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Brandon Held - Life is Crazy
This is a Podcast of perseverance, self-help, self-Improvement, becoming a better person, making it through struggles and not only surviving, but thriving! In this Podcast the first 25 episodes detail my life's downs and ups. A story that shows you can overcome poverty, abusive environments, drug and alcoholic environments, difficult bosses, being laid-off from work, losing your family, and being on the brink of suicide. Either way, I hope anyone can listen and find a place to share life stories and experiences. Allow everyone to learn from each other to reinforce our place in this world. To grow and be better people and help build a better more understanding society.
My podcast is a story of the journey of my life. The start from poor, drug and alcohol stricken life, to choices that lead to success. Being raised by essentially only my mother with good intentions, but didn't know how to teach me to be a man. About learning life's lessons and how to become a man on this journey and sharing those lessons and experiences with others whom hopefully can benefit from my successes and failures. I've led a fairly unique life with some highs and very low low's. I believe listeners would find my experiences worth listening to and learning from and take them with them on their own journey.
Brandon Held - Life is Crazy
Episode 35: Boots to Boardrooms: My Unexpected Career Evolution
Brandon shares his professional journey from military service to project management and consulting, revealing how early experiences shaped his leadership abilities and career trajectory.
• Joining the Air Force at 17 taught crucial foundations of discipline, resilience, structure, and accountability
• Military experience provided early leadership opportunities as a 19-year-old supervisor of older personnel
• Learned to command respect through consistent behavior rather than demanding it
• Discovered transferable skills from seemingly unrelated jobs like customer service and sales
• Corporate career progression from Raytheon to consulting roles required adapting to diverse personalities
• Mentorship from key figures like Debbie Godwin provided critical professional guidance
• Healthcare consulting represents current career focus with both DOD and VA facilities
• Addition of podcasting and life coaching represents ongoing commitment to growth
Support this podcast by subscribing at Brandon's website for $8 monthly - about $1 per episode - to help offset the time and financial costs of production.
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Welcome back to Brandon Held. Life is Crazy. Got another great episode coming your way Today. I want to talk about my professional journey. This is something I wanted to get into to talk about my experience, from my military days to my work in project management and operation and consulting. Which is what I've done the most is consulting. When I look back on where I'm at in my career and what I've been doing, and I want to share the key experiences with you that have shaped me, the lessons that I've learned along the way and how these different roles have prepared me for what I do in my life even today, in life coaching and beyond that.
Speaker 1:I'm just going to get into it. I'm going to start with the foundation my first job career, not job. I had some menial jobs in high school as a burger flipper at a Rax restaurant on an interstate to a bedroom cleaner at a hotel at Cedar Point in Sandusky, ohio. So those were my first jobs, but my first quote unquote real job was when I joined the Air Force and if you've listened to my previous episodes, that's the first thing I did out of high school and you know why I chose the Air Force. But I was a security policeman, security police airman in Minot, north Dakota, which was life altering and a shock for me in many ways. First of all, I went from being this carefree, careless 17 year old kid that just played sports all the time and hung out with his friends and tried to get with girls to now I'm carrying an M16 every day for work, and the possibility of shooting someone was a power in my hands. Nothing I ever expected to be in and nothing that I ever thought was a type of place that I would choose to live. And I didn't choose to live there. The Air Force sent me there, but it was a culture shock overall. But what the good things it did do, which is some of the things I'm going to focus on, not because the bad things don't matter, because the bad things also shape who you are. They also give you the strength that allows you to become you.
Speaker 1:We grow probably more in failures and bad things than we do in experiences and successes. At least, that's been my truth in life. I just don't have to work as hard, so I don't put that much effort into it, but when I fail or it's unnatural to me I'm super, super hard on myself and I hate being unprepared for anything. I feel like a lost kid when I'm unprepared for something. That's how it hits me or something that's how it hits me. I hate being like that. So I really have to work hard in those areas, in the areas that I failed before or areas that are uncomfortable or unfamiliar to me. But I know I have to get in there and go do it.
