VMI Leader Journey Podcast

In this episode of The VMI Leader Journey, we sit down with retired U.S. Army Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann—our 2025–26 Leader‑in‑Residence at the Virginia Military Institute. Scott shares hard‑earned leadership lessons from his Special Forces career, including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan during the Global War on Terror. Whether you’re a VMI cadet, a prospective student, a veteran, or someone interested in leadership and international security, this conversation delivers powerful insights on how authentic leaders build trust, influence without rank, and lead under extreme pressure.

In this episode, we’re doing something a little different. Our conversation with Brad Snyder, a Navy veteran, Paralympic gold medalist, and author, will reveal some behind-the-scenes insights into his memoir, “Fire in My Eyes.” We’ll discover what inspired him to write a memoir, what it was like to put some painful and confusing memories down on paper, and other details about his process. We will also talk about some leadership lessons that go beyond the pages of a book, including the metaphor of “Tap and Advance.”

MAJ. CATHERINE ROY, COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING MANAGER: Welcome to the VMI Leader Journey podcast, where we have inspiring conversations with leaders to uncover the strategies, lessons, and stories that shape their success. Today, we’re excited to explore memoir writing with Brad Snyder, a Navy veteran, Paralympic gold medalist, and author. During this interview, Brad shares some behind-the-scenes insights into his journey from the Naval Academy to the Paralympic Games and how he learned resilience, determination, and the power of embracing challenges.

We’ll use his memoir, Fire in My Eyes, as a guide to explore what inspired him to write a memoir and the process of the writing. Plus some leadership lessons that go beyond the pages of a book. Whether you’re a student leader, athlete, or just curious about leadership, this conversation will inspire and motivate you. So grab your headphones, lean in, and join us for this enlightening exploration of leadership with Brad Snyder.

Let’s dive in.

Welcome, Brad Snyder. Thank you so much for being a guest on today’s episode of the VMI Leader Journey.

BRAD SNYDER: It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

ROY: I have a lot of notes here, and as we just reviewed, there are a lot of things I’d like to get into. First of all, how has your visit been so far? How have you been here for the whole two hours?

SNYDER: It’s been spectacular. It’s always a special treat to be able to visit somewhere that has such, deep and intertwined history with our great country, as VMI does. And I’ve, you know, always had a stout appreciation for this institution but never had the opportunity to come and visit the campus. So I’m really excited to be here now.

ROY: Excellent. So well, again, we’re just super excited to have you here tonight. I want to get into first, the book that you wrote, which is titled Fire in My Eyes. I have read it cover to cover. and you co-wrote that book with Tom Sileo. I will just tell our audience that it’s an excellent read.

I highly recommend reading it. just for the human interest stories. But then we’ll talk a little bit later in the podcast about some of the leadership lessons to gain from, reading the story. So, first of all, I’ll also say that part of our Courageous Leadership speaker series that what we are also doing is giving away a copy of the book with each talk.

My overall impression is, having read the book is I was very impressed with the authentic voice and several instances you talk about, failures and struggles, which I think will be an inspiration for the cadets. it was certainly inspirational for me, even so, a couple of questions about that. Number one, in your own words, why write a memoir?

SNYDER: The book covers aspects of my childhood up to the decision to go to the Naval Academy, my experiences at the Naval Academy, and then, my military experience. But then most of the quote-unquote story revolves around the year between my injury in September of 2011 and then my, ability to go to the Paralympics a year later so that that year is a real consequential part of my entire life and kind of the focus of the book.

Shortly after I competed in London, that story kind of went out there, and I got a lot of invitations to come and speak at various places. The Naval Academy, being one of the Naval Academy Leadership Conference, is one of the first places I spoke. And at that point, I didn’t really fancy myself a speaker. I didn’t really know what to put into a speech, and I didn’t really know what to say.

And I sort of would get up on stage and bumble through a bio of myself. Hi, am this guy. I did these things and here’s my story. What what questions do you have? and for whatever reason, that resonated with people. People really liked that. I was just kind of sharing my perspective on this unique set of experiences.

I got better and better at sharing the story, got more and more invitations over a span of a few years, and frequently the suggestion would come up like one of the incredible story. You know, you’re this incredible person and you should really write this into a book. And then I would go and do more speaking and they would say the same thing, and they would introduce me as things like American Hero and, you know, resilience figure and this and that.

The other thing, and, the way I was introduced did not feel like me, didn’t feel like who I am, who I aspire to be. Certainly, I know we all aspire to be heroic in some sense, but for someone to actually say that in my introduction was very unnerving and especially reflecting on my past. I haven’t always been hitting homeruns, you know, like I haven’t always been winning gold medals.

I have a whole bunch of things that I’ve screwed up along the way. And I thought, you know what? For anybody who’s calling me a hero, maybe they don’t know the whole story. Maybe they know all the good stuff. Maybe they don’t know the bad stuff, too. And for someone to call me a hero, I want you to know the whole story.

And if you read the whole story and you still want to call me a hero afterward, then great. But I wanted it all to be out there, and there’s a lot I can’t share about that journey into blindness. And beyond that, I couldn’t get out in a 45 minute keynote, and so I agreed. I thought, yeah, writing a book would be a good idea.

I spent a number of years trying to write the book. I had really bad insomnia after my injury, so when I couldn’t sleep at night, I would just stay up all night writing chapters about this chapter’s about that and trying to sell the pitch to a couple. Publishers got told, ‘thank you for your service, but no,’ a bunch of times it turns out that Tom Sillitoe is, a childhood friend of my cousin.

So I, we actually had a familial connection. He had just written another outstanding book called Brothers Forever, which is about two Naval Academy grads who are now buried in Arlington together. I highly recommend that book. but there was a very natural partnership there. I had actually already had a near complete manuscript, but at least so far as I could see, when I when I started working with Tom, I sent him the manuscript and he promptly deleted probably about half of it, which was a blow to my ego, but maybe recognize that I really didn’t know how to intentionally put an arc together.

I had written a bunch of chapters about stuff that nobody would really care about. And then when I read back with Tom and edited, there was a lot of power in sort of the Mark Twain quote. If if I had more time, I would have written a shorter note, and by editing it down, I think it ended up being a lot better than it was.

ROY: Yeah, yeah, it’s similar to, Oprah Winfrey likes to say reading is rereading. Yes. And certainly writing is editing.

SNYDER: That’s correct.

ROY: I have definitely experienced that. So why might someone want to read this book? Let’s give you your best plug for reading this book.

SNYDER: I think, and I, I don’t know, I won’t presume to be the reader, but I can say what I was trying to achieve with the book was sort of an explanation for my mom. my mom didn’t have a ton of background in the military. I don’t think she was ever fully aware of the nature of what I was doing in the military.

Both because of her lack of connection with the military, but also, because I intentionally withheld information, I guess I, you know, I didn’t really want my mom to worry about where I was going or what I was doing. Right. And I knew what I was doing was risky. And so I would sort of knew from my as it to my mom.

And there’s a I don’t know if it’s in the book or not, but I, my mom was really mad at me in the hospital. Her because people would visit me and some books. Somebody came to ask me about particular aspects of what was going on in Afghanistan. And of course, I was in the hospital and I was after injury and I was all doped up.

So I was very honest. And afterward, my mom kind of growled at me. I thought you were passing out candy to children, which is what I would frequently tell her on the phone and say, what do you do every day? Oh, well, we’re, you know, we’re out in the villages, and I give candy to children, you know, hearts and minds and that sort of thing.

And she seemed to willingly accept that at the moment. But I think, after the fact, came to recognize that what I was doing was very different than what I had shared with her. so, you know, kind of keeping my mom is the target audience in mind. My mom’s not going to get a lot of military jargon. She’s not really well versed in, are interested in the, like, the grander strategy of it all or counterinsurgency or international relations.

I think what my mom wanted to understand was what was my experience, what was was I afraid, what was I trying to do? What were all my friendships like? Was it difficult to be away from family? was I scared when I got hurt, that sort of stuff. So I, I, I, I was also an avid reader at the time, as we all are probably of military memoirs.

I’d read McChrystal’s book and Petraeus’ book. And, what the what I thought in all of those military memoirs. One, they’re all too long BS. They’re all laced in jargon. They’re all.

ROY: We are very.

SNYDER: Intentional about trying to situate themselves in this really big history. What I felt like was missing in the sort of the war memoir, genre was just like, just for me, like a my experience is just some yokel from Florida who thought it was a good idea to serve my country. I went and did this kind of crazy set of things.

I wasn’t trying to explain it all. I wasn’t trying to have a comment on whether we should have been there or shouldn’t have been. There was a good was it bad? Was it whatever, you know, was and this was my experience with it and it shaped who I am. And I think you should know about it. And that’s kind of what I was trying to achieve.

ROY: I would say you definitely accomplished that task. and certainly, I think it does give a fresh perspective in that, military genre, space. And and you didn’t have to explain your political reasons for whatever decisions happened with our military. So, so, so that is I think that did free you up to share a more relatable, authentic story.

Talk about the process a little bit. So you did mention and touch on that a little bit that you had written this fairly long memoir that 50% just got slashed. and I would say that, Tom Sileo’s work on this did help. What I noticed was the reuse and repurposing of certain phrases that did help connect stories and chapters together.

Yes. What else can you talk about in terms of the process of writing the book?

SNYDER: Yeah, I think from my perspective, my approach was like a scrapbook. I could think of an image in my mind and write the context of the photo. And that was if you flip through a set of photos of my background, that would sort of be how the chapters were arranged. And this memory was a really cool memory and a really cool story.

Let me tell you about it. And this is a really important part of the story. But it was very fragmented. Not Tom did a really, really good job of adding a lot of structure, as you alluded to, binning different thoughts and photographs into cohesive chapters that all matched a general arc from being a child in the Witchy-Waky Springs all the way up to being injured and then to the Paralympics, he added a lot of flow, and it made it a lot easier for the reader than what it would have looked like if they even had read the manuscript I submitted to Tom, which was again, like a scrapbook.

