Your top strength is bravery and valor. This is great news regarding your future as an officer and desire to be in a combat arms branch. Bravery and valor go hand in hand with Armor and Infantry, your top two branch preferences. Applying these will be essential to your success. Showing bravery and valor, particularly while deployed, will be absolutely necessary. If you cower away from challenges your soldiers will not respect you and it will be difficult to lead them. Additionally, without showing bravery and valor you could cost people their lives. As a platoon leader, you are in direct charge of these men.
If you aren’t brave enough to choose the harder right over the easier wrong then you will be held accountable. You cannot shy away from challenges and threats. The greatest and most well-known officers show these attributes constantly. Being brave in battle and putting others before yourself will make you a great officer like many before you. Your number two strength is self-control and self-regulation. This can guide you to the top if utilized effectively. The ability to sacrifice in order to achieve your goals by controlling yourself is more powerful than natural ability. In times of trial, being able to run missions on minimal sleep is a necessary sacrifice.
Staying up late planning out your platoons actions on your own time, instead of making it on the go, will lead you to success. You must be willing to refrain from enticing activities as well. Alcohol is prevalent in the military, and your continuance of life long sobriety will work to your advantage. This will allow you to utilize more time and focus to your work while setting you apart from others that face trouble due to their lack of self-control and discipline. Additionally, tobacco along with other drugs will only lead to trouble and poor health. Abstaining from drugs will allow you to have a healthier and longer career. Physically, officers are expected to be the top of the top. The discipline to sacrifice time and sleep to work out is important, especially while at West Point where there is barely enough time to do homework. Your diet plays into this as well. Give your body what it deserves and maintain your current fitness and continually progress. Don’t fall into a habit of drinking soda and eating candy around the clock. Eat healthy clean foods, particularly nutrient rich foods like vegetables, that will maximize your physical performance. This strength can apply to almost anything, and is vital to your success.
127 our experts are availableright now
Your third top strength is spirituality, sense of purpose, and faith. This will help you stay on track to achieve your goals. In combat, many people get discouraged from what they have seen and lose their sense of purpose. Their minds often become cloudy and leads to them becoming edgy and hard to work with. This is the nature of war. However, through your understanding of the universe you see where you fit in and can use this to your advantage. When things become difficult use your beliefs as a crutch. Rely on them to maintain your sanity and know why you are doing what you are doing.
Never forget that you are an officer pursuing the better good for the world. In SEAR or Ranger school, when instructors are intentionally demoralizing and trying to make you go insane, hold fast to your faith and maintain that token in the back of your mind. Recollect yourself after your experiences and look back at where you came from and how you came to be here. You understand why you are there and have meaning in life. Your sense of purpose, spirituality, and faith will bring you peace of mind in many situations and will ultimately help you as an officer. On the other hand, your strength that needs the most improvement is appreciation of beauty and excellence.
Mastering this skill will help you when your outlook on things become bleak. A positive viewpoint is easier to maintain when you demonstrate this quality. As an officer, times often become challenging. War is a prime example of this. Seeing death, battle, and ruthless acts of violence can become demeaning and impacts many for the worst. There is a high ratio of mental disorders among soldiers that often begin to stem from their negative outlook on the world. Being immersed in violence would make it even more difficult to see the beauty in life. However, if you can gain a greater appreciation for beauty then war will not be a problem for you as an officer.
Seeing how incredible the world is and having that perspective or mental set going into it would help with coping. A mental set that the world is beautiful and you are protecting that beauty would be beneficial. Your mind will be able to focus on the great things of the world instead of the horrific things and will allow you to better lead with a clear mind. Prepare yourself now and gain the ability to see how incredible the world is around you. Notice the beautiful landscape surrounding you, the rising sun, the changing of the leaves, and anything else that you find beautiful. There is no set definition of beauty, so seek to find what you believe is magnificent and hold those moments in your mind.
You will be stable mentally as an officer and have a healthier mindset overall if you can employ this principle in your every day life. A strength of yours that needs to improve in order to maximize success as an officer is the love of learning. You are a lifelong learner and need to truly love that you have so many opportunities to learn. Having a schema, or mental framework, that learning is incredible and is the only thing that will stay with you forever will help you come to love learning. Understanding that the learning opportunities you are blessed with are something people would do anything for should make you feel appreciation and love. The fourth step of the Social Learning Theory is motivation. This means that one must be motivated to learn or they will not retain the information. Being motivated to learn will make learning easier and will help you in countless ways. Knowledge will be retained better and you will want to learn more and more.
As a leader this will do you wonders. Everything you learn will in some way contribute to your time as an officer. You must pay attention during training and throughout your time at West Point and deeply engrain the information given to you. The best way to do so is to come to love the material. Have a thirst for this knowledge. Learning how to call a 9-line Medevac, for example, should be approached with motivation to retain the material so that when you are calling in support to save your soldiers life you have the tools in your mind necessary to render him aid. Additionally, having the self-efficacy that you can learn anything you love and put your mind to will help you as well.
Loving to learn is vital as an officer and will pay you dividends in the end. Additionally, if this is not enough to motivate you to come to love learning, you can still be motivated extrinsically. This can be done by realizing that with increased education, you will statistically make more money. Everybody loves money, whether they will admit it or not, and if you love money then you should love education. It will bring you money and help you in all aspects of your life. The final strength that needs improvement is creativity. Creativity, especially as an officer, is vital to success. There are often predicaments where leaders are forced to think outside the box in order to have success.
Paul (Buddy) Bucha, a Medal of Honor recipient, was forced to use creativity to save his platoon in combat. They were outnumbered and out supplied, but he thought out of the ordinary and directed his soldiers to continuously throw grenades at a fixed interval in order to make the enemy believe that Bucha had more men than he actually had at his disposal. It worked brilliantly and saved many lives. Creativity is important, and one factor that directly impacts creativity is sleep. Creativity is weakened when one is sleep deprived, so strive to develop a healthy sleeping pattern. This is difficult when in combat, therefore ensure you exploit circadian rhythm to your advantage.
Rest well before an operation, and understand that jet lag will impact you upon arrival of your deployment. Utilize caffeine and naps to your advantage. Do not become complacent and sleep for large chunks at completely random intervals. This will confuse melatonin production and your body. Develop a cycle that is healthy and sustainable. Utilize consistent guard shifts in order to help yourself and your platoon find consistency in your schedules. Apart from sleep, focus on developing your divergent thinking. Don’t allow yourself to only think of past methods or what you have learned. These are important, but thinking outside of those and making unique solutions is crucial and will pay off just like it did for Paul Bucha. Do not allow functional fixedness to come into play. Sometimes you have tunnel vision and don’t see the outside possibilities. Be open to change and willing to adapt to fulfill your mission.
The hardest missions are not straight forward. There is a reason for plan B, and you will often be forced to use a plan C,D,E, etc. Thinking on your toes and employing creativity to find the non-obvious solution will help you be successful. Creativity is definitely a common trend among the best officers and you need to focus on this low strength of yours. Overall, you are in a good position to succeed. Start to really focus on your strengths and work on them. You are less than four years away from commissioning and need to have mastered anything you struggle with before you are in charge of a platoon of young men. Focus particularly on your appreciation of beauty, love of learning, and creativity. These may not seem important to you now as you are excelling in bravery among other things, but it truly does take courage to realize your deficiencies and make yourself the best officer you can be. Work hard now and see the results later. The lives of many will be in your hands and you are responsible for optimizing your missions. Abide by these suggestions and you will have success in your career. Good luck.