Speaker 1:So, having said that, the Air Force taught me discipline, which I had almost none at all as a teenager I wouldn't say none. I had to get up and get myself to school every day because I didn't have a mom that was going to do that for me. She was just ready and willing to delve out punishment if I didn't go. So I did have discipline in that regard. It taught me resilience the Air Force did, because when you first go in the military, they break you down In bootcamp. They make you feel like you're a worthless piece of shit. That's just what they do, it's part of the process and then they build you back up. So it's like you're this piece of clay that came in like this lumpy, unmolded thing, and then they take you and they smash you to where you're just nothing again, and then they rebuild you to where you're, this chiseled out, confident statue, and that's what the military does, and it did do that for me the Air Force more specifically because I was 17 and I had a lot of molding of my clay that needed to take place.
Speaker 1:There I learned the power of structure. I didn't have structure in my life. I had a chaotic, carefree, lackadaisical life before I joined the Army, in the army, and I learned structure, and I learned exactly how structure can help you succeed in life. It's almost like the power of habit, right? It's the power of structure, which is also like the power of habit. It's just doing those same things and doing them consistently that allow you success, that offers you success, and so those were some of the things that I learned early in the Air Force.
Speaker 1:I also learned the importance of responsibility and accountability. I didn't have much responsibility before that. I didn't really take care of anyone, except for my little brother to some degree, and myself. Otherwise, I didn't care about school. I didn't really focus on it. I just didn't have much responsibility in my life, and so I learned a lot about responsibility, a lot about responsibility Carrying an M16, I was responsible for making a decision if someone needed to be shot because they came on a missile site or in a restricted area they weren't allowed to be in.
Speaker 1:Obviously, I don't just shoot them on site. There's a process that has to take place, but I had to know at 17 years old how to work that process and how to decide if I needed to shoot someone or not. That's a heck of a burden to put on a 17-year-old, but I took it on and I gladly accepted it. And accountability so accountability also big part of that. You have to be accountable for your behaviors and the things that you do in life, and it is something I see people struggle with all the time, pretty much every day. I see people struggle with all the time, pretty much every day.
Speaker 1:Most people, in my opinion, from my experiences who I deal with, when you approach them about something that they have done that maybe isn't the best, the first thing they go to is defense mode. Right? Oh, I didn't. This happened, so I didn't do do it, or it's not my fault, this is what made that happen, or just whatever. That's what people do is naturally get defensive. I too was that way. I didn't understand accountability. I also thought the best thing I could do was try to explain why I didn't do something and why it wasn't my fault. And that's something that I've learned over the years as I've learned to be more accountable and I've learned to take more responsibility. Take more responsibility People don't realize you just get away with stuff a little bit, to some degree that way, because people just respect that you're owning something, that you're taking the responsibility, and sometimes that's all people want you to do.
Speaker 1:Just own it. Take the responsibility. Okay, cool, we're good, we're good now. No repercussions need to take place, nothing bad needs to happen. You took accountability. You recognize you were wrong. Good, we're done.
Speaker 1:Totally different one oh I couldn't do it because this happened, or oh, I'm too busy, or whatever BS excuse people try to throw out there instead of just straight up saying I was wrong can back you into a corner and cause you more problems than just saying you're right, I screwed up, I was wrong. Sometimes it's that simple conversation over. It's been a big lesson I've learned in life that I didn't used to know, and those were a lot of personal, interpersonal behaviors that I had to learn, but also in my time in the air force at 19, 20 years old, because I was working hard and being sharp and getting in positions by the time I made senior airman. I became a supervisor. I was a supervisor of other airmen and even though I was 19 or 20 at this point in my life, still a lot of people that joined the military were older than that, and so it might just be by a year or two or more, but nobody wants to listen to a 19 or 20 year old telling them what to do when you're 22, 23, 25, right, people don't want to do that, it's just instinctively. What does this young, dumb kid know?