The process after that, I will say, as, as prideful as I was in the manuscript that I sent to Tom, there were big chunks missing, and it was because it was all the hard stuff to write. For example, everything in the hospital for me was hard to write on because it’s a memory I don’t necessarily like going back into.

I was really doped up. I was first newly blind. everything was very just massive in that set of memories. And it was hard to go back into that space and as you said, like be authentic about it. I could have said, you know, here’s the facts and figures. Here’s what happened. I was in the hospital between September the 11th and whatever else, but I actually wanted to go back into that space and understand what was it like with my brother.

What was it like with my mother? What was my head space? What was I afraid of? What was I excited about? What was I? What were my true honest feelings? and, you know, you have to go back into that, but you had to be in that memory and then describe it. It was just a really hard thing to do.

But I would say it was extremely cathartic for me to go back into the blast and go into that memory and, and search around in there and understand what happened to me. what was my perspective and what was the perspective of my friends who are on the battlefield, what it must have been like for them, right, to hear the blast and to run over to me and see me all messed up and be worried about that? Yeah.

To think of my mom getting a call at 530 in the morning to think of my sister having to fly to the hospital and, you know, go to the, the airfield at, Langley Air Force Base and know that I’m on there but not be able to talk to me. And these are all, like, really heavy memories that I had to go back into to write about.

ROY: And did you just write those stories or did you have, like, an interview, like a moderated interview with Tom Sileo or with a phone conversations?

SNYDER: I think the depth of my thinking is always best when I can sit and write it right. So, I wanted to go into this space. I wanted to write what I thought was important, and then I would submit it to Tom, and then Tom would come back in a lot of cases with most of the chapters. It was an editing, like here, I screen through this, I fix your typos.

I corrected a couple sentences. I added some detail where you needed it. There were especially with big chapters like the Blast, or hospital chapters. There was more of a where are you going with this section? And tap in advance was like an idea that came out of talking about the rehab process and me sort of sharing with him this idea of these concentric circles and then I don’t know who it was, said it, but it was in conversation that it dawned on us like, oh, you know, there’s this really neat connection between the metal detector and the cane and this idea of clearing for each footstep.

You know, it’s just like life, you know, you got to, like, know what you’re where you’re at before you can take a leap somewhere else. And so you have to be comfortable and then you have to take a risk and you have to be comfortable. You have to take a risk. And that cycle repeats over and over and over again.

Oh, what a cool idea to rope that into a broader concept. you know, a leadership lesson that follows on. So I think they all started with, you know, I am the subject matter expert in those memories, right? I have they’re my memories. Right. So I wanted to go back into those memories, pull out what I thought was important.

And then Tom did a really, really good job of pushing, nudging, and shaping all of those ideas into being situated within that broader arc.

ROY: Yeah, it sounds like he was trying to help you be very purposeful. Yeah, in what you were trying to accomplish and keeping it your story exactly at the same time, so excellent job there. I couldn’t help but wonder as I read the hospital scenes, particularly. You talked about your mom’s voice being the first thing that kind of, that you felt you could trust in this bizarre purgatory. And that that helped you come out of this coma state that that they had put you in. A lot of times you referenced those instances where you were not conscious with the term dreamscapes. can you talk a little bit about that?

SNYDER: Yeah, yeah, they were very strange. my experience throughout that time was, though, you took your normal perspective and your normal perception of time and memory, and you folded all up and you tied it in knots. Time moved at different speeds. My memory was all odd. and, for that first week especially, I didn’t always recognize that I wasn’t seeing with my eyes things would appear in my mind, that were generated by real stimulus.

So, sounds I was hearing with my ears in the environment around me would reshape themselves into different realities in my head. and look in my keynote. I’ll make this joke later. I kind of as a joke. I say, Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, like, everything looked like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, which is one of many dreamscapes that I often found myself in some.

Sometimes my dreams would have me in. Like these really strange, like, you know, if you were able to go to a shipyard and you’re in all those CONEX boxes that are being loaded off of the ships, I felt like I was at one point, I thought I was trapped in this everlasting yard of shipping containers. Right. that’s one dreamscape.

Other dreamscapes were like walking around in the desert. at one point I thought that I was in a tent, like a a green army tent in the desert with no walls in it. And I kept thinking, I. You would have thought that Walter Reed would have had walls, you know, like. And so I say that to say that for me, these realities, these alternative realities were very, very, very, very real to me.

Yeah. And they were flexing and something I didn’t understand. And that’s why I called them dreamscapes. It’s important to know that, that those were my reality for a while. And that’s why it was so disorienting. Why is this so normal for everybody else? You hear a doctor and a nurse come in and they’re talking to each other as though it’s completely normal to be in this derelict tent in the middle of the Desert Rise shipping container area.

And I just didn’t get that. but I do remember early on hearing voices, and specifically my mom and my mom’s a long, long. You should know about my mom. My mom’s a 38 year neonatal nurse, so I thought, my mom knows the hospital, and she’ll know what’s normal and she’ll know what’s abnormal. And she’s going to advocate for me and to hear her voice and for her to be calm ish and to say, hey, we’re here and this is okay.

And we’ve talked to the doctor and you, this is what’s going on. That was something I could trust in psych. Okay, if my mom’s okay with this weird thing, then it’s okay, right? And as the week went on, I came to, like, kind of understand that these are dreams. And even though I sometimes I would know that I was dreaming and I would be afraid of the dream and be stuck in the dream.

But I knew, you know, after being in the hospital for a couple days or every night, my mom would leave and go to her hotel or whatever, and then she would come back in the morning, and sometimes the nights were the worst. I would have the worst nightmares at night, and I would know I’m stuck in my nightmare and I know I just have to wait.

I just have to wait for mom to come back in the morning and the nightmare will go away. And that’s how it worked. Like in the morning, my mom would bring some breakfast and she would show up. And there was like this immense amount of relief, like the nightmare’s over and my mom’s here, and I’m okay.

ROY: You could relax.

SNYDER: Exactly. And just day in, day out, that’s how it went for a period of a couple weeks.

ROY: So I wonder if there’s something that, practitioners can learn about patient care through you telling that story. Yeah. I know that they encourage family members to come in, although not to overtired patient, but just interesting that having those voices and then whose voice maybe is the one that the person can connect to to come out of their, dreamscape, if you will.

SNYDER: So actually, for sure. But I will tell you, the practitioners at Walter Reed were really good at that. They were really good at understanding the amount of stimulus I could take. And they understood that my family was a very comforting presence for me. But they were also very mindful of like, my mom’s going through hell, too. She’s watching me really hurt and really messed up and navigating massive uncertainty.

She’s afraid to if she needs to go to sleep. So the the practitioners at Walter Reed were good about, hey, we’ve got this. Go take a couple hours, get some sleep, come back breakfast thing in the morning. So they navigated all that really well. They did other things too. I was telling them like, don’t give me any more sleep meds.

That’s freaking me out. They’re like, okay, we’re going to we’re going to change the meds. We’re going to do this. They were very responsive to my needs. One nurse gave me a talking watch, and when I, when I told them about the night, like being stuck in my dreams at night and how that really wakes me up, they said, here, listen, this is your watch.

When you wake up, always hit your watch, and then it’ll tell you what time it is. And now auditory reality on time. so, so long as I knew time was clicking by, I wasn’t stuck in the nightmare. I was still grounded to reality even if someone wasn’t there. And that was actually really insightful. And that’s exactly what I started doing.

Every time I woke up, I would look and see at the time. Now, sometimes it felt like I would click it a couple times and only a few seconds will have gone okay. And it was freaking me out that way. But at least it was always going by. So I always knew I’m not stuck and mourning is coming and people are coming back and it allowed me to navigate that kind of terror for a little bit when I also had, like my favorite nurse at night was this fellow named John, who was a combat medic.

He said he was a combat medic in Afghanistan. He he knew he knew what I was going through. He knew the battlespace. He had friends. We had similar friends. he was just like a very like it was very easy to trust him. And he was able to kind of establish that rapport through our common experience. And so I would always kind of feel comfortable when John was around to.

ROY: Go look, all right, well, I’d like to transition over into some of the leadership lessons as we close out our discussion, because there’s getting time for you to move on to other things. So I do want to go on to some of the leadership lessons that I took away from the book. We’ve already mentioned. Tap in advance. Yeah.

Can you like in a couple sentences, talk about tap in advance and give it some context for a cadet audience?

SNYDER: Sure. Tap in advance. I think starting at the very abstract level is all about, if you, no matter what you want to do, whether it’s like, achieving a growth mindset, having goals, competing for a championship, getting a PhD, getting through your undergraduate experience at VMI, you can’t do it all at once. You have to do it in these very small, incremental steps. And it involves, becoming comfortable with where you are.

But knowing that you need to take little, tiny risks constantly to push your boundaries and become more capable, more wise, more well read more. You know, physically fit whatever else that’s happened. Advanced metaphor comes from blindness, where when you’re using a blind cane, what you’re doing is you’re clearing a spot for the one step in front of you.

That’s it. you’re safe where you are. You’re standing there completely fine. But I’m going to use the cane to clear one space in front of me. And then I take one step, and then I clear the space and take another step. So no matter how hard things get, how complex they get, how difficult and challenging and scary and adverse and whatever else, all you have to do is take one step and you just tap and advance.

Tap and advance.

ROY: That’s excellent. another, phrase in the book, you talked about the Delta. Yeah. So I think that it’s a nice segway from tap in advance. and it reminds me that the future is we might have plans, but it’s kind of unknowable. So I call it like a fog. Yes. You really don’t know. You are kind of navigating your life as best you can.

One step at a time. Yeah, but then there’s the experiences that we have, and in your book, you you coined the phrase the delta. Yeah. Talk a moment about that.

