Built for a Different Body: How to Claim the Skills Nobody Documented

This show is powered by Others Over Self. Hit that subscribe button to keep training your brain. From Others Over Self, it's Hardcore and At Ease, a show about people who are keeping their edge without going over the edge. I'm host Shelly Rood, and if you have ever pulled something off that nobody in the room fully understood smiled and nodded when they called it a win, but quietly you knew that it cost twice what anyone saw. Well, this is the episode for you. We see what it takes to accomplish something that looks simple from the outside and how to claim the full value of what that demanded from you. Today you're gonna walk away with a simple inventory process and the confidence to fully own what you bring to the table. This is Hardcore and At Ease. Hey friend, thank you so much for being here today. I know there's a hundred things competing for your attention right now and you chose this, so I promise to make it worth your time. I am recording out of Detroit, Michigan, and right around the corner from me is Selfridge Air National Guard Base. We have over a billion dollars of infrastructure coming into our community over the next few years in order to get ready for the new F-15EX Eagle 2. So you'll hear more about that as you stay tuned with me. But today I'm going to start with a story, a very specific one. So I want you to stay with me in the details because the details really are the whole point. So I'm going to take you back to my Army days. At 5'3", the rucksack frame that I carried, it sat way too high on my back and has a metal frame that digs into your hips, and they were never quite aligned just right. There was a PT mat that you did training on, and it strapped above the pack, clearly above my head, which isn't where it was supposed to be, at least 3 inches higher than I was. So that pushed my Kevlar forward, which is the helmet that we wear, and that pushing tipped the whole load that I carried forward. So my neck was forced into an angle that had to be sustained for the duration of every ruck march that I ever did. I looked like a video game mushroom man, and my drill sergeant, I did not find this charming, and neither did anybody that I ever did a ruck march alongside of. But that was my position, and I held it anyway, because that's just what we do. Now, my gear belt, it had its own relationship with my frame. My 26-inch waist was smaller than the minimum that the system had been designed for. Yeah, I said it, 26-inch waist. It's a little, little bit bigger than that now, not quite, not quite 26, but not too much bigger. But it was so small that the belt didn't fit snug around it. It shifted. And so over miles, you can imagine that it found each hip bone and it worked on it. I walked like a cowboy for the first few weeks of any field training exercise. Now, my shorter legs mean that I had to cover more steps in the same distance that the other soldiers around me. My loadout had a pouch that didn't have any operational use, but it had to be on my setup. So this extra pouch just kind of went on there, and now I couldn't even put my arms down on my sides because there was a giant empty pouch on my right side. But it had to be there, and so I wore it. You just find solutions to the uncomfortableness. I used to wear deodorant under the belt because, right, that cuts the friction better than you'd think that it would. I would wear 2 sports bras, sometimes even 3. You just figure it out. You don't say anything. You just have to keep moving. And that's the pattern, and it's one worth naming because most people never do. We don't take the time to give ourselves credit for all of the creative ingenuity to be able to sustain and do and achieve what we have. Now, here's what I want you to notice. I'm not telling you this story because the gear was unfair. Fairness is not the question today. I'm telling you this story because of what happened every time I held the standard in spite of the conditions. Nothing. Nothing happened. No flag was raised. There was no accommodation that was filed. There was no record of me going above and beyond and doing the extra. The system saw the output that I was able to achieve. It saw the standard as met and it moved on. Which meant that the next person who started in my position started exactly from the same place that I did, and they had to solve the same problems that I had already solved with no record of it having ever been necessary. Now that is the part worth examining, because that missing record is a gap, and in the intelligence world, gaps are what we live for. They tell the real story of what's missing or being overlooked. So a gap in the record is not neutral. It's data. And when the gap is in operational readiness, what goes undocumented, it doesn't disappear. It just gets inherited by the next person who steps in without a briefing. So let's talk about what actually accumulates when this pattern runs long enough. It's not the discomfort. We're built for discomfort. And it's not these extra steps that we have to take because you've been taking those extra steps since before you can remember this. Who you are. What accumulates inside of us though is something quieter than all of that. It's the weight of performing a standard in conditions that the standard was not designed for. We do this repeatedly. We do this without other people acknowledging what was required of us to succeed. Our operational load never shows up in any report because you made it look like there was no load. And here's the part that makes this a leadership problem and not just a personal one. When you hold the standard anyway, the system reads your performance as confirmation that the conditions are fine. Your output becomes evidence against your own experience. Your competence, your beautiful competence, it keeps that gap invisible. And the gap stays invisible until the next person walks into the same setup and wonders why nobody warned them. And here's why this happens. This is