Speaker 1:I'm smarter than he is, I've lived longer, I've been around more, but fortunately I've always been someone that's been pretty good at commanding respect, not demanding respect. I do sometimes, when I have to like with kids, my kids or something, I step up and let them know what's up and they need to treat their dad with respect. But that's even that has always been very rare, because I command respect. The way I carry myself, the way I lead by example, the way I treat other people, which is a huge part of that All those things command respect, not demand respect. And people like you and they respect you and they hear what you have to say when they see you're walking the walk, you're not just talking the talk, you're walking the walk and that matters to people and that garners respect. I've always been pretty good at getting people's respect by living my life that way.
Speaker 1:I took college classes or a college class. I volunteered, I was airman of the quarter. I worked really hard at my job. Knowledge as a security policeman. You might say, oh, you're just a security policeman, what is there to know? There's a lot of things you need to know to rank up in the military. Military has written tests and boards that you have to sit in front of to get rank. So there's a lot of job knowledge about your actual personal career in my case, security police, and then also military history. So you're expected to know. In the Air Force's history, you're expected to know facts and statistics and data that people probably don't even realize that you need to know just because you're in the Air Force. But you do. You're supposed to respect the history.
Speaker 1:These are all things that I had to learn to do and they were all Very important to me and my future, because I was a terrible student in high school. I didn't care about studying. I didn't care about school. If I couldn't get my schoolwork done at school, in a study hall or another class before I went to a different class, which obviously meant I was ignoring the class that I was in, it didn't get done. I never studied for tests, I just had a rule that when I left school, it was my time, and so I didn't care about school and I didn't know how to be a student. That was something I had to learn, and I'm on my first career and still all these things that I learned in just my first career. So that's a big deal. The Air Force taught me a lot and it is fair to say that it gave me a large foundation for who I am today. It built that base that the rest of me was able to build a foundation on and add to against really talented athletes and holding my own and, in some cases, being the leader of the team or even the best player on the team or even the best player on the court or the field or whatever the case is.
Speaker 1:That stuff gives you confidence. All that stuff makes you feel good about yourself because you're really good at something, potentially great, depending on what level we're talking about. You're a leader. If you're leading other people and you're leading the team, you're the person that people are looking to in difficult situations. All these things are transcendent. Just because I am playing basketball or football or volleyball or whatever I was doing, you don't think that behavior, that mindset, carried into my daily life and my thought process at work and family. Because it did. It absolutely did. It gives you confidence to lead and believe you have what it takes, and sports absolutely helps with that. And people that have never played sports, they probably don't understand that.
Speaker 1:But I had always said I wanted all my kids to play sports. I have three sons. I wanted them all to play sports because I wanted them to get everything out of sports that I got, including just being active and healthy. And life didn't turn out that way. I had wives that were ex-wives while my kids were growing up, that just didn't have the same values. And when you're trying to raise kids separately and their mother doesn't have the same values you do, you can't really enforce anything. Really enforce anything because they just pacify you while they're with you and then they go back to their mom and they live whatever life they want to live when they're with their mom. It's sad and it's unfair, but it's true. So I'm getting off on a tangent here, but sports is something that really made me the man I am today Not solely, but a large part. So that was something I learned in the Air Force, and all that laid the groundwork for my future ability to believe in myself and lead and be a project manager and be a leader in high pressure situations. Because even though I didn't have the education yet and I still had a lot to learn in life, I had a lot of great foundations. For once I learned I could now take that knowledge and put it to work. Not just be someone that sits there with knowledge in their head, but actually go put it in action and put it to work.
Speaker 1:So when I did get out of the Air Force, I went to college for three years at Minot State where I was in the Air Force. I'd gotten out. I was still a dependent there, and then my wife and I got divorced and she moved to Ohio and took my newborn son. So I had to transfer to be by my newborn son. So I did transfer to Wright State in Dayton, ohio and I had to do two years there. So I lost a year in transfer credits if you will. And so I had to spend five years in undergraduate total to get a bachelor's degree in mass communications and I learned a lot just by going to school.
