Tracks & Torches

                   What in world am I going to do now? That was the question I was asking myself, my wife, and the heavens five years ago after I had retired from U.S. Army Special Forces after almost 23 years in the military. I thought I had a plan. I thought I had it all figured out, but as I moved further and further away from that retirement date and put on my flip flops and took off the desert boots, I discovered that there was a lot about my next life after the military that I did not have figured out.

                     I had a lot of issues with what I was going to do next. It was as if I had left my purpose in the team room with all of the gear that I had turned in. I had let the Army keep that. And it was having a severe effect on me. I was 40-some years old and felt like I had already reached my pinnacle.

                      And that was not a good place to be. It's a place I don't ever want to be again. Maybe you're in that place now. Maybe you've been in that place. You don't have to be a veteran to experience intense life changes and kind of lose our way.                     

Our tracks are like our inner compass, our why, our purpose. Your torch, on the other hand, is a temporary thing. My torch was being a Green Beret. When I decided to become a Special Forces guy, I carried this torch for almost two decades, and this was the torch that I used to feed into my tracks. It was my passion and it burned really bright. But, then, as I got towards the end of my career, it started to kind of burn out, and that's the thing about a torch.

                      Five or six years ago I was a Green Beret and that came to an end. Today, I am a high-stakes storyteller. I am a connection coach. I am an advocate for veterans. I am trying to change the game. I am changing the game and how we fight violent extremism. I carry three or four new torches now.

                      And guess what? Those will come and go as well. Torches are simply the word I use to describe our passions for operationalizing our deep tracks. Tracks are forever. They're the things that you were gifted from a power bigger than yourself, and you owe it to yourself to get clear on what they are. They are the essence of your identity.

                       Your torches are where you powerfully apply your passion, but they change over time, and that's healthy, but it means you don't want to over-invest in one torch. We all have to be open to our torches changing, and if we're not careful, if we over invest our identity in a torch, which is merely the application of a passion in time and space, it can get sporty when we have to move on to other things.

What are the torches that you're carrying right now that feed into your tracks? Now, if you haven't done the tracks exercise, that 15-year exercise, you need to go somewhere quiet and do that. I do it about once a quarter here. Imagine it's 15 years after you've passed and the person closest to you is describing your life to someone who never met you. What would you want them to say?

                         Right now, I am a storyteller. I am a connection coach. I am the founder of The Heroes Journey. Those are my torches. Those are my broad channels. They're where I apply my efforts in time and space. This allows me to operationalize and leave my tracks, which are to contribute to things bigger than myself from the bottom up. That never changes. I did that as a Green Beret. Now, I'm doing it at a storyteller. I'm doing it as a husband, as a father. See what I mean? Your tracks just give you real-time focus of where you put your passion.

                          Get clear on your tracks and on the torches you are currently carrying. People follow clarity. People follow authenticity. People follow purpose. They buy from those things. They invest in those things, and they sure as hell follow those things. So do the work, and you'll be glad you did.