PASS IT FORWARD.
What do you wish you knew before you deployed?
#WhatIWishIKnewDeployment
Deployment can change the way you think, feel, sleep, react, connect, and experience the world. Too often, those changes are laughed off, minimized, or never explained.
#WhatIWishIKnewDeployment brings those experiences into the open so people can understand the human stress response, recognize what may be happening inside of them, and know they are not the only one experiencing it, and way to be supported.
DEPLOYED? Share what you wish you knew
DEPLOYING? Learn from those who went before you
Your story could be exactly what someone needs to hear.
Get your unit involved
HOW TO PARTICIPATE
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Create a 60-second to 3-minute reel OR a carousel
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Get the carousel template below
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Add your name or caption to the front slide
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Share a lesson, experience, or advice you wish you had known earlier.
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Tag @hannahlifestrategycoach
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Use #WhatIWishIKnewDeployment
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Tag someone whose experience the next generation should hear.
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Post!
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You can share more than once!
WHAT TO TALK ABOUT
These are just examples - the goal is to share what you know will help the next generation of warfighters through the stress responses that come with being deployed.
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What do you wish someone had explained before/after a deployment?
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Or what something someone did tell you that helped?
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What surprised you most about your stress response during or after deployment?
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What changed in your thoughts, emotions, body, sleep, relationships, or sense of safety?
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What do you understand now about operational stress, moral injury, identity, and/or trauma?
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What you you tell someone deploying today?
HELP THIS GENERATION KNOW WHAT WE DIDN'T
We can do a better job preparing people for the human response to extraordinary pressure. Deployment is one place to start. Not war stories. Not deployment highlights. The things happening inside you that you wish someone had explained before you experienced them.
STRESS RESPONSE
How your body reacts to prolonged stress, threat, and uncertainty.
THOUGHTS
The feeelings that surface during a deployment and when you come home.
EMOTIONS
Racing thoughts, self-doubt, hypervigilence, and the stories we tell ourselves.
MORAL INJURY
The weight of hard decisions, what stays with you, and what's hard to say out loud.
At this point no one should go through normal reactions to complex environments alone. By sharing and learning together, we build awareness, support, and strengthen the people behind every mission.
THIS IS NOT ABOUT WAR STORIES.
No deployment highlights. Not proving who had it worse. The focus is what twas happening inside of you that you wish someone had helped you understand sooner.
SHARE RESPONSIBLY
Only share what you are comfortable making public. Do not disclose classified, sensitive, operationally restricted, medical, or PII. Only speak from your own experience.
Bring Gray Matter to Your People
Live briefings, workshops, and speaking engagements for military units, leaders, and high-pressure organizations.
Topics include operational stress, deployment and reintegration, nervous system adaptation, identity under pressure, burnout, recovery, and Raising the Baseline™.