Speaker 1:A education and going to school is tough. You take classes because your curriculum requires you to that you aren't necessarily good at, you're not necessarily a natural at. For me, the hardest two things in college were science classes, which I had to take plenty of for some reason as a communications major, and a second language, spanish, which required as much as anything, just memorization, just remembering words, which my rope memorization has always been terrible. And so remembering words, translating words into another language when you think of all the words that are just in the English language, and I'll turn around and try to put that into Spanish and then try to mix up the order in which you say those words that you have to remember. It was just foreign to me, it was so lost on me and I did not do well. Spanish killed my GPA in college.
Speaker 1:Frankly, my bachelor's degree I only finished with a 2.6, wasn't good. Graduated college at all was a major accomplishment. It was nothing anyone else in my family tree had done ever. They didn't go to college, forget having a bachelor's degree. So I couldn't beat myself up for not having a higher GPA that I would have liked. That was a success for me. It was a small step in building more confidence and building more belief in myself as a man and what I was capable of in this world. And for some people that might sound crazy. That might be like where humans were capable of so much. Yeah, but you didn't come from where I came from. You didn't see what I saw in my life. Men weren't good, they weren't valuable, they just weren't good people. So that was something I had to learn and I've had to teach myself. So that was something I had to learn and I've had to teach myself.
Speaker 1:And so when I finally did finish my bachelor's degree, I had to try to figure out a career with this communications degree because I wanted to be a sportscaster. That didn't work out. It wasn't going to work out. I had applied at some local TV stations. They had some wacky rules Okay, we want you to work minimum wage and we want you to work in the control room on the switchboard for three years before you'll even try to be on camera. So that was their way of saying you're going to be stuck behind a board in a control room and then after three years we'll let you try. So that is no guarantee that I was even ever going to be on camera or be a sports guy.
Speaker 1:So I saw that for what it was worth. I knew how to read between the lines. The hours were awful. I had met and I was dating my soon-to-be second wife at that point in life and I didn't want to be working 2 pm to midnight when she was working a day job and I'm coming home, going to bed and she's getting up and going. We literally would have never saw each other. So it just didn't sound good to me. It didn't sound like it was worth the trajectory and path that I was going to potentially take to maybe, hopefully, if I'm lucky get to what I was trying to get to.
Speaker 1:So I got derailed. I had to do different things. I did things like work as a server in restaurants. I was a worked in retail at GNC and vitamin world. I was a bartender, I was a manager in training at places like Finish Line and Circuit City and I worked business to business sales and I worked insurance and while none of those things were my future and none of those things were the way I was going to live my life. They were still incredibly helpful because I learned something from every one of those things. I learned how to be good at dealing with difficult people, because customers are difficult people, not a hundred percent, not all good and damn well that some customers, when they're dealing with a server or a bartender or they're in a retail store, they think I'm your customer, so you need to bow down to me, and they really live with that kind of attitude, just this really narcissistic, you need to kiss my feet and do whatever I want type of attitude. And it's wild. And when your livelihood depends on that, whether it's getting a tip or even just keeping your job, because you can't talk bad to customers just because they're crappy you really learn to eat a lot of crow and your ego takes a seat in the back. And you have to do that and that is helpful. That is helpful. I didn't know that at the time I thought, oh, this sucks, I can't wait to get a quote, unquote, real job. But even in real jobs you have to do that. And business to business, sales that's invaluable. That, along with customer service. Those things helped me deal with Multiple types of personalities and how you talk, to deal with and work with multiple types of personalities.
Speaker 1:When you're in sales and your livelihood is depending on you making a sale, you take everything you can and you figure out how can I identify with this person? How can this person identify with me? Because I need this person to like me, because they're not just buying the product, they're buying you. So they were buying me and I needed them to like me, and the only way I could get someone to like me was to get on their level, whatever level that was. There are all kinds of people that own businesses. There can be highly educated people that think they know everything and you have to let them believe they know everything. Everything they say is right. Yeah, you're right, you're so smart Wish I was as smart as you, whatever. And then you have these people that are like the duck hunt guys that just hillbilly, don't really carry themselves any type of way with intellect or education. They're just a good old boy, and you got to figure out how to get on that level with them too, even if that's not who you are. So there's just a broad range and I had to learn how to do all that and it helps me in life because when I move on and go into my careers I need to recall that. I need to recall how to deal with different types of people.