SNYDER: Is a fun kind of process. Point about the delta. in my original sort of manuscript, I go off on all of these offshoots all the time. So coming from the Naval Academy, I’m all about these leadership vignettes and the lesson learned all the time. Right. I think Tom encouraged me to have more patience, tell the story first, and then tell the lesson learned.

So he took out a lot of the little vignettes that I had along the way in the book, and then in the epilogue told me, go out. Well, write whatever you think is the broader lesson learned. And I think throughout the writing of the book, and actually in a, in an article that’s not part of the book, with the Players Tribune, this idea of the Delta came out when I was talking about some of my experiences when I was most frustrated being blind, and how I realized that the frustration was not with the thing itself.

I think it was either, you know, trying to wash dishes and breaking some of the glasses or, when my dog would come back to me in the dog park. gizzy, God rest her soul, she’s passed away a handful of years ago. But, I realized that for me to sort of mitigate these moments of frustration, I had to realize that they weren’t coming from washing the dishes or the dog and the dog.

Right. They were coming from an expectation in my mind that things should remain as they are. I should be able to wash dishes a certain way because I used to be able to do these things before this dog should come back to me, because she’s supposed to help me and I can’t get out of here without her help.

So it’s an expectation thing. I had to learn that things aren’t. They’re not always going to be the way that they are that you think they’re supposed to be. And for me to become less frustrated, for me to be at peace with my current reality, I need to let go of these tethers, both my past, who I used to be and my future, who I want to be.

And I have to accept who I am and know that context always changes. I’m always changing. I’m never going to be the same. I’m not 24 anymore. I’m different now than I was when I walked in here 15 minutes ago. We’re always making these small, incremental changes, and by holding on to past versions of ourselves or inappropriately bounding us to a future versions of ourselves, we can’t possibly be who we are.

And sometimes that, prevents us from being at peace, being happy, finding joy and delight in all of the like miracles that exist all around us. As a blind person, I’m extremely fortunate to still be alive. I talked about Tyler a lot in the book. My buddy who didn’t come back right. and for me to get frustrated over washing the dishes ignores the miracle that I’m still alive.

It’s a dishonor to my buddy Tyler, who died so that I might still be here. And so for me to really be at peace with who I am and to let go of this idea that, you know, I should be this kind of man. I’m not that man. I’m a blind guy and I do blind guy things, and I have a certain set of capabilities that I need to get that I need to accept and go back to the top in advancement of war.

If I want to expand my capabilities, I just have to work at. I have put in that work. I had to get comfortable with who I am and take a risk and move on. And that’s what the Delta is all about.

ROY: Yeah, I think that is such a powerful and exceptional lesson for everyone to learn, but especially young adults. because I think that we go into even being a, student here at the Institute, we have a certain expectation. Not everybody graduates from this place. It may not be a good fit or we made mistakes along the way.

We got behind and overwhelmed. And so I think it’s important for cadets to understand and have that perspective of tap in advance. And when it’s just not within the realm of possibility to say, that’s okay, I can be something new and different. Yeah. I love that you talk about that. That’s going to bring about personal peace and joy.

I like that you talk about, the gratitude and how we can reframe another phrase that ties into it is the flipping your perspective to to find gratitude and to accept and embrace the moment that you’re in yet, but that you can still move forward. we call around here, we eating the whale? Yeah, exactly. Same idea. Eat a whale one bite at a time.

SNYDER: That’s exactly right.

ROY: Just do the next thing. Yep. That’s in your control.

SNYDER: Yeah. One other aspect of the Delta. I’d like to kind of like bespoke for this audience. The cadets at VMI. I say this to midshipmen all the time, and I remember this as a midshipman myself. How I was just desperate. I couldn’t wait to go and, like, prove myself, couldn’t wait to go and do my military training and go on deployment and do my job.

And I felt like one of these days I’m going to feel like a real boy. I’m going to feel like I’ve made it. And my advice is like, you never actually make it. You’re always striving for the next thing. So my advice is, don’t be in such a rush. Going back to that delta, if you’re always thinking about where you’re going, you lose sight on where you are.

And I think it’s really important you’re never going to be a cadet again at VMI once you graduate. Just be here, enjoy this experience, make the most of it. Learn everything you can from your classes. Make the most of the relationships you have while you’re here, and then go on and go into the infantry or go to the fleet and be a great, you know, junior officer, and then be a great senior officer and then be a great, you know, civil servant and whatever else you’re going to do after the military.

But you can’t do all of that at once. And don’t be in a massive hurry to live your whole career all at once. Just be where you are and be good at it.

ROY: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your time, Brad. This has been excellent discussion. I think, our cadet audience will certainly enjoy, what you’ve had to share.

SNYDER: Thank you so much for having me.

ROY: This has been a strategic outreach program of the VMI center for Leadership and Ethics. We educate, engage, and inspire the leadership journey of our VMI community and the nation. Don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast to follow along as we release new episodes. Follow the VMI Center for Leadership and Ethics on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. To learn more about our programs and events, visit our website at VMI dot EDU forward-slash c l e. Thanks for tuning in.

In this exciting episode of the VMI Leader Journey, host Major Catherine Roy invites Retired Brigadier General Christopher Burns, the 2023-24 Leader in Residence at VMI. Burns gives a succinct overview of his career journey, laying out potent leadership philosophies he’s learned from his time in the military and Wall Street. He delves deep into the distinction between managing and leading, emphasizing the centrality of clear communication and vision in inspiring successful endeavors.

