these qualities. Your gift helped you graduate and perform as an officer. You know about your gift in your conscious mind and in the deepest recesses of your subconscious because the academy transmuted it into something called leadership and pounded your awareness of it into you for four years. Every authority figure, every lecture, every monument, every classmate, and even the young, eager, and ambitious reflection in the mirror oozed military leadership. This, I propose, is your curse.

Leadership is a curse? Perhaps.

Let's explore this by examining the missions of the three largest academies. USNA is the only one that claims to prepare graduates for a life outside the military.  It claims to prepare its midshipmen for 'citizenship', but only as a 'future' state to achieve after being 'dedicated to a career of naval service'. USMA and USAFA make no pretense about it. Graduates are being prepared for service as officers in the Army or Air Force.

By mission statement and real world execution, the service academies build a special brand of leadership that enables victory in warfare. This is necessary since America needs people who can lead warriors. But since the vast majority of us leave the service prior to completing military careers, all but a select few of us are living outside the academy mission. Therefore, something within the hearts of our alumni ranks cries out for us to evolve into something counter-cultural to the environment that shaped us as young adults. This leads to a revealing observation.

By choosing to leave the service, you took action that implies that your deep and enduring military leadership programming conflicts with your true nature.

Of course, this statement warrants an examination of the relationship between military leadership programming, other possible programming you could have undergone or may yet undergo, and your true self.  Such an examination is complex and the subjects of different posts. For this post, let's assume that there is at least some degree of difference between the expected result of academy-grade military leadership programming and the average service academy graduate.

Therefore, from the psychological perspective, I believe that our subconscious minds accepted the conditioning of the academies, which creates, on average, some degree of internal conflict. Worse, since repeated programming over years embeds itself in the subconscious mind, most of us are unaware of this conflict's full depth and breadth.

Self-awareness is vital and separates humans from all animals except elephants, apes, and dolphins, (http://www.livescience.com/animals/061030_elephant_mirror.html). Imagine the horror of being hidden from your nature by programming that says you're something that you're not. Imagine the sadness, the anxiety, the anger, and the emptiness of trying to live up to the mission of the academy when your DNA and innate strengths have set your gifted character traits, drives, and desires in different direction.

I call that a curse.

This, of course, excludes those who feel or felt that they were in their destined place while leading warriors. If this describes you, I invite you to keep reading this blog because the insights will apply to the broad population of service academy graduates in your charge, and you may gain a better understanding of how embodying the academy's mission is part of your identity.

For the rest of us, the majority, there is a good chance that self-awareness eludes us. Unless you take the action to reprogram yourself, this blindness and its resultant internal struggle are your fate, even if you've been out of the academy for decades. Subconscious drives don't change until you invest in a repeated conscious effort to change them.

The intent of this blog is to help each other change, rediscover our gifts from an enlightened perspective, and become what we were individually destined to become.

Enjoy, reflect, and share your thoughts through comments.

Thank you,

John H. USNA '91

Future posts

• Military leadership versus generalized leadership. Limits and challenges of transition and ongoing lifetime development.
• How to succeed and develop a powerful sense of self-esteem outside a leadership role.
• Why did we sign up in the first place? Were we already trapped in someone else's vision for us? Were we trying to prove something because we felt a need to prove?
• Self-awareness – the academy restricted this discovery during our formative early adulthood. How can we achieve it now, and why it's never too late.
• Lessons learned - case studies in those who have successfully reprogrammed themselves.
• Accepting your limits and celebrating mistakes as learning experiences.
• Asking for help. A lot of us have been through serious issues, life threating or not. If you're processing your traumas and grief alone, stop!
• Sticking together. Whether or not the academy churned out the authentic version of you, you shared incredible experiences with people you may not have even met.
• Updating or even throwing out score cards. Grades, class rank, net worth? Which indicators apply in the past, which count today, and where should we set the bars?
• Spirituality, emotions, and being human – the stuff that was tangential back then deserves more attention now.