Speaker 1:After those things weren't working out and I understood and realized that that mass communications degree, bachelor's degree, really wasn't going to get me where I was looking to go in life. I realized I had to get an advanced degree and so I joined the army and the reason I joined the army was I just liked what they had to offer educational-wise better than the Air Force. I did try to become an Air Force officer and if you follow my journey through my other podcasts, you know why that didn't work out. But I didn't have to join the Army, but I chose to join the Army and it was because of the educational offering. Now, that also was critical for me being who I am, becoming who I am and living the life I live today.
Speaker 1:Because, without having joined the army and gone through some of the things that I went through in the army which was a really tough time I didn't enjoy the army. I'll be candid I didn't like the army. I didn't enjoy the army. I was proud to wear the uniform I was proud to serve. In a weird twisted way, I was prouder to wear my army uniform than I was my Air Force uniform, just because to me it felt so hard to be a soldier, so difficult that the fact that I could do it, the fact that I could get through all the bullshit that I was dealing with and still continue to work on excelling in life yes, I played more sports, I won intramural championships, I went to the gym and exercise and weight lifted a lot, was an MBA student for two years during my four years in the army. So for two years, no-transcript, while not enjoying my military life, and I don't know, maybe in a way being in the army pushed me to succeed, to get through my MBA, because I knew that was my future. I knew the MBA was going to put me in a position where I didn't have to live the kind of life I was living in the army. I was living in the army. So while it sucked and I don't recall the army being a positive experience for me it did teach me a lot of mental toughness and drive to get out of that situation. So I can't say that I regret joining the Army because I don't. I just wish it wouldn't, had been as difficult as it was.
Speaker 1:So when I left the Army I was the personal trainer led me to my first quote unquote real corporate job at Raytheon as a senior configuration analyst. To me this was the army. The MBA it was to have this type of job. It paid really well. It was over double my income that I've ever made previously to that and I thought I was being set up for life, but I wasn't. But I learned some great things while I was at Raytheon. I gained expertise in translating technical jargon and turning those into actionable insights.
Speaker 1:And I had to navigate engineers and I don't know if you've ever had a job where you have to work with engineers, but they're a different breed, they're different, and I was dealing with aerospace engineers and, needless to say, they didn't run low on self-confidence. They thought the sun shined on them, and so dealing with people like that on a regular, daily basis is a learning curve for sure. But I had been working on that through the things that I previously discussed about how to deal with different types of personalities and how to get on that level, but that was hard for me. At some points I just couldn't get on some engineers levels, to be frank, because some just aren't personable people. They're not trying to be personable, they don't care if they get along with you or you work well together. They don't care, they're the engineer to them. I'm the one making the missile work. I don't need to like you, I don't need you to like me, and that's tough to work with. But I did the best I could and I learned some skills trying to do that.
Speaker 1:And then I was laid off at Raytheon and that was devastating. There were defense cuts during the Obama era I talked about that before and that directly affected me personally. And I got laid know how I was going to rebound. I didn't know how I was going to recover. I didn't have mentors. I didn't have people to look up to to tell me hey, everything's going to be all right. You have an MBA now, and not only that, you have three years of experience at Raytheon as a senior configuration analyst and that's going to help you open other doors. I just didn't see it like that. I thought, oh my God, I lost my job at the place where I thought I was going to spend the rest of my career. Now I don't know what I'm going to do Eventually hindsight being 2020, it didn't take that long.
Speaker 1:Six months later, it felt like forever to me. At the time, I was depressed. I was on my third marriage. I had two small kids. I felt like a failure. I felt like I was letting my family down and I wasn't doing my job as a man and a father, even though it really wasn't my fault, but it still hurt to be in that position.
Speaker 1:So six months later, I did get a job with NCI Information Systems. They're a government contractor. They were down at Fort Huachuca at the time and I became a senior IT program manager and a program control officer and again, new positions. Never had done the work before, so I had to learn things I didn't know how to do. The job itself was incredibly beneficial for me.