a difference between a tactical executor and a strategist. The executor gets the work done. The strategist figures out which work to do, how to sequence it, what to do when the plan breaks, and how to make the whole thing look like it was supposed to go that way. Now, those are two different skill sets, two levels. Of contribution, and they carry two very different levels of value. The executor is often easy to praise. You can see the output. She made it to the end of the ruck march. You can point to it. You can count it. The strategist, on the other hand, is harder to see. They don't know about the nylons that got slipped in underneath your second pair of socks, the strategy that lived in the decisions that happened before the execution even started. The strategy in the problems that never became problems, in the pivots that just looked seamless because somebody was already 3 steps ahead, and it's usually you. So here's what makes this especially complicated. Chances are you're both. You're the one doing the work and the one designing how the work gets done. You are executing at a high level, and you're carrying the cognitive weight of strategy behind it, and the people around you are applauding the execution without ever seeing the strategy that made it possible. In the military, we have a phrase that I am convinced runs the entire operation. That phrase is, "Just figure it out." Oh, just figure it out, sir. I have a— ma'am, I have a— ugh, just figure it out. Honestly, it's not a bad phrase. Some of the most ingenious solutions solutions in military history have come from telling a service member to just go away and solve the problem. That mindset is an asset. The ability to be handed an impossible situation with no manual and no roadmap and come back with something that works, that is a real skill, and it's not common. The problem is not the phrase "just figure it out." The problem is what happens after. The person went away, they figured it out, and they came back with the solution, and nobody asked how they got there. The result got praised. The strategy behind it completely disappeared. The credit went to the outcome and not to the thinking that produced it. That's not a small distinction. An executor without a strategist is just somebody that pushes a button, maybe the right button, we don't know. They're just executing. Without that strategic thinking behind it, they may as well just be pushing any button. You see, the strategy is what makes the execution matter. And if you're the one providing both, that is two full contributions that deserve to be named separately. So today, my friends, is a high five for every person who has ever been told just to figure it out and did. This is not a complaint. This is a data problem, and data problems have a specific fix: better intelligence. Now, before I give you the framework for that, I wanna name two responses that tend to take root when this goes unaddressed, because you've probably felt both of these and neither one is serving us. So the first is absorbing this as personal failure. The gear didn't fit, so something must be wrong with me. If the helmet and the Kevlar doesn't fit, she's too small and shouldn't be in combat. My body is the variable. I am the anomaly. I should be able to do this the way everyone else does it, and the fact that I can't is a verdict on my capability. That's a very dangerous mindset. Now, the second reaction is flipping this over to resentment. Sounds like this: The gear didn't fit, so the system failed me. I performed in conditions that nobody else had to manage, and nobody acknowledged it, and I'm owed something for that. Now, both responses here come from the same root. This terrain has no name. And so self-blame, that first option, It turns a design condition into a character verdict. We take it personally. The second reaction of resentment— while resentment misses the fact that you chose this field, you held that standard, and that choice counts for something that the anger tends to bury. Now, both of these rob you of the ability to read your own record clearly, and reading your own record clearly is the whole mission today. So let's name the terrain. In these difficult moments where you had to just figure it out, what you were operating inside is called a design gap. That's the name. It's a design gap. It's a condition where the standard, the tool, the structure, the environment, it was built around a model that didn't fully include your parameters. And I want to be precise about what that means and what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean that the system was malicious. It doesn't mean that you were targeted. It means that the model was incomplete. The person who designed the RUC frame was not thinking about a 5-foot-3 soldier with a 26-inch waist. That's not average. And they weren't thinking about those measurements out of hostility. It was just a blind spot. And blind spots that are unnamed get inherited. The next person in the same position inherits that same blind spot, and it has no language for what they're navigating. And so they often conclude the same thing that you can, that the problem is them. The problem is me. I'm too small. When terrain has no name, it feels like it owns you, and you keep trying to diagnose yourself as the problem because that's the only available explanation sometimes. It's me. The thing I want to hand you today is a better explanation. So here's a quick test of how to tell when you're in this just go figure it out type of mentality. 