There’s a moment I keep coming back to.

It was about six months into my first corporate role. I was sitting in a meeting room, glass walls, a projector humming, a slide deck someone had spent too long on and a senior leader was talking about “change.” About how the organisation needed to move faster. How people needed to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

I sat very still and thought: you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.

Not because he was wrong about the organisation. He probably wasn’t. But because I had just spent eleven years in the British military, including multiple operational deployments, and I knew, in a way that lived in my body, not just my head, what it actually felt like to have your world restructured without warning. To lose the people you operated alongside. To come back from somewhere and have to figure out who you were now.

That meeting room felt very far away from all of that.

And yet, here is the thing I’ve spent years trying to understand, I wasn’t coping as well as I thought I was.

I left the military after more than eleven years as a Senior NCO. I didn’t leave broken. I left ready. I had plans. I had transferable skills that any HR professional would recognise on a page. Leadership under pressure. Decision-making in ambiguity. Team cohesion. Certifications shinning out my backside. I had more real experience of managing change than most of the people I’d be working alongside.

What I didn’t have, what nobody had thought to prepare me for, and what I hadn’t thought to prepare myself for, was the question of who I was without the uniform.

This sounds like it should be a straightforward thing. You know who you are. You’re a person. You have a name, a history, opinions about coffee, a football team you’re disappointed by on a regular basis. Identity feels like furniture, it’s just there, in the background, and you don’t think about it much until someone moves it.

The military moves it. Completely. Deliberately. That’s part of how it works. From the moment you enter basic training, the institution begins the work of building a particular kind of person, one who operates within a clear structure, who derives meaning from belonging to something larger than themselves, who knows exactly where they stand in relation to everyone around them. Your identity isn’t just shaped by the organisation. For most of us who serve long enough, it becomes the organisation. The values, the habits, the way you carry yourself, the shorthand you use, the standards you hold yourself and others to.

And then one day you hand in your ID card and none of that infrastructure exists anymore.

The corporate world didn’t reject me. That’s the strange thing. I was hired. I was competent. I progressed. From the outside, the transition looked seamless.

On the inside, it felt like operating in a foreign country where I spoke the language just well enough to be dangerous. I could do the work. What I couldn’t always do was be the person the work seemed to require. The unwritten codes. The political navigation. The way seniority worked differently, the way relationships worked differently, the way meaning worked differently.

In the military, meaning was built in. The mission existed. Your role in it existed. You didn’t have to construct it. In the corporate world, I discovered, meaning is something you have to manufacture yourself and most people are quietly struggling with that, even if they’ve never served a day in uniform.

That was the first real insight. Not that my transition was uniquely difficult. But that the thing making it difficult, the question of identity, was making everyone’s transition difficult.

Veterans were just the canary in the mine. We hit the wall first and hardest because we came from the place where identity was most completely constructed by something external.

I’ve spent the years since trying to understand that process. Not just to make sense of my own experience, but because I found myself working in organisational change and watching the same thing happen to people in large meeting rooms and restructures and post-merger integrations and digital transformations. The same fracture. The same disorientation. The same gap between the official story, this is an exciting opportunity and the interior experience, I don’t know who I am in this new version of things.

Nobody was naming it right. The change frameworks were about process. The comms plans were about messaging. The training programmes were about skills. And the people were quietly drowning in a question that none of the official infrastructure was designed to answer.

Who am I now?

This publication exists because I think that question deserves serious attention.

Not just for veterans, though if you’ve served, you’ll recognise everything I’m describing and I’m glad you’re here. But for anyone who has been through a significant transition and found that the practical side was manageable and the identity side was the thing that nearly undid them.

Senior leaders whose role disappeared in a restructure. Professionals who built an identity around a company that no longer exists in the form they joined. People promoted into a version of themselves they haven’t grown into yet. Organisations trying to take their people through change and wondering why the process worked on paper and didn’t work in the room.

The territory I want to explore here is the space between who you were and who you’re becoming. It’s uncomfortable territory. It’s also, I’d argue, the most important territory in change, for individuals and organisations alike.

I don’t have a tidy map of it. I have something better: eleven years of military service, fifteen-plus years of corporate change work, my own transition that nearly broke me in ways I didn’t see coming, and a genuine obsession with understanding why transition is so much harder than it should be.

I’ll write about all of it here. Honestly. Without the corporate varnish.

If that sounds like something you want to read - welcome. I’m glad you found this.

Daniel McGeechan is a Change and Transition Specialist based in Edinburgh. He spent over eleven years as a Senior NCO in the British military before moving into corporate change, where he now works with organisations navigating complex transition. He is the author of Combat to Corporate: The Rewiring — Rebuilding Identity After the Uniform. – Coming Soon.