Speaker 1:I met an amazing mentor and a woman named Debbie Godwin. She really liked me and she took me under her wing and she was the vice president there of NCI, where we were located at Fort Huachuca, and she was pretty high up obviously only one person above her there and she took a liking to me and she gave me a lot of foundation for understanding career and how to be a more career oriented professional and how to work through some of the difficulties of people and what you have to deal with. She had been a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army as well, so she had an extensive background of being a leader and she really taught me a lot and that was great for me. I lost touch with her. She moved some years ago and I wish I still knew how to talk to her and I could thank her. But anyway, hindsight is 20 2020 on being able to keep touch and do stuff like that. I've lost touch with a lot of people in life that I wish I could still reach out to and say hey, what's going on? Doing that job?
Speaker 1:I worked in procurement and I managed multi-million dollar orders. Not only did I make some, I approved other people's, so other people like Debbie really took trust in me and respected me to. When other procurement personnel were putting and submitting orders to her, she would say to me hey, brandon, take this $5 million order and let me know what you think about it, and in some cases I could rework the order, get the exact same products and save a million bucks for the company. And frankly, while it was valuable to learn and it was nice on the inside to feel good about myself to make that kind of contribution. I really never got much reward. Honestly, I did get a few pay raises. We're just talking a few thousand dollars a year. When I worked there three years total, I had gotten a $10,000 pay raise over those three years and that's nice. But when I think about the millions of dollars I had saved them, all they really gave me was an outstanding work certificate and some small pay raises at the end of each year, and it is what it is.
Speaker 1:I learned a lot. I had a great mentor, so I have to be thankful for those things, because what good does it do me to be anything else? It doesn't. I worked financial travels for over a hundred employees, so when people needed to travel or purchase things or anything, I was the person that had to manage all of those people. It was over a hundred employees and it was a very valuable learning experience for me. And I also provided guidance to Army's NetCom as a consultant and I found myself again working closely with a diverse team of sometimes difficult people.
Speaker 1:Government leaders can be difficult, high-level contractors can be difficult and you just really have to learn to connect and speak their language, and I thought I did that pretty well and I've always felt like I've been able to connect with almost anyone pretty well. Anyone that wants to be connected with and is open to be connected to, I can almost most certainly do it. Sometimes you squeeze in there and you do it with people who didn't even want to, weren't even trying to, but they just end up liking you so you make a connection. It happens too. So I ended up leaving there because it was a long drive for me it was an hour and a half one way each day.
Speaker 1:So after three years I decided it was time to move on and I got a job with a company named Decision Sciences and oddly enough, they were a contractor for Raytheon. So I found myself back at Raytheon again, but I wasn't a Raytheon employee this time. I was a consultant for Raytheon with Decision Sciences and we were working in their supply chain. We were building a supply chain tool for them, so I was spearheading the development of their vertical program management tool, which was very instrumental in streamlining operations for Raytheon. I had to overcome resistance to change because the workers there didn't want to learn this new tool. They didn't want any part of it and I had to work through all of that while I was there.
Speaker 1:The role deepened my understanding of things like coaching, leadership and consultant and just coaching the way I would coach today. Because I had to do a lot of presentations high level presentations to executives and VPs at Raytheon because my company, decision Sciences, was based out of Florida. The owners and the engineers, they were all in Fort Walton Beach, florida, and I, along with my buddy, blair, who became my buddy because we met there, we were the face of the decision sciences at Raytheon in Tucson and we were on different programs. That is, same project, different programs and so we had to deal with different people. So he would have to do the same thing on a different level with different people as I did.
Speaker 1:And it was the experience of being at NCI and dealing with the vice president and president on a regular basis that made that not intimidating to get up and give presentations to Raytheon's employees and managers and VPs. That's something that just came more naturally at that point because a younger me would have been intimidated by people in those positions but because of my growth and experience, positions didn't intimidate me anymore and don't intimidate me anymore To this day. I'm not the kind of person that's oh my God come and we need to behave a certain type of way. No, they're a person just like you, and if you can relate to them, treat them with respect. Just like you. And if you can relate to them, treat them with respect, give them the respect they deserve, but also relate to them. People are people, at the end of the day, and they see when you're afraid of them.
