proved to myself that my inner critic didn't know what the hell he was talking about. In fact, I decided, if my inner critic says I can't do something, I'm going to go for the most challenging, interesting, and/or exciting option. I basically started treating my inner critic like that guy we all have in our office who thinks he knows everything, he has the “inside track” on how the new policy sucks and it's going to be bad, but when you check on anything he says it's wrong, and so you decide to humor him when he talks to you or warns you about something, and then you just go on with the rest of your day thinking nothing of it again. When you learn you don't have to believe what you say to yourself about yourself, the world opens up for you.
As you might imagine I gained a bit of self-confidence as my grades in the Chinese program improved and certainly later when I graduated. It was at this point in my career I decided I wanted to work toward obtaining a college degree. As I mentioned, I graduated from high school on a Friday and was flying to an Army base on Monday, so I didn't go to college. I had an option to use some of my DLI training to support getting an associate's degree and I could begin while still at DLI, so I took some classes while in Chinese language training and earned an AA degree in language from Monterey Peninsula College.4 And later, while I was assigned to Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, I looked for a program online that I could take while still working full time as an active duty soldier. No one in my family had a bachelor's degree and I wanted to break that cycle, but the only way I would be able to do it was if I made a sacrifice in some of my downtime to focus on chipping away at this goal. I pursued a bachelor of science degree in business information systems at Bellevue University.5 It took me a few years of working at night during my different assignments in the Army, but by carving out the time needed to get the work done, I graduated with honors and became the first person in my family to get a bachelor's degree. When I learned to regularly prioritize time for self-development and self-care, I realized some goals just required consistent application of effort over time as opposed to high levels of natural talent or wealth.
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My Army career took me across the US from the East Coast all the way to Hawaii, with many states in between, and then back to Maryland to work at Fort Meade doing signals intelligence collection work, listening to foreign communications, and translating conversations. This was when I first volunteered to deploy to the Middle East during Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. In 2003, I left the Army after nearly 10 years but continued to serve my country by joining the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) as a civilian intelligence officer where I served for 7 years.
After successfully working my way through a series of the intelligence community's (IC's) increasingly complex and the single-most-challenging human intelligence collection courses, where I learned to gather intelligence from the most complex entities, humans, I began my career in one of the riskiest professions the IC has to offer: espionage. I volunteered again to deploy and served tours in Afghanistan and Iraq with some of the most selfless and under-recognized patriots our country has protecting us at the tip of the spear.
Although you might think all that seems interesting and exciting, and it was, my crowning assignment with DIA wasn't in a war zone. After coming back from Iraq in 2007, I had an opportunity to go to the Joint Military Attaché School, where DIA personnel go to learn to be diplomats and how to navigate the maneuvering and double-talk associated with diplomacy. On completing the training, I was selected to become a diplomat and represent my country in an assignment at the US Embassy in Beijing, China.
Given my journey thus far, a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks joins the Army as an enlisted soldier, learns Chinese, gets educated, and eventually becomes a diplomat, representing our country with one of the most important strategic and often contentious foreign relationships we have, you might imagine this was the pinnacle of my career up to that point in my life. It was. You'd also probably think I was on top of the world, and I was, outwardly. I mean, I displayed that excitement. Inwardly, though, I still had some of those self-defeating thoughts popping into my head from time to time which still took diligent effort to Catch and Release.
Not long after meeting all the brilliant and highly educated professionals assigned to the US Embassy Beijing, I began to have more and more thoughts making me feel like I didn't belong, like I was an imposter, and that I would soon be found out when I had to face a tough question. These thoughts were a little more difficult to Catch and Release because they weren't coming up in automatic response to some specific external challenge. Instead, they were coming up more subtly in response to an overall awareness that the folks I worked with were pretty amazing, had done so many interesting things, and went to schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, and Columbia.
So, when an embassy colleague suggested I apply to Harvard when I began considering attending graduate school, I told him he was out of his <bleeping> mind. I immediately shared, “I barely graduated high school and, oh yeah, I have an online undergraduate degree.” I explained it would be a colossal waste of time and money. Plus applying to Harvard is like doing your taxes in exchange for one lottery ticket and you have to wait three months to hear the winning numbers. But doing your taxes is actually a lot easier than applying to Harvard. My Catch and Release system was offline. I wasn't catching anything; I was totally taken in by the story created by my thinking.
Consider for a moment the arc of my career as I've described it thus far. I don't presume to know how you define success in your life, and I certainly don't think success is merely achievement after achievement (we could have an entire book on the futility of seeking happiness/fulfilment through external achievement). However, it was pretty clear at that point in my life, I had enough evidence showing that even if I was afraid or if some aspiration seemed or felt impossible, it did not mean it actually was impossible. For example, if I had succumbed to fear and believed negative self-talk up to that point, I would have never jumped out of planes, learned Chinese, or done a number of other things I have to leave out due to the security classification level of those activities. Yet, here I was having my brain automatically serve up all these limiting beliefs about applying to Harvard.
Why might my brain serve up those thoughts despite ample evidence to the contrary and a robust Catch and Release system? Well, as I've discovered, and reams of research bears this out, our brains aren't designed to make us happy; they are designed to keep us safe and ensure we survive. So, in that situation, my brain automatically began predicting what would happen if I took the chance to apply to Harvard and the answer it came to was this: “This effort will lead to failure.” What does failure equal? Failure equals pain from our brain's point of view. Therefore, my brain served up the belief that this was impossible and added in self-talk such as “Don't even try; who do you think you are?” “It'll be embarrassing when you fail.” “Let's just move on to something more realistic.” Why those thoughts? Because those beliefs and automatic thoughts might nudge me to take actions (or refrain from taking actions) that would avoid failure (avoid pain) and would serve to keep me in my comfort zone (keep me feeling safe). They would also keep me from taking a chance.
Fortunately for me, my colleague asked a number of times over the following three weeks, whether I had applied to Harvard yet. Thankfully, Catch and Release finally kicked in! I let the inner critic have his say, I let go, and asked myself, “If I was able to meet the previous ‘impossible’ challenges in my life, why not this one, too?” The response I got was, “You may not be able to control the outcome of getting accepted or not, but you can refrain from ruling yourself out and can control the effort you put into the application.” Those thoughts led me to take the leap and apply to Harvard. A few months later, much to my surprise and delight, I opened an email from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government on April 8, 2010, and the first word read, “Congratulations!” It really did feel like I won the lottery but the odds were much better than what my mind was telling me.
What I learned from that entire experience was that we can either be pushed around by and blindly believe every thought that bubbles up in our head or we can see thoughts for what they are, just thoughts. Sometimes thoughts are true, sometimes partially
