The Returning Veteran in the C-Suite

The skills that kept you alive in the field are the same skills that quietly cost you, decades later, in the corner office.

I served seven years in the United States Army as a noncommissioned officer, with overseas tours that included Iraq and Egypt, before becoming a clinician. That experience is part of what informs how I work with another particular kind of client I see often across Phoenix and the Valley: the veteran who has gone on to build a serious civilian career.

These are not the veterans the public usually pictures. They are operators, executives, partners, and founders in their forties, fifties, and sixties. The deployments were long ago. The transition was managed. The career, by every external measure, has gone well.

And the skills that kept them effective in uniform are, decades later, getting in the way of the life they actually want.

What carries over

Plenty of what the service taught is genuinely useful in the civilian career: the operational discipline, the bias toward action, the ability to function under pressure, the comfort with hierarchy, the steady performance regardless of internal weather. These are not small things. They are, in many cases, exactly what made the post-service career possible.

The same traits, however, tend to ossify over time. The discipline becomes rigidity. The bias toward action becomes an inability to sit with anything uncomfortable. The steady performance becomes a refusal to ever signal weakness. The hierarchy becomes a way of avoiding peer-level vulnerability with anyone, including a spouse.

The cost on the inside

Veteran executives often present in my office not for any specific symptom but for a vague sense that something is wrong they cannot quite name. Sleep has degraded. The marriage feels distant. The drinking has crept up. There is irritability at home that does not show up at work. There is a feeling, hard to articulate, that they are running on something other than fuel and they are not sure how much is left in the tank.

Sometimes there is a deeper layer underneath this — unprocessed material from the service years that has been quietly waiting two or three decades for an opportunity to surface. Often it does not surface until the career stabilizes and there is finally space for it.

What the work usually involves

For veterans in executive roles, the work tends to move in two directions at once. There is current-day work — the marriage, the sleep, the drinking, the relationship with adult children, the question of what to do with the next chapter. And there is older work — making conscious what has been operating below the surface since uniform days.

The first piece is concrete. The second is slower. Both, in my experience, benefit from a clinician who can speak the language of service without being defined by it, and who is comfortable letting the work be both clinical and practical at the same time.

If this is familiar

If you are a veteran in a serious civilian career — in Phoenix, Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, the East Valley, or anywhere across the Valley of the Sun — and some of the patterns above are uncomfortably familiar, the work is worth doing. The earlier version of this work is shorter and easier than the version that begins after the marriage has cracked, the drinking has become a problem, or the body has finally registered the bill.

I am glad to have the first conversation whenever you are ready.