MAJ. CATHERINE M. ROY, COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING MANAGER: Welcome to the VMI Leader Journey. I’m your host, Major Catherine Roy, communications and marketing manager at the Center for Leadership and Ethics. This podcast features conversations with VMI cadets, faculty, alumni, and VIP guests who come to post. Our conversations highlight leadership, and best practices and insights on leader development. On our show today is the 2023-24 Leader in Residence, retired Brigadier General Christopher Burns.
Burns was a guest speaker and Lieutenant Colonel Paula Tucker’s leadership class last year, which allowed us to invite him to observe and serve the Institute’s leader development programing. His unique relationship development style and insights on developing a ‘recruitable workforce’ have made him an invaluable asset as this year’s leader in residence.
Welcome to retired Brigadier General Chris Burns.
he’s made several visits to post, and we’re just very excited to have him. Not only has he been very useful, here on post, having conversations, engaging, members of our staff, faculty and Corps of Cadets.
But we’re having this opportunity to sit down and have a bit more of a in in-depth, targeted discussion on leadership insights.
if you can just introduce yourself to our audience. Give them a little taste of your background and, and, what you do now.
BRIG. GEN. CHRISTOPHER BURNS, RET. & 2024 PEAY LEADER-IN-RESIDENCE: Sure. Well, thanks, Catherine, and thanks for the opportunity to do this podcast. I’ve really enjoyed being in VMI and being a leader in residence and had, you know, I think learned as much from the cadets as they have from me, hopefully, and everybody else in the faculty. So, my background is pretty, pretty different in the sense that I started as a, private in the National Guard, in the artillery.
And then, kind of took the traditional path and what I would call the Connecticut mindset, which is you go to high school, you go to college, you get a job. And, came along the way, there was a little ad that talked about joining National Guard. And so I joined the National Guard as an E-1 when I was 17, between my junior, senior year of high school.
And then I was kind of off and running. It was a six year enlistment that were going to pay for college. It was the Cold War years. So, we kind of looked at it and said, you know, I always wanted to serve my country, and this is a way I can kind of do both. So, that was my initial motivation.
And then my grandfather had worked on Wall Street. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but when I graduated college and, went through ROTC at the University of Connecticut, went through my Green Beret training, I started working on Wall Street. Didn’t realize it was sales but I quickly learned and adapted from that, what to do and became a very successful financial advisor and then moved into management at the same time, paralleling a career track as a Green Beret in the reserves.
And then when 9-11 happened, everything changed for everybody. I was working in the Middle East, with Fifth Group as part of my, alignment so I knew when we figured out that we were going to the Middle East, we’d be mobilized. So, I was there with Fifth Group, we mobilized with them, and then ended up […] Uzbekistan in February of 2002, and then pretty much every couple of years was deployed somewhere around the world
in terms of countering ISIS and all the various things we had to deal with from that side.
ROY: and you were still with the National Guard, right?
BURNS: Yep. Still the National Guard.
ROY: Okay. Okay.
BURNS: Yeah. So it was it was, you know, we mobilized for a year and then come back and, I learned a lot in that process. I learned the business principles. You kind of set the foundation up front. And then when I was away, all the success of all my hard work would be there for the person who was who took over for me.
And then, yeah, I’d come back and rebuild it but it was a pretty crazy time. And then I got the opportunity around midway, I think around ‘04-’05 to help develop a high performance coaching program for our company. And that’s when I really got the leadership bug. I had it a little bit before that because I had run Officer Candidate School, but I, I didn’t realize until I got into high performance coaching how effective it could be.
So that’s where my passion for leadership and coaching comes from. And and as you know, working with me, I’m an avid reader in that space and constantly looking at kind of where we need to be from that side. So that’s really where my passion came from. So combination of my military background, my executive coaching, and then just being a successful financial advisor and then moving up through the ranks of Wall Street, kind of gave me that drive to to keep going.
And then in 2010, with the mortgage meltdown, I came on active duty and, they kept giving me jobs. I couldn’t say no to. So I stayed until I retired, as commander, commanding general for Special Operations Command North, which was a tremendous honor for me.
ROY: Well, it’s super impressive, but, of course, that’s kind of what we look for in a leader-in-residence is somebody with these, not only the theory and the study, but the very practical…. you were in the trenches kind of background and experience. I think that that for our cadets, is a is a sign of some serious gravitas.
BURNS: Oh, you. I think I was in the right place at the right time, so. Yeah.
ROY: Right, right. So it’s interesting that your career kind of flexed in and out of the military duty and I wonder, with all the leadership reading that you do and your high performance coaching, would you say that you have a good idea or your finger on the pulse of trends, or, dare I say, a little bit of a futurist as to what are the coming needs for leadership?
And if so, can you talk about that?
BURNS: Yeah, I think the the trends are a little bit challenging because we’ve been in a tough economic cycle for 20 years since 9/11. Yeah. So one of the programs that gets cut on the civilian side, and I talk to the cadets about this, are your leadership development programs. So what you have on the corporate side is you have managers who are getting promoted from kind of what we call tactical management.
You’re working at that office level moving up, but they’re not getting that leadership training. And unless you’re someone who looks to keep learning, you’re not really catching up on that. So you have a lot of managers who need to become inspiring leaders but didn’t really get that training. Now the benefit is the military. That’s part of our core value system.
So, just like we run Officer Candidate School, VMI, you know, the Institute is focused on leadership, leadership development. And that’s really what it’s about. And that’s the strength I tell the cadets every day when I sit with them is that you’re unique value proposition is you’re going to be able to be an inspiring leader, because as you move from thinking about I just me, myself, who I am and then transition to a we mindset as you develop your leadership philosophies, you move into your leadership roles.,
you also have to inspire and that helps make for a very effective leader, both for those cadets who are going into the civilian world or into government agencies, as well as for the ones going into the military. But there’s a tremendous gap, because of that lack of leadership and development where you have people being more of a manager than a leader, and you can feel that, when you look especially in the corporate world, there’s just this kind of lack of inspiration and a little bit of apathy among employees because you’re just not inspired by by leaders, and it’s not their fault.
They just haven’t been developed, due to to the cutting programs, which is unfortunate, but, people tend to cut developmental programs when times get tough.
ROY: Yeah. You and I had a previous conversation and you were talking about how also the impact of the rapid technology growth that we’re having. and we’re not able to kind of my word, marinate in these leadership principles and ideas as we did post-World War two through the Cold War years, to say and and allow those people the time to develop their leadership, insights and principles and then become those inspiring leaders.
Do you have some insights on how managers might better transition from tactical? I call it like the moving from the production side to the leadership side.
BURNS: And I think the biggest thing is that and it’s the scariest thing, which is you have to realize your success is no longer based on you. And when you’re a manager, you can manage your way to success. And a lot of that is kind of centric on you and how you manage and what you do. Whereas when you’re leading and moving up in that, elevation, operational, strategic, you have to rely on everybody else, which can be very unsettling because you’re going from, you know, me as a manager, I can kind of manage this and I can, you know, through sheer force, kind of get to where I need to be.
Whereas when you’re leading, you have to inspire others to be the best versions of themselves, which then makes the organization greater. Now the scary part, which I always talk to the cadets, is, depending on the size of your organization, that can be anywhere from, you know, eight to hundreds that are all raising that organization, that you hope you can give them a common direction to be successful as a leader.
But it’s no longer about your success. It’s about you inspiring them to be successful and see the vision for the organization and driving.
ROY: That was going to be another question I had is, do you think that some of these managers that are struggling or, you know, just not quite getting it, would you say that they have a lack of vision or maybe a lack of ability to communicate a vision?
BURNS: Yeah, I think it’s it’s that and I’ve seen that over and over again. It’s amazing. at my company, I was working for, a year and a half ago, I was coaching through a, standard of care for our clients. And we had the the people talk about what their vision was, but I didn’t realize that their staff had no idea what the vision of these people was.
And they’d been working for them for 20 years. So it was incredibly powerful for the staff to get the vision from the leader, because then they were able to innovate and find solutions, say, okay, this is who we’re focused on. Let me do a better job in my role now that I know what the vision is. So yeah, that’s a great point.
I think a lot of people underestimate the value of articulating the vision to people, and they just assume everybody has it.
ROY: Yeah. Like reminds me of, I can’t remember quite how the saying goes, but if you aim for nothing, you’ll hit it every time. Yeah. Would you say that this also involves, again, going from that tactical management to strategic management requires a lot of, delegation and there’s that aspect of trust that has to happen?
BURNS: Yeah, yeah. Trust is is critical in the kind of the four elements I would say for a successful team are trust, communication, process, and accountability. And trust and communication are critical for a leader to have that so that way, that vision comes out. You know, what we call commander’s intent in the military comes out. And kind of having that road that everybody knows they need to move along.
And as you move up in the organization, you have less and less control, if you will, because you have more and more people under your, you know, supervision or command, which means you have to be much more effective as a communicator, because you’re going to have to give them that vision and that common road to kind of stay on, to develop and grow the organization.
And that can be hard sometimes if you’re not communicating. And we we have a tendency in society today to think, oh, we, you know, we don’t need to communicate as much as we do. And the common question that’s always been asked, which is a great one, is, do you ever feel like you’re over communicated to. And most people will say, no, but we have this natural tendency of, oh, no, too many meetings, too many this.
And we’re not communicating. But if you can communicate more effectively and also using different mediums because you know what you find there, I’m sure you see this, Catherine, with cadets, they love texting, you know, whereas, for me, I like a conversation. So I have to use different mediums to reach the population where they’re at to be an effective communicator, like the podcast. This is something, you know, a couple of years ago I would never thought of doing. But it’s an effective way to reach a certain amount of the population as we go forward.
ROY: Yeah, we definitely use those principles all the time in, in campaigns or marketing, reaching all and it, it makes your workload kind of grow exponentially along with the technology because you’re not creating 1 or 2 tactics, you’re creating a multitude of them. Thank God for repurposing, is all I can say.
It’s like I used to say when I, when I worked on Wall Street and I would train new advisors around marketing. I would say everything works a little bit. There is no magic bullet. You know, in the old days, you can have this very pithy tagline that would drive, you know, revenue. We don’t have that opportunity anymore now.
We have everything works a little bit. So to your point, you have to constantly be innovating and expanding and thinking differently on how to approach things and look at what the effects are.
ROY: Yeah, yeah. We also talked about, previously, some of your favorite leadership books, and one of them that you mentioned was about, Strengths Finder. And so if you could talk a little bit about why that’s one of your favorite leadership books, what people might find if they read that and then talk about one of your strengths being a ‘Woo’ because that’s, you know, what is woo?
That sounds romantic, but it’s not.
