Dan's Veterans Day Special

Dan Austin: [0:00] Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of the Collecting Keys Friday Focus. I, Dan Austin, will be your host today, and when this thing airs on November 10, it'll be a Friday, Mike and I will be down in Scottsdale, Arizona. I'm recording this a couple days early, because we will be flying tomorrow down there, to put on our very first in person group mastermind event. We rented out this mansion, it's actually more like an estate, it's a pretty cool place, we got a private chef, we got bartenders, have the full meal deal for the awesome experience that these folks are gonna have, and really what it is is, we open it up exclusively to our instant investor group coaching members, and we actually limited it to 10 people, but there's enough demand, we bumped it up to 15. So there's 15 of us coming together to mastermind, it's a network at this facility, and Mike and I are essentially going to go through a boot camp, really, for two days of like how people can get through whatever glass ceiling they're facing, like how can they scale their business, how can they get over a hump, how can they get better in their business, and by the time they leave it, they're gonna have this awesome roadmap of the next exact steps they need to take to get where they want to be to obtain their vision that they set for themselves. So we're super pumped about that. If you have any desire to go to an event like that, we only open this up, like I said, to our Instant Investor group, but if you're not an Instant Investor member, and you're like, hey, kinda would love to go to one of those things, just hit me up in the DMs on Instagram, InvestorMandan, and if there's enough demand, we can put one of these on next year for non group members as well, or just join the group and you'll have access to one of these events.

Dan Austin: [1:34] Anyhow, let's dive into this episode, because today is a special episode, at least for me, and I hope it is for you, because I mentioned this is dropping on November 10. Veterans Day is November 11. This is a day that has kind of evolved and changed for me as a military veteran. I served between two thousand and four and twenty twelve. I don't talk about that very often, I do that on purpose, I try to avoid publicly speaking about it and I've always been that way, I'm kinda keep it, I've internalized it quite a bit. Whether that's a healthy thing to do or not, I am not the one that's going to gauge that, but you may not know that about me as far as my status and all that sort of stuff, so I'm trying to open that up for you as listeners, get to know me a little bit better, get to know my background a little bit better, you might understand how I tick and why I tick the way that I do. But also, if you're a veteran out there, I'm hoping this will, you know, give you a helping hand up, if you're trying to mature and evolve your life after the military service, or maybe you are active duty. And if you're not a veteran, maybe this will help you understand veterans more, and when you say thank you for your service, you can really mean it, or at the very least, understand that veteran and have a little bit more insight into their life and their background. I will start by saying Veterans Day is different for everybody. Some it's a quiet day of reflection, others, it's a free meal at Applebee's and a bunch of Facebook posts telling people that they need to thank them for their service.

Dan Austin: [3:00] Those are not the type of veterans I'm associating with, or I'm even talking about, every group has this type of people, us veterans are no different, just excuse those folks, and let's focus on the core group of people who aren't shameless shills. So, yeah, anyhow, I'd like to tell a couple stories, and that will help, I think, share the growth of myself in Veterans Day, and will kind of share about a little bit who I am in my background. And I'll start with back, this was a story in, gosh dang, 2019, I think is when this took place. I met with a neurologist, who was a friend of a friend. I actually met a friend that's a neurosurgeon who cut open brains, and he had this mutual acquaintance that studied brains. And she actually at the time and still is leading, was running one of the leading studies on the human brain as it relates to traumatic brain injury. And so she had four thousand five hundred military patients that had left the theater of war with some sort of traumatic brain injury, or other type of wound, and they were scanning their brain year after year. I think she had like a decade of data at the time, maybe, I can't remember exactly, but it was a lot. And so, just because of that, my friend said, hey, you should talk to her. You guys could connect, you could talk about all sorts of stuff.

Dan Austin: [4:12] So I like, okay, cool. We connected via email, she happened to be coming to Spokane to do a talk at one of the local universities, which was just down the road from me, so I popped down there on the day she was supposed to do it, we were gonna have coffee, and I was in this foyer with like 200 people in it, which as I think about it, is so strange, because I went to this school, that's where I got my degree, and there was never like that many people in this one spot, but that day there was a ton of people, and she walked right up to me, shook my hand, and said, hey, nice to meet you Dan, and I was just like flabbergasted. Was like, how did she know who the heck I was out of all these people? And this was before I even had any Facebook or anything posted like lots of pictures where you could easily find me, that wasn't, you know, public, and she somehow just kinda knew, and so we sat down and I said, hey, so when I left the military, like I was purposeful, I didn't tell a lot of people about my background for many different reasons that I'm still trying to cope with today, and I can't shake this thought, like every day I wake up, I think I have a military thought, every throughout the day I have these things that pop into my head, and these aren't like bad thoughts, I had already got this point, I had already gotten over kind of the nightmares and the night sweats that just happen, I think, you're transitioning from a traumatic and difficult and challenging time, and your brain, like my brain at that time was finally over letting go of all that, right?

