About a year into my civilian career, I was completing a performance evaluation support form. Standard process. You write your own input, your supervisor reviews it, everyone moves on.
I wrote something honest. That I was still learning to navigate civilian professional spaces. That the translation from military to corporate wasn’t always clean.
My supervisor was a veteran. Former military, same as me. He read it and took it as a critique of his leadership.
We laughed about it later. But we both sat in that moment for a second before we got there.
Two people from the same background. The same training. The same language, theoretically. And we still missed each other.
That’s the thing nobody warns you about. The gap doesn’t just exist between veterans and civilians. It exists between veterans and veterans, because the work of recalibrating is personal. Nobody can do it for you, and most people don’t even know it needs doing.
What Came With You
Everyone talks about what the military gives you. Discipline. Mission focus. The ability to function under pressure. Those things are real. And they transfer.
What doesn’t get talked about is that the weight transfers too.
The standards. The way your nervous system processes “not finished.” The body-level gravity of a missed task. The internal voice that still sounds like a formation brief when you’re sitting in a quarterly review.
My first job out of uniform had a forty-hour expectation. That was what was said. That was what was written. And there was enough work that forty hours wasn’t close to enough.
So I worked sixty. Got paid for forty. Kept going because the math in my body said: if I don’t get all of this done, the people I’m developing won’t have what they need. I was training new instructors, building curriculum, coaching people through their certifications. And I carried all of it myself because in my experience, you didn’t narrow the mission. You accomplished it.
The conversation I could have had with my supervisor, what are your top priorities, what matters most right now, never happened. Not because I didn’t have access to that conversation. Because I just fell in on how they did things. Filed the form. Kept working.
That’s military wiring operating in a civilian space. Quietly. At a cost nobody named.
The Knife-Hand
Early in my career, I had a soldier show up two minutes late to formation.
I corrected him in front of everyone. Loudly. The way I had been corrected. The way correction happened in that environment because visibility and immediacy were part of how standards got communicated.
It worked, in the narrow sense. He was never late again.
What I didn’t see in that moment were the second and third order effects. The other soldiers watching. What they learned about what to expect from me. The quiet recalculation happening in the people who had been on time, about whether this was a place they could make a mistake and survive it. The trust that moved a few degrees in the wrong direction and took time to earn back.
You can delegate work. But you cannot delegate responsibility.
That’s true. And it’s also true that the tools that communicated responsibility in one environment need recalibration in another. The standard doesn’t change. How you hold people to it does.
The Letter and the Board
I know generals who have written letters to the families of fallen soldiers. That is not a public act. It happens alone, in a private space, with the full weight of what that moment costs.
A leader answering to a board, navigating stakeholder expectations, making decisions that affect people’s livelihoods, that is real weight. I’m not here to rank it. The financial and operational gravity of running an organization is serious and I respect it.
But it is not the same weight. And nobody helps veterans make that distinction when they cross over.
So they carry both. The old weight and the new one. And the body doesn’t automatically know which set of stakes it’s operating under.
Missing a deadline can carry the same emotional impact in your body as it did when you had to make decisions that could save or take lives on a battlefield.
Read that again if you need to.
That’s not weakness. That’s wiring. And wiring can be recalibrated.
The Work Is Calibration
This is the part I want to say clearly to anyone in a leadership position who has a veteran on their team and thinks the transition is going fine because the performance is strong.
The performance being strong doesn’t mean the weight has been set down.
Veterans are exceptionally good at accomplishing the mission regardless of what it costs them. That’s not a flaw. That’s exactly what made them effective. And it’s exactly what makes them hard to read in a civilian context, because the signal they send is competence, even when what’s happening underneath is something else entirely.
Don’t talk about it, be about it. That’s the culture we came from. Feelings were not the deliverable.
The work now is learning which weight still belongs to the mission and which weight was built for a different battlefield. That’s not translation. It’s calibration. And it is worth doing.
We can be present for ourselves while also showing up to whatever room we’re in.
I See You
To the veteran navigating civilian professional life. To the one who got here without a roadmap and figured it out through sheer force of the same will that got you through everything else.
I see you. I know some of what it cost to get here. I know you probably still have the internal formation brief running somewhere in the background, telling you the mission isn’t done.
Some of what you carried here is exactly what got you here. Some of it is costing you more than it should. And the work of knowing which is which, that’s not something you have to do alone.
If any of this named something you haven’t had language for, that’s where we start.
The Values Investigation Exercise is free. No strings. It’s a tool for getting clear on what you actually value now, in this season, in this role, so your decisions stop being run by a mission brief from fifteen years ago.
If a different starting point makes more sense for where you are, send me a message. Tell me what you’re carrying. I’ll point you to the right tool.
We are communal beings. Get help.
I am here when you are ready.
If you’re ready to go further, the discovery call is the next step.
LaSchwann Killens is an ICF-trained life and executive coach and the founder of VALADD Coaching. He works with leaders who are carrying more than the current mission requires.