BURNS: It’s. Yeah. So Strengths Finder, I find to be probably one of the most powerful tools out there in terms of an assessment tool and helping an individual and organization be successful. And the primary reason is because it’s focused on your strengths. So if we go back to this idea that keeps me up at night, which is we’re moving faster and faster and faster, so we’re innovating.
We need to be able to adapt and change all the time. So when you think about that, I need the best version of you. Each person who works for me and the best version it is, they’re working to their strengths. And what Strengths Finder does is it’ll assess and tell you what your top five strengths are, and then the idea being that if I do those things, I’m going to probably operate over 100%, which as the world moves faster and faster.
And if I can have you doing that one, you’re going to be happier because you’re playing to your strengths. Two, you’re you’re going to just be way more effective because those strengths are your native geniuses. The things that you love to do, share and be passionate about them. And if you’re passionate about them, you’re going to naturally be innovating and thinking all the time about how do I make these strengths mine even better as I go forward?
And then that allows you to go and grow from there. And for cadets, it’s incredibly important. I just had this conversation last week in the class, because what you don’t have yet is a lot of experience, but if you know what your strengths are, then you can kind of focus on your experiences and then that you have as a cadet around those strengths and start to build confidence.
But Strength Finder will definitely give you that confidence, because if you know what your strengths are and then you reflect on some of the things at the institute that you did that really were your high points that you think memorably about, you can see where your strengths float in those, and then when you sit down, either with your first commander or you sit down with, a manager, when you get hired or do a job interview, you can tell stories on how those strengths applied for you and how you were able to effectively kind of drive outcomes based on those.
And that’s critical. And, for me, Woo is one of those strengths that I love because it’s about just talking to people you don’t necessarily know, and I just find people interesting. So I love just talking to a lot of different people, and I’m the person who will go to a cocktail party, never eat anything, and just kind of work the room and then, really enjoy myself in, in part of what I talk about in Strengths Finder 2.0 is where you draw your energy.
So for me, I love talking to people I don’t know, and I draw a lot of energy from that. And that’s also important to Strengths Finder how do you keep your energy levels up? Yeah, looking at those strengths. So for me was one of those things that really.
ROY: Well, we certainly all benefit from you having that kind of, character and strength.
We’re talking about the leadership in organization’s class, and that’s where they explore all kinds of leadership theories and then do some studies and some sections actually create, a leader profile about themselves and they take this, StrengthFinders assessment. Would you say that that closely falls in line with or can evolve into a commander’s intent?
BURNS: I think it can, from the sense that for the commander, if they use Strengths Finder and they look at their Strengths Finder, then what they’re doing is this are shaping their commander’s intent. Their mindset is, I’m getting the best version of each person to be the best they can be by looking at their strengths and then also theirs, and kind of bringing them together to kind of achieve those goals and objectives.
And then also, if for some reason there’s a gap in there, because diversity of your strengths is critical for an organization. So you don’t want twenty […] because them are all going to just shake our head and go, oh, that’s great. That’s the best idea I’ve ever heard. You want those diversity of strengths to help you get to a better solution, which is really critical.
So so the idea is if I can create my commander’s intent based on the best versions of each person I have, and then if I have a gap, go find some people to fill that gap or just put in processes in place to make sure I kind of think about those things we don’t necessarily have, because ideally you get who you want, but that’s not reality.
Sometimes you’re gonna have a gap. That’ll help you with the commander’s intent, and then you optimize your organization to be the best they can. They increase morale and, a sense of accomplishment and drive, which is really important.
ROY: I’d like you to talk a little bit more about how this leader profile strength finders relates to your strategy of developing recruitable subordinates and tie it into that 80/20 rule.
BURNS: Yeah. So I’ll take the second part first. So the that part goes to what I call my command philosophy, which is I know that we have a great organization if the people in my organization are being recruited to other parts of the organization. So there’s, there’s two elements to that. One is that I am honored that they’re being recruited because it talks to the culture of the organization we have and not the leader, because if it was just about the leader, you wouldn’t have that.
And, Liz Weisman has a book called multipliers, which talks about the ministers and multipliers, and that’s what a dimension does. It’s all about them. But to be recruited means that the culture of your organization you’re leading is naturally a place where it’s developing future leaders for other parts of the organization. And there’s a great book called What Got Us There Won’t Get You There.
And the whole idea was for Marshall Goldsmith was that you have to evolve to where the success of the organization is beyond where you are. So you want to help everybody with everything all the time, whether it’s your talent, your ideas, everything. So my philosophy has always been, I know that we have a good organization if you get recruited away.
And that’s what I focus on. The other thing to be careful of with young leaders is, and this is where you can see it as a trap sometimes is the leader won’t let their subordinates develop, so they won’t send them to school because they’re just too valuable. I can’t lose them. And that’s a very I-centric mindset because if I’m trying to get the best version of everyone, it’s for the organization, not myself.
So I want to have those people develop, have those opportunities, do those things and move on. Well, I miss them, absolutely. But if I’ve done a good job developing everybody in the transition, someone will step up from that side. But we have to be very careful that we don’t get selfish with very talented people. We want to have them keep growing.
So with the the Pareto principle, which is 20% of what you do is responsible for 80% of your success. That’s really the heart of what coaching is about. And figuring out, okay, what am I really good at? And then doing more of that. So what I coach people, I try to identify what are those key things that you’re good at and then have you do more of them.
And that’s how I’m able to have people be more successful. And when you go into the organizational aspects of it, it’s figuring out, okay, what are we good at? And then what are the gaps we might have that we need to go from good to great on and kind of executing to those within that 20% and then staying focused on it, which is critical from that side.
But it’s a powerful, very powerful tool that I use with very successful people, because we always assume if you’re really successful, you know, you must be working great. And I’ll have them just write down every hour what they do. And I’ve always had to back. Yeah, I always had them come back. They’re like, I God, I can’t believe how much time I wasted.
And that’s one side of it. The other side of it is think about how comfortable it is to know that these are the things that are most important. So if I come into my day and know these five things are the things I need to accomplish every day, and everything else is interesting, but it’s only going to be 20% more of the success. It just makes you more effective as an individual and then as a leader as well as a leader. If I know the 20% things I need to focus on that allows me to do that. And I also do it for work life balance with families in the military as well as other ones. Because if you know that 20% for your relationships or other things that allows you to get things done, and focus very quickly.
And if you have to leave or whatever, you know, you get the most important things done.
ROY: So what kind of, assessment tools, if any, do you use to identify the gaps? Would you say?
BURNS: So what I do is I do a strategic assessment of the organization, usually over the first 45 days. I interview, the leaders and then also the people who work, in various aspects of the business. So it’s not just the leaders because they’ll kind of give you the company line. I want to talk to everybody. I’ll also look at industry trends and say, okay, where’s this industry going?
So, like in my previous job, it was all about the client experience. for a lot of reasons, regulatory, obviously the client and some others. So looking at that and then looking at kind of where we’re at, doing your classic SWOT analysis is important because you need to understand those things. And a lot of a lot of industries are not looking at the macro trends, you know, because you’re going to have peaks and troughs, you’re going to have regulatory things come in.
You’re going to have economic cycles. All those things matter. When I kind of look at things, to figure out where we need to go and then getting that unified purpose, which is that trust and communications we talked about where we all are on the same line with that commander’s intent, that vision then allows us to execute and stay focused.
And the key thing is a leader is not to change the message. You know, success is defined by your people knowing exactly what they need to do every day. And if you keep changing the message, then they don’t know what to do. But if you stay focused, they will execute a very high level and then innovate around whatever that vision is.
ROY: So, one of my top leadership books is one by a lady named Denise Lee Yohn, and it’s called Brand Fusion. Have you heard of her?
BURNS: I’ve heard of it. Yeah.
ROY: Yeah. And she talks about operationalizing your brand. And so when you talk about taking your, you know, using your vision, leveraging that so that everybody knows, you know, not to change the message. What is our message? I, I like her work and how she, how she builds that into the operations. yeah.
You’re going to be giving the keynote speech at the Superintendents Annual Leadership Dinner. And while I don’t want to cannibalize your content for that, what topic will you be will you be talking about?
BURNS: So I’m going to talk a lot about how VMI is a crucible for leadership, innovation and adaptation. And the idea being that, you know, what keeps me up at night when I think about the world is it’s innovating faster and faster.
So we think about the technology all the time and go, wow, this is amazing. You know, I’ve got an Apple Watch, I’ve got this, I’ve got that.
Well, the thing is, you need leaders who can adapt to those changes and make sure they get integrated in. So a simple one is if we go back to COVID you know, you had Zoom, then you have Microsoft Teams. And a lot of people didn’t learn the technology because it just kept coming. And a leader needs to make sure they inspire their people to do that.
And what’s critical in today’s world is that we have to help those leaders become that type of leader. Because when I was going through, my initial leadership training, you had time to make decisions. and the problem is, your brain is designed to survive, not thrive. And that’s the hard part about today’s leaders versus when I started is I could sit on a decision for a period of time and then make it literally months later and not have any consequences be, against me.
Whereas today leaders have to be much more dynamic and leaning in, because, technology’s moving faster, so they need to make sure their subordinates have it. You know, it is, a nightmare scenario for me is a technology gets rolled out to, to a unit, a military unit. And they’re so busy and they’re so comfortable in the technology.
They have. The leader doesn’t create a change in the status quo and say, no, we need to learn this new technology. And then it leads to them having a setback on the battlefield. And it’s the same in the corporate world, because in the corporate world, you have to constantly be evolving. And if you miss, then that means you’re going to have to make a bet in the future because you didn’t come up with 2.0, now you’re going to bet on 3.0.
And that’s a risky challenge. So leaders today need to be constantly leaning forward. And there is no, you know, ten year success of a product anymore. It’s literally a couple of years. And then you better come up with a new version. So, you know, I joke a lot about the post-it note because that was a great thing, right?
We still use it. but you can see tablets and other things come in in younger generations. Don’t use those things. But these cycles change. And there was a great example last week, 23 and me, was this, you know, DNA thing that was really hot was $6 million company, and now it’s zero because it didn’t figure out what is next.
That comes after that. and that’s the reality we live in. So we need leaders who can do that. And VMI is a place where you have that laboratory to give them the the opportunity to constantly innovate and keep changing and thinking and practicing while they’re at this institute and then also go out into the civilian world or in the military and be that successful leader, because they know that they have to keep changing and innovating and also yet have the principles that VMI stands for.
