More than a Discharge Book

Dan Milberg
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  • Self-Improvement
  • Series

Narrated by Dan Milberg (warning: Aussie accent), More than a Discharge Book is for anybody who has served or is serving in uniform. If you've done basic training in any armed forces you have been indoctrinated to work and think differently to civilians. After years in this environment, it's normal to get Joining Instructions for new postings, do Readiness Training for deployments, and wear a patch on your arm that tells people your job. On the flipside, it's abnormal to walk into the civilian environment and do things like write a resume, get phone-screened by a recruiter, or confidently talk about yourself and how you can fill a vacant job. This audiobook is designed to help anticipate discharge and plan for what's ahead.

  1. Episode 1

    Introducing: More than a Discharge Book

    I discharged after serving for over 10 years and, like many other veterans have experienced, my transition to civilian work and life wasn't easy. The stuff that was normal for me while in uniform suddenly became abnormal. What stuff? Almost everything! It shouldn't have come as a surprise, only 1% of the population serve as Active Duty, which means us veterans need to learn how the other 99% work and adjust to their environment. After transitioning and spending years working with civilians, I can share things that I wish I had known before my career change. It might sound simple enough, but many of us struggle in our first few years after discharge. We can feel lost, frustrated, or misunderstood. Truth is, us veterans are capable of more than we give ourselves credit for. This book is designed to help anticipate discharge and plan for what's ahead.

  2. Episode 2

    About Dan & Book Preface

    My e-book is free, this audiobook is free, the paperback is sold at cost price on Amazon -- I don't make money from it. I'm a veteran that cares about other veterans making a successful transition after their service career. If you're active duty or a recently discharged veteran, I hope you enjoy my book and find it helpful to prepare for your discharge. If you like what you hear give me a follow on social media. This episode contains the following sections in the book: - Author's note & dedication - About the author - Purpose & preface

  3. Episode 3

    "Our military mindset" — Chapter 1: Part 1

    From our earliest days in uniform, one of the core principles we are taught is to "work as a team". We learn very quickly that anybody who separates themselves from the team, or gloats about their individual effort, gets highlighted as not being a "team player". They get called-out and made an example of "what not to do", which typically happens a lot in basic training. I can personally recall this happening to me at the start of my career. It was 0500h and my recruit school squad was standing formed-up outside our accommodation block, I was the last person to make it downstairs to join them. Less than 1 minute late, my instructor made a spectacle of my failure to be on-time, and instead of only punishing me, my entire squad was punished. This is something we have all experienced in uniform and it's a deliberate style of military conditioning. It's done to develop trust and to prepare us for active duty service, but it's not normal. Few civilians understand it and even less value it. Once we have made the decision to discharge, even before we have submitted our discharge papers, it's important to acknowledge that we are leaving this teamwork driven environment. Why is it important? Because it rarely exists anywhere else. What do I mean when I say it rarely exists? Well, specifically, our typical veteran understanding and experience of teamwork is very different to a civilian's understanding and experience. Most civilians have never been punished for somebody else's failure. They haven't endured the stuff that veterans go-through that builds camaraderie and close bonds, and they don't undergo the level of group training or repetition that promotes trust in each other. These are all things that contribute to our veteran understanding and definition of teamwork. Instead, for almost every civilian, particularly those working in an office or business, the word teamwork is synonymous with "inclusion", "collaboration", and "synergy". For us in uniform, these words are just useless fluff or something that we might hear during a ‘mandatory awareness training’. In other words, the civilian definition and understanding of teamwork is very different to ours and in many ways it's opposite to how our rank structure and chain-of-command works. My point is that having served for a minimum of 4 years, we no longer work the same way that civilians do and we have a tendency to be reliant on a system that puts the team above the individual. We rely on hierarchy and support from the DoD; we make formal requests, we get approval, and we follow some kind of procedure or policy for anything we engage in. Civilians don't do this, they don't rely on anybody.

  4. Episode 4

    "Shifting to a civilian mindset" — Chapter 1: Part 2

    Changing our mindset doesn't mean abandoning who we are and how we think as veterans. It means understanding and appreciating how different we are from civilians, specifically how we think and work differently. Active duty staff make-up 1% of the workforce, the other 99% perform very differently to the way we are accustomed to working. >> download free e-book to read more

  5. Episode 5

    "Don't be bitter" — Chapter 2: Part 1

    I can think back to old postings and bosses that I could have happily given the bird to and walked out on, but I didn't. This makes it sound like I had a choice, but the reality is we have no choice. We get told to take whatever posting we're given and sometimes that means dealing with a rough deployment, a difficult boss, or a mess full of deadbeats. A bad SNCO or chain-of-command can make our life misery and see us counting-down the days until our postout date. We don't get emotional about it, we just deal with it and each of us have our own ways of doing that. Some guys find solace in the gym, others spend time alone and read books, then there's a bunch of us that prefer a drink. We go through a lot, it's normal to release it. When it comes to our decision-making though, we shouldn't use the negatives that we experience as our main reason for wanting to leave the service. Doing this will only cause us to be bitter on our way out. Instead, we should take an approach that has some strategy, then execute that strategy with a tactical plan that sees us making forward progress to a better career. This strategy should consider 3 things: the career we want, the prerequisites needed, then the time and cost to get them.

