Choose Your Mindset (Because It Won't Choose You)

Gratitude as Strategic Advantage

"Fight for positivity."

I need to tell you something about myself that might surprise you, given that I'm writing a chapter on mindset and gratitude: my normal is negativity. That's just my default. Left to my own devices, I'll find the worst version of any situation and park there. Complaining is easy. Cynicism is easy. And in the military, you'll have plenty of company on that road.

But that road doesn't go anywhere good. I know because I've walked it.

The Paper Shredding

When I first got to RAF Lakenheath (my first duty station, fresh out of tech school) there was a SSgt who I was convinced had it out for me. While everyone else was getting trained on the actual job, learning the console, processing messages, this guy had me shredding paper. Hours and hours of shredding paper.

I wasn't being trained. I wasn't learning the mission. I was standing in front of a shredder watching classified documents turn into confetti while my peers were doing the real work.

I called my mom. I cried. I told her I thought I'd made the worst decision of my life enlisting in the Air Force. Nobody else had to do this. Just me. I felt singled out. Targeted. I was convinced this guy saw me as nothing more than cheap labor.

About a week in, the SSgt came up to me. And he didn't give me more work. He thanked me. He genuinely thanked me for helping him out and for not complaining about it. It turned out he was the training manager, arguably the busiest person in the shop. He was drowning in work, and he needed someone to handle the mountain of documents that had piled up. He wasn't punishing me. He was asking for help.

That moment hit me hard. Not because of the thank you, but because of what I realized about myself. I had been standing at that shredder for a week, consumed by self-pity and victimhood, while the entire time I was actually serving someone who needed it. My pride had convinced me I was above shredding paper. My ego told me a story about a villain who didn't exist.

The SSgt wasn't my enemy. My own mindset was.

What Happened After the Shredder

That reframe didn't fix me overnight. I want to be clear about that. The skill of reframing negative situations took years to develop, and I'm still not always successful at it. But that paper shredding moment planted a seed.

The SSgt and I became close friends during that assignment. The guy I was sure hated me became one of the most important mentors in my early career. He taught me how to learn, gave me opportunities, and invested in me as a controller. None of that happens if I'd stayed stuck in the victim story. None of it.

What changed was this: instead of asking "Why is this happening to me?" I started asking "What is this teaching me?" and "How is this helping someone else?"

I wasn't a slave. I was serving someone who needed help. A completely different story, and the true one.

What I'm Actually Grateful For

I want to get specific, because gratitude that stays abstract is just positive thinking that goes nowhere.

The Air Force gave me things I carry to this day:

A security clearance. Try getting a Top Secret clearance as a civilian. It opens doors you didn't even know existed, and it's been a career multiplier every single time I've transitioned to a new job.

My wife. I was deployed to Savannah, Georgia, and met her at a church info desk. My hotty wife. If I don't enlist, we never meet. That alone makes the decision worth it.

Education. The GI Bill paid for my undergraduate degree and part of my Master's. I got two CCAF Associate's degrees because I had two AFSCs: Emergency Management and Fire Science. All of that for free.

Healthcare. My youngest child was born on Tricare Reserve Select. Total cost: a $20 copay. Twenty bucks for a healthy baby. That's not a small thing.

Travel. A kid from Texhoma, Oklahoma (population 900) got to live in England, Japan, and travel across Europe and Asia. I wouldn't have seen any of it without the Air Force.

Relationships. The people I met are still in my life decades later. Former peers and supervisors helped me get jobs on the outside because they knew my work ethic. When my sister and my father passed, they were the ones who showed up.

Skills. Everything I know about leadership, emergency management, operations, communication under pressure, it all started in the Air Force. It's the foundation Forever Wingman is built on. It's why AF101 and AF102 exist.

Listing these out isn't just feel-good journaling. It's perspective. When you're working a 12-hour shift and your leadership makes a decision you disagree with and the chow hall is closed and your roommate is driving you crazy, you need something real to anchor to. Not a motivational poster. A list of actual, tangible things that are true about your life because you raised your right hand.

Gratitude as strategy means exactly this. Not a feeling. A decision to look at the full picture instead of just the part that hurts right now.

Internal Locus of Control

Negativity Is the Default

Let me say this plainly: there is a staggering amount of negativity in the military community. You'll feel it the moment you hit your first base. People complaining about leadership, the food, the schedule, the deployment tempo, all of it. And they won't just complain. They'll recruit you to join them.

Negativity is the easy path, and you'll find plenty of company on it.