ROY: Is there such a thing as future-proofing, or is there just, you know, a particular mindset that, that helps one to keep evolving?
BURNS: That’s a great question. and I do a lot of wargaming and and simulations, as in my other role as a senior advisor, for the Regal Warfare Center. And part of what we talked about is the elasticity of the mind. So just thinking about different opportunities and opens you up to thinking about them. Whereas if you don’t do that, you don’t have that elasticity of thinking.
So, you know, Bill Gates, who is Secretary of Defense, you know, once said that you know, futurists have never been right. But I don’t think it’s so much about them being right. It’s it’s about creating a mindset of thinking about constant change and being aware of that. And as you move up, you know, as a strategic leader, my role was to think out 3 to 5 years on where the organization needed to be. And as a tactical leader, it’s, you know, weeks out, because just the nature of tactical versus strategic.
But also, the compression of that is coming to where now, I even say at the strategic level, it’s like 18 months because everything’s moving faster, faster. So for those leaders, that’s hard. That’s really hard. And, you know, I talk about Ukraine with the cadets and the special operations task force commanders, which are colonels and special forces.
I’ve talked to three of them or four of them at this point, and they all say the war changes every 60 days. So as a leader is thinking about that is, you know, is a challenge. So the it’s it’s one of those things we just have to train people to be more and more, agile and leaning in on.
ROY: And is there a difference or can you describe the difference between having an agile mindset, maybe a resilient mindset and change management?
BURNS: So agile is is really about getting it out and executing it and developing and innovating. So kind of going back to Strengths Finder, I’m a learner and an input. So that’s what I do. I look I develop that plan, I get that plan out there. But then I’m constantly changing it because I wasn’t looking for the perfect plan to come out.
It’s more of that kind of agile concept of it’s 60%, but the field is going to tell me what I need to do to to kind of upskill it from there.
So a resilient mindset to me is about the ability to handle the pressure of changing all the time and then also being comfortable in, in taking those risks, which is really about you being resilient and realizing, okay, everything’s moving faster and faster, but it’s also about leaders looking and saying, and I always said, this is part of my leadership philosophy.
We’re moving fast, so we’re going to have an error rate and a key with that error rate is that we learn from it. But for us to be resilient, I can’t put pressure on my team to where they feel like, oh gosh, we’re a zero defect organization. Because when that happens, then nothing happens. And that’s unfortunately what we have in the past in the military, we have this kind of zero defect mentality, which led to kind of more of a stalled that organization and development.
And then change management is really about, again, thinking about where do we need to go, what do we need to be thinking about to get the best versions of our folks and realizing it’s not static. They are constantly evolving. The technology around them is evolving. That will make them better. And then the the trends and industry are evolving.
So you have to constantly have this change management mindset of always going from good to great and not thinking, okay, we’re good, because if you think you’ve made it and you’re maintaining the status quo, the reality is you’re going backwards. You’re just not seeing it because it’s very slow and eventually you’re you’re going to get in trouble and you’ll see that it might be too late for you to recover.
ROY: Can we train for resilience?
BURNS: We can, because it’s it’s one of those things that’s actually kind of fascinating. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on this where it’s it’s kind of like parachute jumping, you know, the first time you jump out of a really scared house. Okay.
And then the more you do it, the more comfortable you get. So we can train various resilience scenarios and then also it’s key for the leader to, to basically develop their folks and not look at something is oh my gosh, I can’t believe you did that. That’s such a big mistake. And put pressure on them instead of looking it as a learning opportunity to develop the organization.
And resilience is critical, because for us to be able to move forward in the future, we are going to make more and more mistakes because we’re moving faster and faster. So it’s the ability to to snap back immediately and get back into the game. And that’s where that resiliency is really going to come into play.
ROY: It’s interesting that resilience requires a certain error rate. How do you determine what success looks like, how do you determine what is a successful error rate?
BURNS: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think it’s one that we are coming to grips with and realizing that failure leads to success. So there is a person I used to play golf with who is a four-star general who moved up in, actually was, in a pretty senior position, and we would talk about failing faster.
And the idea of failing faster is that the faster you fail, the faster you get to that next breakthrough in innovation. And that’s kind of how I look at errors, because if you’re on the cutting edge and you’re pushing forward, you’re going to have those errors and then those errors can lead to learning opportunities for you then to to advance from.
So the idea being that if I don’t have errors and I’m probably not taking enough of a risk to grow the organization to the next level, and that’s critical. And it’s the same. I always talk about friction in organization, and if you don’t have friction, your organization is a growing. And it’s not that you don’t want everybody like each other, but it’s the idea that organizationally we’re leaning in and you don’t make it personal, but you just talk about how do we challenge the status quo, where should we be going next to kind of create that friction?
And I look at errors that same way. We need to have those errors to be able to be successful. And I’ve had the opportunity a couple times to talk to biographers, and that’s one of the things they look at in developing leaders. You know, you have to have mistakes to learn from, to grow as a leader in the ones biographers are always worried about are the ones who’ve had no mistakes, who think they’re perfect.
Because that is a scary idea as well, because then you’re you have blind spots. You don’t realize, so how having errors, how you treat those errors and how you grow from them are critical for you and your organization.
ROY: So, I like that was another discussion we had.
As a team were actually in the season right now, we’re in February, of looking at what will be our leadership theme for next year, and then what will we delve into for our leadership conference. And so we talked about, you know, failure is a fairly big buzzword in industry and business.
It’s been out there for several years now. And we were talking about, you know, maybe we don’t call it failure, but we call it learning mechanisms, right? I mean, that’s really what you’re talking about. And I remember in college we talked about experimentation being a hallmark of intelligence. You know, that if you see a child trying to learn how to walk, it’s experimenting with its balance to learn how to walk, how to talk, so that was just a just a side note of conversation we were having.
BURNS: Yeah, it’s a great point because, as I build plans for organizations to that Pareto principle, we’re making a hypothetical experiment with a line of effort, and we put metrics both qualitative and quantitative against it. But I always tell people, don’t get wed to your plan. If the metrics are showing that your idea, what you thought was a 20% thing that would lead to 80% of your success isn’t working, then change the plan.
It’s not a failure. The metrics allowed you to say, hey, this isn’t working, let’s try something else. So you have to have that experimentation mindset as opposed to I have the best idea ever. And then you just hold that forever. And at least the failure instead of using it as an opportunity to change.
ROY: Yeah, yeah. It reminds me of somebody sent me the book Who Moved the Cheese or Who Moved My Cheese?
BURNS: That’s a good one.
ROY: So we’re about out of time, and, I think we’ve got we’ve gone over some really great, content this conversations with people who operate at your level are just so fascinating to me, because the episodes and the discussions we have are just chock full of meaty information and takeaways. Do you have any final words? You again, you’ve been here for a while.
You’ve kind of observed our leadership, methods and the results, having conversations with cadets. Any final thoughts or insights on the experience you’ve had?
BURNS: Yeah, I would say one, it’s it’s been incredibly humbling for me. And I tell the cadets all the time, I joined back in 1983 as an E-1 and every one of them, which is striking, is I ask, now were born around 2000. And so they they were born in a time of conflict after 9-11. And they’ve grown up in elementary school and middle school and high school.
And it’s still made a decision to serve their country, our country, either in the military or in other agencies or as a leader. And have come to VMI. So that’s incredibly humbling to me because when I joined in 83, as I mentioned, I wanted to serve my country. It also gave me an opportunity to get my college paid for.
And I was very sober in the reality of, I have to go, I have to go to war, I will, yeah, but they joined during a time of war. And, I always tell them, you know, this is as much as I’ve done an accomplished in the military, I don’t know if I would have made that decision because I haven’t been put in that space.
But that’s a much bigger decision than Chris Burns saying, okay, I’m going to join for six months, six years and serve in the National Guard. So I’m very proud of them and humbled by their commitment to serve and then their ability to be on the cutting edge of leadership innovation as the world gets faster and faster in figuring out how to do that, to me is incredibly exciting.
You know, as I said, you know, and help and advise and do all these things there at that tactical level, having to kind of make these changes faster and faster. So, that is exciting to me to watch them as they learn, as they develop. And just like with Officer Candidate School, my greatest joy will be when I run to, run into them at, base someplace and they’re a captain or a major, and they tell me about how what they learned at VMI helped them to be very successful as a leader in the future, whether it’s in the corporation or in the military. So that’s to me. But it’s really exciting about where they’re going and the future they have.
ROY: Well, I certainly hope you have plenty of those opportunities, and I hope that VMI, continues to stay in touch with you and, and leverage your insights and expertise. I know I certainly will. and so I’ve really enjoyed our time today. I could definitely go on for another couple of hours, but we’re not the Joe Rogan Show.
But I thank you so much for your time and for all that you’re contributing to, examining what we do here at VMI and your insights and conversations you’ve been having.
BURNS: And and thank you to Catherine and the entire team at the Center for Leadership and Ethics. It’s been an honor. And and I love the the workshops. You guys do amazing job which is how a and everybody coming to one of your, workshops. So it was fantastic. So thank you. Thank you very much.
ROY: All right. Thank you very much. And we’ll talk to you soon.
We’ll use his memoir, Fire in My Eyes, as a guide to explore what inspired him to write a memoir and the process of the writing. Plus some leadership lessons that go beyond the pages of a book. Whether you’re a student leader, athlete, or just curious about leadership, this conversation will inspire and motivate you. So grab your headphones, lean in, and join us for this enlightening exploration of leadership with Brad Snyder.
Let’s dive in.
Welcome, Brad Snyder. Thank you so much for being a guest on today’s episode of the VMI Leader Journey.
BRAD SNYDER: It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
ROY: I have a lot of notes here, and as we just reviewed, there are a lot of things I’d like to get into. First of all, how has your visit been so far? How have you been here for the whole two hours?
SNYDER: It’s been spectacular. It’s always a special treat to be able to visit somewhere that has such, deep and intertwined history with our great country, as VMI does. And I’ve, you know, always had a stout appreciation for this institution but never had the opportunity to come and visit the campus. So I’m really excited to be here now.
ROY: Excellent. So well, again, we’re just super excited to have you here tonight. I want to get into first, the book that you wrote, which is titled Fire in My Eyes. I have read it cover to cover. and you co-wrote that book with Tom Sileo. I will just tell our audience that it’s an excellent read.
I highly recommend reading it. just for the human interest stories. But then we’ll talk a little bit later in the podcast about some of the leadership lessons to gain from, reading the story. So, first of all, I’ll also say that part of our Courageous Leadership speaker series that what we are also doing is giving away a copy of the book with each talk.