Speaker 1:So that time was really critical in helping me learn new skills that I still hadn't learned yet. Eventually, raytheon would decide you know what? Why are we paying this company to build a tool for us? We're talented, we have skilled people, we have our own in-house engineers and coders engineers and coders. So they decided to let the contract with DSI expire and build building their tool and they stole from it. They hired their own people and they stole from DSI's knowledge. They saw what DSI was doing. They decided, oh, we can do this. So they let DSI go, which in turn meant I was let go, and now I found myself laid off again.
Speaker 1:This time it was less scary for me because I had more experience, more knowledge, and I was just less worried about being laid off. So I tried to become a consultant and do my own work as a consultant and saw myself to companies based on all that experience that I had learned and I just covered with you and I'm not going to go into the details of the different types of things that I could do at this point. It was going all right. I was getting some business and I was working with some clients and then all of a sudden, bam, covid hits. And everybody knows what happens when COVID hit and everybody knows what happens when COVID hit People like me in those type of positions. We weren't getting clients anymore because companies were shutting down, they were closing doors, employees weren't coming into work.
Speaker 1:So I had to find a job again and that was when I got hired by a company called Deep Mile and I started in the healthcare field, which I had never been in yet but I was excited to get into because after my experiences in aerospace and government contracting, those jobs can go away, but what never goes away is health care. So I was excited to start a role in health care and my job with Deep Mile took me to an Air Force base where again, I was working with the high level executives. Where again I was working with the high-level executives, I was working with the commander and assistant commanders and the first sergeants and the chiefs of the hospital and the high-level executive positions. I was right in their ear, working with them day to day, helping them transition their old electronic health care record system into the new electronic healthcare record system. And it went well and it was successful.
Speaker 1:And once we did that and it was successful for the DOD, I decided to move on, thanks to someone I had met doing that role and her name was Mindy, and she decided to help me move from the DOD to the VA. And what was great about that is her recommending me for this role gave me a work from home consulting position for the VA. So I moved from one role where I had to be in an office every day for the DOD to now I can work from home and be a consultant for the VA doing roughly the same thing. It's a little more expansive, the role that I have to do for the VA as a consultant subcontractor, but it's ultimately the same goal and it's to change the VA's electronic health care record system over from their antiquated system to a new system that is more future driven and future oriented, and so we have about 200 facilities we have to complete to do that and we're five deep. So we have a long ways to go, but in the interim I'm going to keep learning, growing and being me.
Speaker 1:I've added podcasting and life coaching to my life and that's why you're hearing me talk right now. I wanted to expand, keep growing, keep learning, so I could talk about this topic forever and I will stop here. It's going to be my longest podcast episode ever. Probably would have made more sense for me to break it up into two episodes, but I'm not going to do that. If you made it through this far, if you listened to this whole thing, I want to say thank you. Thank you for tuning in today and please subscribe to.
Speaker 1:Life is Crazy, because podcasts aren't free. I had to buy a podcast materials, I have to purchase a website. I have to buy a podcast materials. I have to purchase a website, I have to edit. There's plenty that goes into this process between my time and money, and if you just listen to every episode and you enjoy them and you just say, hey, it's worth $1 for me to listen to this episode, I drop about eight episodes a month or so. So subscribe, go to my website and click on my podcast link and right there at the top there's a subscribe to podcast button right there and you could subscribe for eight bucks a month. That's a dollar a show.
Speaker 1:You might think what's my eight bucks going to do? That's not going to do much for you. Yeah, you're right, one person's. Eight bucks a month isn't a lot. But if enough people contribute eight bucks a month, maybe I can at least recuperate my costs for putting this podcast together. I enjoy it. I do it because I enjoy it, but also I'm sharing knowledge. I hope I think you feel that way. I feel that way and I hope you enjoy that knowledge and you feel that it's worth your while and maybe it's even worth a buck. So until next time, stay inspired and keep moving forward. Work on your mindfulness and clarity journey inside of you, and I'll talk to you then.