What I learned is that countering that negativity, actively and consistently, in real conversations, is one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself and the people around you. Someone's bashing leadership, everyone's nodding along, and I'll say something like, "We don't know the whole story. They have conversations we're not privy to. There's probably more going on than we realize." That's not being a suck-up, and it's not defending bad leadership. It's refusing to play a game where everyone loses.

The Reframe Is a Skill

That instinct started with the paper shredder I told you about in the last section. What I saw as punishment turned out to be service, and that one reframe rewired how I handle almost everything. When something looks bad on the surface, I've trained myself to ask a different set of questions instead of spiraling:

• What's the lesson here?
• How is this making me a better person?
• How can I be the positive influence in this situation?
• Is there a way to turn this into something good for everyone around me?

I'm not always successful. Some days the negative voice wins. But more often than not, those questions pull me back.

It Got Sharper With Time

Here's how that skill matured over 20 years, because it didn't stay frozen at the paper shredder.

What it's really done is help me slow down and not react. To remember that I'm almost never seeing the full picture. The clearest example is how I deal with leadership now. They're privy to things I'm not, so even when I don't agree with a decision or a process, I've learned to assume there are influences in the grand scheme that I can't see from where I'm standing. That one shift has made me far more teachable and a lot less critical of the calls leadership makes. Not because I'm a pushover, but because I've been wrong enough times about "obvious" bad decisions to know I usually don't have the whole story.

That's the locus of control in practice. You can't control your leadership. You can't control the deployment schedule, whether the chow hall is open, or whether your roommate is a nightmare. But you control how you interpret every one of those things, and that interpretation is the one variable that is always, 100%, yours.

"Fight for positivity." Those three words have echoed in my head for years, because positivity doesn't just show up. You fight for it. Every day. In every conversation. In every situation where the easy path is to complain and the hard path is to look for the good. I still fight. I don't always win. But I show up for the fight every single day.

If you want to apply this when the people around you are the ones struggling, that's empathy, and the nuts and bolts are in Navigating People. And if the negativity you're fighting is coming from the people you spend your time with, that's a circle problem. See Your Circle.

Optimism vs. Toxic Positivity

The Difference

I need to draw a line here, because some people hear "fight for positivity" and think I mean "pretend everything is great." That is not what I'm saying. Not even close.

Toxic positivity is when someone is going through something genuinely hard, a death in the family, a failed relationship, a real setback, and you hit them with "everything happens for a reason" or "just stay positive." That's not helping. That's dismissing their pain so you don't have to sit in the discomfort of it.

Authentic optimism is different. It says, "This is terrible. I see that. I'm here. And when you're ready, we'll figure out what comes next." One shuts the conversation down. The other opens it up.

I've been on both sides. I've been the guy going through it, crying to my mom on the phone from England, sure I'd made the worst decision of my life. In that moment I didn't need someone telling me to look on the bright side. I needed someone to acknowledge what I was feeling, sit in it with me, and only then, when I was ready, help me reframe it. And I've been the guy on the other side, trying to counter the negativity in the break room. The whole skill is knowing which situation you're actually in.

How to Fight for Positivity Without Being Fake

This is what's worked for me over 20 years. I still mess it up regularly, but the pattern holds.

Acknowledge the suck first. If something genuinely sucks, say so. Working a 12-hour shift on Christmas sucks. A deployment that doubles in length sucks. You earn the right to be the positive voice by being honest about the reality first. Skip this step and you're just the annoying guy with the motivational poster.

Then look for what you can actually control. Once you've named it, find the actionable piece. What can we learn? What can we do to make this better, not in some imaginary future, but right now?

Be the example, not the preacher. Nobody wants a lecture on gratitude. What changes a room is someone going through the same garbage as everyone else and still showing up with a good attitude. That's contagious in a way words never are.

When the Feelings Are Lying

When things are going wrong and I catch the negative spiral starting, I make myself get specific about what's actually going right. Not vaguely, in my head. Concretely. What do I have now that I didn't have five years ago? How far have I actually come?

That question always works, because the evidence is overwhelming once I bother to look at it. The kid crying on the phone to his mom from England never could have pictured the life he's living now. So when the negative voice tells me today is a disaster, I have a counter: "Look how far you've come."

That isn't toxic positivity. It's evidence. And evidence is what you reach for when the feelings are lying.

My normal is negativity. I fight for positivity every single day. The fight is the point. Not the winning, the fighting. Because the alternative is to stop fighting and let the default take over, and I've seen where that road goes.

It goes nowhere good.