My overall impression is, having read the book is I was very impressed with the authentic voice and several instances you talk about, failures and struggles, which I think will be an inspiration for the cadets. it was certainly inspirational for me, even so, a couple of questions about that. Number one, in your own words, why write a memoir?
SNYDER: The book covers aspects of my childhood up to the decision to go to the Naval Academy, my experiences at the Naval Academy, and then, my military experience. But then most of the quote-unquote story revolves around the year between my injury in September of 2011 and then my, ability to go to the Paralympics a year later so that that year is a real consequential part of my entire life and kind of the focus of the book.
Shortly after I competed in London, that story kind of went out there, and I got a lot of invitations to come and speak at various places. The Naval Academy, being one of the Naval Academy Leadership Conference, is one of the first places I spoke. And at that point, I didn’t really fancy myself a speaker. I didn’t really know what to put into a speech, and I didn’t really know what to say.
And I sort of would get up on stage and bumble through a bio of myself. Hi, am this guy. I did these things and here’s my story. What what questions do you have? and for whatever reason, that resonated with people. People really liked that. I was just kind of sharing my perspective on this unique set of experiences.
I got better and better at sharing the story, got more and more invitations over a span of a few years, and frequently the suggestion would come up like one of the incredible story. You know, you’re this incredible person and you should really write this into a book. And then I would go and do more speaking and they would say the same thing, and they would introduce me as things like American Hero and, you know, resilience figure and this and that.
The other thing, and, the way I was introduced did not feel like me, didn’t feel like who I am, who I aspire to be. Certainly, I know we all aspire to be heroic in some sense, but for someone to actually say that in my introduction was very unnerving and especially reflecting on my past. I haven’t always been hitting homeruns, you know, like I haven’t always been winning gold medals.
I have a whole bunch of things that I’ve screwed up along the way. And I thought, you know what? For anybody who’s calling me a hero, maybe they don’t know the whole story. Maybe they know all the good stuff. Maybe they don’t know the bad stuff, too. And for someone to call me a hero, I want you to know the whole story.
And if you read the whole story and you still want to call me a hero afterward, then great. But I wanted it all to be out there, and there’s a lot I can’t share about that journey into blindness. And beyond that, I couldn’t get out in a 45 minute keynote, and so I agreed. I thought, yeah, writing a book would be a good idea.
I spent a number of years trying to write the book. I had really bad insomnia after my injury, so when I couldn’t sleep at night, I would just stay up all night writing chapters about this chapter’s about that and trying to sell the pitch to a couple. Publishers got told, ‘thank you for your service, but no,’ a bunch of times it turns out that Tom Sillitoe is, a childhood friend of my cousin.
So I, we actually had a familial connection. He had just written another outstanding book called Brothers Forever, which is about two Naval Academy grads who are now buried in Arlington together. I highly recommend that book. but there was a very natural partnership there. I had actually already had a near complete manuscript, but at least so far as I could see, when I when I started working with Tom, I sent him the manuscript and he promptly deleted probably about half of it, which was a blow to my ego, but maybe recognize that I really didn’t know how to intentionally put an arc together.
I had written a bunch of chapters about stuff that nobody would really care about. And then when I read back with Tom and edited, there was a lot of power in sort of the Mark Twain quote. If if I had more time, I would have written a shorter note, and by editing it down, I think it ended up being a lot better than it was.
ROY: Yeah, yeah, it’s similar to, Oprah Winfrey likes to say reading is rereading. Yes. And certainly writing is editing.
SNYDER: That’s correct.
ROY: I have definitely experienced that. So why might someone want to read this book? Let’s give you your best plug for reading this book.
SNYDER: I think, and I, I don’t know, I won’t presume to be the reader, but I can say what I was trying to achieve with the book was sort of an explanation for my mom. my mom didn’t have a ton of background in the military. I don’t think she was ever fully aware of the nature of what I was doing in the military.
Both because of her lack of connection with the military, but also, because I intentionally withheld information, I guess I, you know, I didn’t really want my mom to worry about where I was going or what I was doing. Right. And I knew what I was doing was risky. And so I would sort of knew from my as it to my mom.
And there’s a I don’t know if it’s in the book or not, but I, my mom was really mad at me in the hospital. Her because people would visit me and some books. Somebody came to ask me about particular aspects of what was going on in Afghanistan. And of course, I was in the hospital and I was after injury and I was all doped up.
So I was very honest. And afterward, my mom kind of growled at me. I thought you were passing out candy to children, which is what I would frequently tell her on the phone and say, what do you do every day? Oh, well, we’re, you know, we’re out in the villages, and I give candy to children, you know, hearts and minds and that sort of thing.
And she seemed to willingly accept that at the moment. But I think, after the fact, came to recognize that what I was doing was very different than what I had shared with her. so, you know, kind of keeping my mom is the target audience in mind. My mom’s not going to get a lot of military jargon. She’s not really well versed in, are interested in the, like, the grander strategy of it all or counterinsurgency or international relations.
I think what my mom wanted to understand was what was my experience, what was was I afraid, what was I trying to do? What were all my friendships like? Was it difficult to be away from family? was I scared when I got hurt, that sort of stuff. So I, I, I, I was also an avid reader at the time, as we all are probably of military memoirs.
I’d read McChrystal’s book and Petraeus’ book. And, what the what I thought in all of those military memoirs. One, they’re all too long BS. They’re all laced in jargon. They’re all.
ROY: We are very.
SNYDER: Intentional about trying to situate themselves in this really big history. What I felt like was missing in the sort of the war memoir, genre was just like, just for me, like a my experience is just some yokel from Florida who thought it was a good idea to serve my country. I went and did this kind of crazy set of things.
I wasn’t trying to explain it all. I wasn’t trying to have a comment on whether we should have been there or shouldn’t have been. There was a good was it bad? Was it whatever, you know, was and this was my experience with it and it shaped who I am. And I think you should know about it. And that’s kind of what I was trying to achieve.
ROY: I would say you definitely accomplished that task. and certainly, I think it does give a fresh perspective in that, military genre, space. And and you didn’t have to explain your political reasons for whatever decisions happened with our military. So, so, so that is I think that did free you up to share a more relatable, authentic story.
Talk about the process a little bit. So you did mention and touch on that a little bit that you had written this fairly long memoir that 50% just got slashed. and I would say that, Tom Sileo’s work on this did help. What I noticed was the reuse and repurposing of certain phrases that did help connect stories and chapters together.
Yes. What else can you talk about in terms of the process of writing the book?
SNYDER: Yeah, I think from my perspective, my approach was like a scrapbook. I could think of an image in my mind and write the context of the photo. And that was if you flip through a set of photos of my background, that would sort of be how the chapters were arranged. And this memory was a really cool memory and a really cool story.
Let me tell you about it. And this is a really important part of the story. But it was very fragmented. Not Tom did a really, really good job of adding a lot of structure, as you alluded to, binning different thoughts and photographs into cohesive chapters that all matched a general arc from being a child in the Witchy-Waky Springs all the way up to being injured and then to the Paralympics, he added a lot of flow, and it made it a lot easier for the reader than what it would have looked like if they even had read the manuscript I submitted to Tom, which was again, like a scrapbook.
The process after that, I will say, as, as prideful as I was in the manuscript that I sent to Tom, there were big chunks missing, and it was because it was all the hard stuff to write. For example, everything in the hospital for me was hard to write on because it’s a memory I don’t necessarily like going back into.
I was really doped up. I was first newly blind. everything was very just massive in that set of memories. And it was hard to go back into that space and as you said, like be authentic about it. I could have said, you know, here’s the facts and figures. Here’s what happened. I was in the hospital between September the 11th and whatever else, but I actually wanted to go back into that space and understand what was it like with my brother.
What was it like with my mother? What was my head space? What was I afraid of? What was I excited about? What was I? What were my true honest feelings? and, you know, you have to go back into that, but you had to be in that memory and then describe it. It was just a really hard thing to do.
But I would say it was extremely cathartic for me to go back into the blast and go into that memory and, and search around in there and understand what happened to me. what was my perspective and what was the perspective of my friends who are on the battlefield, what it must have been like for them, right, to hear the blast and to run over to me and see me all messed up and be worried about that? Yeah.
To think of my mom getting a call at 530 in the morning to think of my sister having to fly to the hospital and, you know, go to the, the airfield at, Langley Air Force Base and know that I’m on there but not be able to talk to me. And these are all, like, really heavy memories that I had to go back into to write about.
ROY: And did you just write those stories or did you have, like, an interview, like a moderated interview with Tom Sileo or with a phone conversations?
SNYDER: I think the depth of my thinking is always best when I can sit and write it right. So, I wanted to go into this space. I wanted to write what I thought was important, and then I would submit it to Tom, and then Tom would come back in a lot of cases with most of the chapters. It was an editing, like here, I screen through this, I fix your typos.
I corrected a couple sentences. I added some detail where you needed it. There were especially with big chapters like the Blast, or hospital chapters. There was more of a where are you going with this section? And tap in advance was like an idea that came out of talking about the rehab process and me sort of sharing with him this idea of these concentric circles and then I don’t know who it was, said it, but it was in conversation that it dawned on us like, oh, you know, there’s this really neat connection between the metal detector and the cane and this idea of clearing for each footstep.
You know, it’s just like life, you know, you got to, like, know what you’re where you’re at before you can take a leap somewhere else. And so you have to be comfortable and then you have to take a risk and you have to be comfortable. You have to take a risk. And that cycle repeats over and over and over again.
Oh, what a cool idea to rope that into a broader concept. you know, a leadership lesson that follows on. So I think they all started with, you know, I am the subject matter expert in those memories, right? I have they’re my memories. Right. So I wanted to go back into those memories, pull out what I thought was important.
And then Tom did a really, really good job of pushing, nudging, and shaping all of those ideas into being situated within that broader arc.
ROY: Yeah, it sounds like he was trying to help you be very purposeful. Yeah, in what you were trying to accomplish and keeping it your story exactly at the same time, so excellent job there. I couldn’t help but wonder as I read the hospital scenes, particularly. You talked about your mom’s voice being the first thing that kind of, that you felt you could trust in this bizarre purgatory. And that that helped you come out of this coma state that that they had put you in. A lot of times you referenced those instances where you were not conscious with the term dreamscapes. can you talk a little bit about that?
SNYDER: Yeah, yeah, they were very strange. my experience throughout that time was, though, you took your normal perspective and your normal perception of time and memory, and you folded all up and you tied it in knots. Time moved at different speeds. My memory was all odd. and, for that first week especially, I didn’t always recognize that I wasn’t seeing with my eyes things would appear in my mind, that were generated by real stimulus.
So, sounds I was hearing with my ears in the environment around me would reshape themselves into different realities in my head. and look in my keynote. I’ll make this joke later. I kind of as a joke. I say, Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, like, everything looked like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, which is one of many dreamscapes that I often found myself in some.