Dan Austin: [5:30] I had all this pent up, all these pent up things going on the first couple years, and so I was past that, right? I was like, hey, I'm just like a normal dude now, but boy, this stuff pops in my head all the time. Not necessarily bad things, just military stuff. I was like, can't shake it, and then you just walk up and introduce yourself like you knew me, like, and she's like, it's because I do know you, and she's like, people at your age, this is where the story gets fascinating, she's like, people when you join the military, young men like yourself, who went through the things you went through, and she knew my background in special operations and those sorts of things, she said, you have a look about you, and it's not your fault. It's not like you're trying to do that, she said, Between the ages of 18 and 25, young men's frontal lobe actually is developed, and finally finishes growing. Our brain, our decision making processing unit, the frontal lobe, is finally formed, and that happens to be for most military men is, during that time frame, they serve in their early twenties, and their late teens. And so, of that is, is your decision making, the way you carry yourself, your risk assessment, your risk analysis, all those sorts of things are basically just formed and you can't get rid of it, it's solidified in your brain. And she said, I've seen a lot of guys like you, the way you're scanning the crowd, the way you carry yourself, she's like, I just knew. It had to be you just from your experience. So that was a fascinating point.

Dan Austin: [6:47] This was seven, eight years after I had left the military, that I finally got this like, okay, it's not necessarily a bad thing that I'm thinking about the military often, it's part of my brain. So, really the moral of the story is that for a lot of veterans, their military service is stuck with them forever, you know, even more so if they spent time in combat, where their judgment, their decision making, and just general personality was formed. You know, most most Americans went to college, and or just got a job right out of high school, and so those years are vastly different for them, and the bottom line really is, just keep in mind veterans aren't trying to be a certain way, like they're just, that's just how they are. It doesn't give them an excuse to be a jackass, or non productive member of society, but maybe give them a little bit of grace here and there once in a while. Because you know, in reality, if you knew a veteran before they were in the military, and then they went and left and came back from the military, maybe you had an eight or ten year gap between when you saw them, they're probably going to be slightly, a little bit of a different person. Doesn't mean that they're sell out, doesn't mean that they're a weirdo, it just means that they matured in a different environment than than you did, and so, it is what it is. Next, I just wanted to talk a little bit about what Veterans Day is specifically for me, and how it's evolved over time, because when I started out as a younger person in my early twenties as a veteran, I just kind of ignored the day, I didn't really, oh, it's Veterans Day, whatever, I kind of tried to avoid that conversation with other people, and again, it wasn't because I was hurting, it just because I didn't know how to process that. And over the years, it's kind of ebbed and flowed, and I think I've figured it out a little bit the last couple years, and for me it's of course a day of self reflection, but not on like my service, more so on the relationships I held, because what I found was that is the, that has been the biggest impact of my life, were the friends that I made during that period of time in my life, the brothers and the relationships that I had with those people, and that I still miss to this day, and I honestly have an immense amount of gratitude for those guys, and for those relationships.

Dan Austin: [8:49] They taught me a lot, and it taught me a lot at a time in my life when I needed that. And I'd be lying to be honest, if there wasn't a little bit of sadness that comes with it, because of course I remember the guys that I served with that didn't make it home, and you know, that always sucks, but also because a lot of those relationships have to, out of kind of necessity, end, Sometimes, they don't have to be a necessity, but when the military separates you, you know, everybody's a mishmash from all over the country, and the likelihood of you landing in the same city as somebody that you served closely with, you had that special bond with, is super, super unlikely. So many of us kinda go to the to the winds, and for me, I I didn't have anybody near me that I could associate with or assimilate with, and so I I struggled there a little bit with those relationships, kind of dissolving, but over the years, I've been able to stay in touch with many of the guys, and again, I'm super grateful for that, but of course, a little bit of sadness and and part of it is that, some of that, a really fun time in my life, a really great time in my life is behind me, and it's no longer in front of me, or I can't just recreate that because we're all at different points in our life, we're not young men anymore serving our country in combat, you know.

Dan Austin: [9:59] So it's the good old days, right? Missing those sometimes. But also, would say last, like just the last point I would make on what what it is for me, is also a day of reflection on like, holy shit, I am so lucky to be here, I'm so thankful to be here, had the privilege, the opportunity to serve, I spent quite a bit of time in combat, and the shit that we went through, and that we did, even just in training, I always joke, there's no OSHA in the military, so even training is like everything's like, you go to war, it's dangerous. The training is just as dangerous, and I say that fun, like jokingly, but it also is super true. Know, we train with real bullets, we jump out of real airplanes, we do lots of stuff that's real in training, and so, for a lot of us, we're lucky to be here, and kinda laying there, like thinking about that. Sometimes at night, I'm like, my heart starts racing, I'm like, I can't believe how close I was to death. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was very close to death. And so there's some of that fight reflection around just being amazed, and of course thankful that I'm still here. I share these thoughts with you, I'm hoping that it gives you a little bit of insight into who I am, and what Veterans Day means to me, and maybe informs you a little bit more about how the day can be different for other people and for everybody. I don't really have a whole lot more to share here with you today, but feel free to hit me up in the DMs on Instagram, especially if you're a veteran and you wanna just chat about stuff, I'm always open to that.

Dan Austin: [11:23] I've really had to evolve how I understand my position as a veteran, how I can be a leader in this group, and how I can help others. So, please hit me up, and thank you all for listening.