3 questions, and I want you to sit with each one. Question number 1: Have you been regularly performing a standard in conditions the standard was not designed for? You're not complaining about it, you're not avoiding it, or You're actually performing it with steps that you invented on your own because there was no other option. Question number 2: Does the system read your successful performance as confirmation that the conditions are fine? Meaning the better you do it, the more invisible that gap becomes. And question 3: When you try to describe the gap to someone outside, Does it come out sounding like an excuse or a complaint, even when you know that it's neither? If those three land as yes, then you are navigating a design gap. And I wanna be clear about what that means for how you read yourself. You're not failing and you're not the variable that needs correcting. You are operating in terrain that requires skills that the training manual didn't cover. And you've been developing those skills in real time without a map, without documentation, and without anyone even acknowledging the terrain was harder than the standard version. Your record is worth reading accurately. So now that you have the name, this is a design gap. Here's where the confidence comes in because this is not about building a grievance list. This is about claiming what's already yours. So we have 3 moves here that I want you to make in order to claim that confidence. The first is naming it to yourself privately, and this is before anyone else even sees it. This is not an internal complaint. We're doing this as inventory. And you know what these thoughts already sound like. They're the ones that usually come out at 2 AM, or when you're on a long drive, when you can finally breathe deep and nobody's asking things of you. These thoughts can sound like, "Oh, I was the only one who figured out how to make that work. Nobody else even knew that was a problem. I did that entire session without the support that everyone thought that I had. I never said anything because saying something feels like admitting that I'm not doing it good enough or that I can't handle it." and I could handle it. I just had to handle more of it than the person next to me. That, that right there is the meat and potatoes of what we're doing today. Write those thoughts down if you need to. I don't want you to clean them up. Just make this list. What we're doing here is called puking. It's intelligence gathering. We're not creating a testimony. What we're doing is just getting out what we know is true. And when you can see that clearly, you can stop misreading it as evidence of being inadequate. You start reading that intelligence as a true account of what you are actually up against. And that true account is the beginning of knowing your own value, not as others validated it, not as any external system documented it, but as it truly existed in the field. Now, the second move here for you to be able to claim this confidence is separating the terrain from your identity. And this one takes practice because these two tend to fuse together over time. We need to separate the terrain from your identity. You see, what the gap demanded of you is not the same as who you are. The gear was wrong for your body. Your body was not wrong for the mission. I want you to hold both of these sentences at the same time because one of them is probably one that you've been carrying, and the other one is probably the one that you've been avoiding. The mission you held in conditions that the standard didn't anticipate, well, that says something real, and it says something specific about your capability. It's time for us to be recognizing our capabilities with deep accuracy. Now the third move I want you to do here is to decide what you're going to pass forward. If you've invented solutions that nobody asked you to find, you have operational knowledge that the person coming up behind you needs, and without it, that person is going to start from zero, and they might even conclude the same wrong things about themselves that you were tempted to think. You don't have to become a spokesperson, and you don't have to make a cause. You just have to stop treating what you learned as private and secret, because it's not private. Your ability to adapt is institutional knowledge that happens to live in your experience, and the human experience is one of the most valuable things that we have in life. So don't discount yours. Take the time to name it. Separate it and pass it forward. Now those 3 moves in that order are how you stop navigating a design gap and you start building something with what it taught you. Move number 1 is to name it privately to yourself, not as a complaint, but as inventory. Move number 2 is to separate the terrain from your identity. And move number 3 is to decide what you want to pass forward. That operational knowledge has true value. Now, if you've ever been told no by a system that had no business telling you no, next week's episode is going to land hard for you. My guest is Adam Castillo, United States Marine combat veteran. He came home from Afghanistan and watched corporate America run campaigns that said hire a veteran, and they didn't even give him an interview. He didn't absorb that as failure. He left. He literally left the country. And what he built in the years that followed is exactly what we're talking about today, just at a scale that most of us are never gonna get the guts up to navigate. That's Adam's story, and he'll be on next week. If today's episode resonated with you, the article that this episode is based on is live right now on Mission Wildflower. That's my newsletter for intel on women veterans. That's Mission Wildflower. You can find me, Shelly Rood, on Substack. This article on Mission Wildflower, it goes deeper into the gear story that we've been talking about, and it sits alongside other women veteran stories that embody exactly this get-it-done attitude that we talked about today. The link to that is in the show notes. That's all for today, so get ready for next week, episode 47 with Adam Castillo. It's been a joy sharing time with you. Thank you so much for listening, or maybe you've been watching our YouTube channel, Others Over Self. You can count on me returning next Tuesday with a conversation about keeping your edge without going over the edge. So until then, stay hardcore, be edgy, and trust the process. You're listening to Hardcore and at Ease. Keep the conversation going at join.othersoverself.com.