Sometimes my dreams would have me in. Like these really strange, like, you know, if you were able to go to a shipyard and you’re in all those CONEX boxes that are being loaded off of the ships, I felt like I was at one point, I thought I was trapped in this everlasting yard of shipping containers. Right. that’s one dreamscape.
Other dreamscapes were like walking around in the desert. at one point I thought that I was in a tent, like a a green army tent in the desert with no walls in it. And I kept thinking, I. You would have thought that Walter Reed would have had walls, you know, like. And so I say that to say that for me, these realities, these alternative realities were very, very, very, very real to me.
Yeah. And they were flexing and something I didn’t understand. And that’s why I called them dreamscapes. It’s important to know that, that those were my reality for a while. And that’s why it was so disorienting. Why is this so normal for everybody else? You hear a doctor and a nurse come in and they’re talking to each other as though it’s completely normal to be in this derelict tent in the middle of the Desert Rise shipping container area.
And I just didn’t get that. but I do remember early on hearing voices, and specifically my mom and my mom’s a long, long. You should know about my mom. My mom’s a 38 year neonatal nurse, so I thought, my mom knows the hospital, and she’ll know what’s normal and she’ll know what’s abnormal. And she’s going to advocate for me and to hear her voice and for her to be calm ish and to say, hey, we’re here and this is okay.
And we’ve talked to the doctor and you, this is what’s going on. That was something I could trust in psych. Okay, if my mom’s okay with this weird thing, then it’s okay, right? And as the week went on, I came to, like, kind of understand that these are dreams. And even though I sometimes I would know that I was dreaming and I would be afraid of the dream and be stuck in the dream.
But I knew, you know, after being in the hospital for a couple days or every night, my mom would leave and go to her hotel or whatever, and then she would come back in the morning, and sometimes the nights were the worst. I would have the worst nightmares at night, and I would know I’m stuck in my nightmare and I know I just have to wait.
I just have to wait for mom to come back in the morning and the nightmare will go away. And that’s how it worked. Like in the morning, my mom would bring some breakfast and she would show up. And there was like this immense amount of relief, like the nightmare’s over and my mom’s here, and I’m okay.
ROY: You could relax.
SNYDER: Exactly. And just day in, day out, that’s how it went for a period of a couple weeks.
ROY: So I wonder if there’s something that, practitioners can learn about patient care through you telling that story. Yeah. I know that they encourage family members to come in, although not to overtired patient, but just interesting that having those voices and then whose voice maybe is the one that the person can connect to to come out of their, dreamscape, if you will.
SNYDER: So actually, for sure. But I will tell you, the practitioners at Walter Reed were really good at that. They were really good at understanding the amount of stimulus I could take. And they understood that my family was a very comforting presence for me. But they were also very mindful of like, my mom’s going through hell, too. She’s watching me really hurt and really messed up and navigating massive uncertainty.
She’s afraid to if she needs to go to sleep. So the the practitioners at Walter Reed were good about, hey, we’ve got this. Go take a couple hours, get some sleep, come back breakfast thing in the morning. So they navigated all that really well. They did other things too. I was telling them like, don’t give me any more sleep meds.
That’s freaking me out. They’re like, okay, we’re going to we’re going to change the meds. We’re going to do this. They were very responsive to my needs. One nurse gave me a talking watch, and when I, when I told them about the night, like being stuck in my dreams at night and how that really wakes me up, they said, here, listen, this is your watch.
When you wake up, always hit your watch, and then it’ll tell you what time it is. And now auditory reality on time. so, so long as I knew time was clicking by, I wasn’t stuck in the nightmare. I was still grounded to reality even if someone wasn’t there. And that was actually really insightful. And that’s exactly what I started doing.
Every time I woke up, I would look and see at the time. Now, sometimes it felt like I would click it a couple times and only a few seconds will have gone okay. And it was freaking me out that way. But at least it was always going by. So I always knew I’m not stuck and mourning is coming and people are coming back and it allowed me to navigate that kind of terror for a little bit when I also had, like my favorite nurse at night was this fellow named John, who was a combat medic.
He said he was a combat medic in Afghanistan. He he knew he knew what I was going through. He knew the battlespace. He had friends. We had similar friends. he was just like a very like it was very easy to trust him. And he was able to kind of establish that rapport through our common experience. And so I would always kind of feel comfortable when John was around to.
ROY: Go look, all right, well, I’d like to transition over into some of the leadership lessons as we close out our discussion, because there’s getting time for you to move on to other things. So I do want to go on to some of the leadership lessons that I took away from the book. We’ve already mentioned. Tap in advance. Yeah.
Can you like in a couple sentences, talk about tap in advance and give it some context for a cadet audience?
SNYDER: Sure. Tap in advance. I think starting at the very abstract level is all about, if you, no matter what you want to do, whether it’s like, achieving a growth mindset, having goals, competing for a championship, getting a PhD, getting through your undergraduate experience at VMI, you can’t do it all at once. You have to do it in these very small, incremental steps. And it involves, becoming comfortable with where you are.
But knowing that you need to take little, tiny risks constantly to push your boundaries and become more capable, more wise, more well read more. You know, physically fit whatever else that’s happened. Advanced metaphor comes from blindness, where when you’re using a blind cane, what you’re doing is you’re clearing a spot for the one step in front of you.
That’s it. you’re safe where you are. You’re standing there completely fine. But I’m going to use the cane to clear one space in front of me. And then I take one step, and then I clear the space and take another step. So no matter how hard things get, how complex they get, how difficult and challenging and scary and adverse and whatever else, all you have to do is take one step and you just tap and advance.
Tap and advance.
ROY: That’s excellent. another, phrase in the book, you talked about the Delta. Yeah. So I think that it’s a nice segway from tap in advance. and it reminds me that the future is we might have plans, but it’s kind of unknowable. So I call it like a fog. Yes. You really don’t know. You are kind of navigating your life as best you can.
One step at a time. Yeah, but then there’s the experiences that we have, and in your book, you you coined the phrase the delta. Yeah. Talk a moment about that.
SNYDER: Is a fun kind of process. Point about the delta. in my original sort of manuscript, I go off on all of these offshoots all the time. So coming from the Naval Academy, I’m all about these leadership vignettes and the lesson learned all the time. Right. I think Tom encouraged me to have more patience, tell the story first, and then tell the lesson learned.
So he took out a lot of the little vignettes that I had along the way in the book, and then in the epilogue told me, go out. Well, write whatever you think is the broader lesson learned. And I think throughout the writing of the book, and actually in a, in an article that’s not part of the book, with the Players Tribune, this idea of the Delta came out when I was talking about some of my experiences when I was most frustrated being blind, and how I realized that the frustration was not with the thing itself.
I think it was either, you know, trying to wash dishes and breaking some of the glasses or, when my dog would come back to me in the dog park. gizzy, God rest her soul, she’s passed away a handful of years ago. But, I realized that for me to sort of mitigate these moments of frustration, I had to realize that they weren’t coming from washing the dishes or the dog and the dog.
Right. They were coming from an expectation in my mind that things should remain as they are. I should be able to wash dishes a certain way because I used to be able to do these things before this dog should come back to me, because she’s supposed to help me and I can’t get out of here without her help.
So it’s an expectation thing. I had to learn that things aren’t. They’re not always going to be the way that they are that you think they’re supposed to be. And for me to become less frustrated, for me to be at peace with my current reality, I need to let go of these tethers, both my past, who I used to be and my future, who I want to be.
And I have to accept who I am and know that context always changes. I’m always changing. I’m never going to be the same. I’m not 24 anymore. I’m different now than I was when I walked in here 15 minutes ago. We’re always making these small, incremental changes, and by holding on to past versions of ourselves or inappropriately bounding us to a future versions of ourselves, we can’t possibly be who we are.
And sometimes that, prevents us from being at peace, being happy, finding joy and delight in all of the like miracles that exist all around us. As a blind person, I’m extremely fortunate to still be alive. I talked about Tyler a lot in the book. My buddy who didn’t come back right. and for me to get frustrated over washing the dishes ignores the miracle that I’m still alive.
It’s a dishonor to my buddy Tyler, who died so that I might still be here. And so for me to really be at peace with who I am and to let go of this idea that, you know, I should be this kind of man. I’m not that man. I’m a blind guy and I do blind guy things, and I have a certain set of capabilities that I need to get that I need to accept and go back to the top in advancement of war.
If I want to expand my capabilities, I just have to work at. I have put in that work. I had to get comfortable with who I am and take a risk and move on. And that’s what the Delta is all about.
ROY: Yeah, I think that is such a powerful and exceptional lesson for everyone to learn, but especially young adults. because I think that we go into even being a, student here at the Institute, we have a certain expectation. Not everybody graduates from this place. It may not be a good fit or we made mistakes along the way.
We got behind and overwhelmed. And so I think it’s important for cadets to understand and have that perspective of tap in advance. And when it’s just not within the realm of possibility to say, that’s okay, I can be something new and different. Yeah. I love that you talk about that. That’s going to bring about personal peace and joy.
I like that you talk about, the gratitude and how we can reframe another phrase that ties into it is the flipping your perspective to to find gratitude and to accept and embrace the moment that you’re in yet, but that you can still move forward. we call around here, we eating the whale? Yeah, exactly. Same idea. Eat a whale one bite at a time.
SNYDER: That’s exactly right.
ROY: Just do the next thing. Yep. That’s in your control.
SNYDER: Yeah. One other aspect of the Delta. I’d like to kind of like bespoke for this audience. The cadets at VMI. I say this to midshipmen all the time, and I remember this as a midshipman myself. How I was just desperate. I couldn’t wait to go and, like, prove myself, couldn’t wait to go and do my military training and go on deployment and do my job.
And I felt like one of these days I’m going to feel like a real boy. I’m going to feel like I’ve made it. And my advice is like, you never actually make it. You’re always striving for the next thing. So my advice is, don’t be in such a rush. Going back to that delta, if you’re always thinking about where you’re going, you lose sight on where you are.
And I think it’s really important you’re never going to be a cadet again at VMI once you graduate. Just be here, enjoy this experience, make the most of it. Learn everything you can from your classes. Make the most of the relationships you have while you’re here, and then go on and go into the infantry or go to the fleet and be a great, you know, junior officer, and then be a great senior officer and then be a great, you know, civil servant and whatever else you’re going to do after the military.
But you can’t do all of that at once. And don’t be in a massive hurry to live your whole career all at once. Just be where you are and be good at it.
ROY: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your time, Brad. This has been excellent discussion. I think, our cadet audience will certainly enjoy, what you’ve had to share.
SNYDER: Thank you so much for having me.
ROY: This has been a strategic outreach program of the VMI center for Leadership and Ethics. We educate, engage, and inspire the leadership journey of our VMI community and the nation. Don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast to follow along as we release new episodes. Follow the VMI Center for Leadership and Ethics on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. To learn more about our programs and events, visit our website at VMI dot EDU forward-slash c l e. Thanks for tuning in.