  6. Episode 6

    "Sharpening our skills & building confidence" — Chapter 2: Part 2

    Prior to creating a detailed tactical plan, it's important to know 2 things: our goals and our strategy. Abraham Lincoln was quoted with saying, “If I had five minutes to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first three sharpening my axe.” Before we even get to the sharpening of our axe and chopping down trees, it's helpful to take a walk through the woods and pick a couple tall oaks that we want to take a swing at. Staying with this analogy, we can picture the axe being our resume or set of skills, and the different trees being the career opportunities. The thicker the tree, the better the salary, but the longer it will take us to cut down. >> DOWNLOAD FREE E-BOOK TO READ MORE

  7. Episode 7

    "The happy man" — Chapter 2: Part 3

    Most of us enter the military from humble beginnings. There are very few of us that come from rich and affluent backgrounds with opportunities to go to Ivy League universities that lead to high-paying careers. The majority of us come from backgrounds that fall into the categories of: having family that served, holding a strong sense of patriotism for our country, or needing a job that would help us escape the town or position that we're in — sometimes it's all 3. Our decision to enlist saw us enter a better position of status, finance, or geography. In many cases, it's the better financial position that's the main drawcard. If we reflect on our recruiting interviews, most of us can recall being sold the benefits with lines like "You will get to travel the world, while getting paid to do it!" For me, it was getting a decent paycheck without having a university degree and getting out of my small town. I didn't have family that served and I had no idea what to expect. I was 17 years-old and was joining the Royal Australian Navy having never spent a single minute in the open ocean. After I joined, every experience I had was new and, despite how hard the situation was, it felt awesome. I was in a place that had zero tolerance for kid-like behavior and was fast becoming a man. Looking back, it was the best decision I've ever made, it's given me some of my happiest memories. I recall even the shittiest jobs being cool to experience. Ditching gash at sea with another 5 blokes, separating the ship's trash for the week, and playing frisbee with the cardboard boxes that were supposed to be compacted into recycling. There was something therapeutic about flicking those boxes into the ocean and watching them float away into the Pacific. Another kickass gig was being overseas in Malaysia, dressed in my whites and standing on the gangway at midnight while overlooking the city lights, thinking to myself "How the f**k did I get here? This is awesome!" At some point, ditching gash and doing gangway tricks gets boring. In fact, it gets old real quick. All the new stuff that we experience eventually becomes routine and instead of seeing it as something that's cool to be a part of, it turns into work. We find ourselves doing weekend duties on-base thinking "This sucks." But it's normal for us to be changed by the things we've done, it matures us and it naturally sees us take stuff for granted. The rough part is that sometimes we can convince ourselves that our situation is worse than it is. Things like being overlooked for promotion year-over-year, not getting the postings that we wanted, or constantly doing shit jobs that don't make sense. I remember having to regularly wax polish a ship's passageway between the hours of midnight and 0400h — stuff like that can annoy us. If we're honest with ourselves, discharging won't make our frustrations disappear. That said, I totally get what it's like to be pissed-off with our chain-of-command, to get given orders that have zero logic and then having to follow them without complaint. For me it happened a lot and I was more aware of it during the later years of my career, mostly because I had to pass down the orders to lower ranks and wasn't blindly following them like I would have earlier in my career. If we take a big-picture perspective, the stuff that frustrates us is temporary and it also exists everywhere we go. It might be a different kind of frustration, but it sticks around even after we discharge. For me, when I think back, it was the tedious stuff that would tick me off. >> DOWNLOAD FREE E-BOOK TO READ MORE

  8. Episode 8

    "Controlling our discharge anxiety" — Chapter 2: Part 4

    In my experience, "anxiety" isn't word that we associate with in the armed forces. Why? Because anxiety typically comes from discomfort, unfamiliarity, and situations that we want to avoid. Oddly enough, these are things that we are expected to get acquainted with during our military careers. The difference is, we are taught how to deal with this in our military environments, and in many cases, we instinctively revert to our training and rely on Standard Operating Procedures to control any discomfort, unfamiliarity, and high-risk situations. In the instance that we are expected to enter an unfamiliar environment, we are usually sent on a course to help prepare us for it. For example, if we're about to embark on a deployment, we will undergo Pre-deployment Readiness Training beforehand. We are instructed to get familiar with stress or anxiety, then work through it by trusting the skills we obtained after being deemed competent during some type of training or exercise. The problem is that we have a course for everything in the military, but there's no course for re-entering the workforce and becoming a civilian. This is why we struggle with the decision to discharge. We receive very little guidance in the vocational differences between us and civilians. If we combine this lack of guidance with our natural expectation to get training for new environments, we essentially feel lost.

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About

Narrated by Dan Milberg (warning: Aussie accent), More than a Discharge Book is for anybody who has served or is serving in uniform. If you've done basic training in any armed forces you have been indoctrinated to work and think differently to civilians. After years in this environment, it's normal to get Joining Instructions for new postings, do Readiness Training for deployments, and wear a patch on your arm that tells people your job. On the flipside, it's abnormal to walk into the civilian environment and do things like write a resume, get phone-screened by a recruiter, or confidently talk about yourself and how you can fill a vacant job. This audiobook is designed to help anticipate discharge and plan for what's ahead.

Information

  • Creator
    Dan Milberg
  • Episodes
    21
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    Copyright © 2022 by Dan Milberg. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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    More than a Discharge Book