 Welcome back. Our next speaker is Abigail Manning. She is heartfelt, compassionate, and cares deeply about improving the lives of others and helping to stop daily traumas from overtaking a person's life. She is also the proud mother of two Marines. Well, as proud as you can be if you have two Marines. So give her some grace here on the Air Force Base. But I present to you Abigail Manning. Thank you. Good morning. Oh, I love that about the Air Force. I am so happy to be here today because I've been able to listen to so many incredibly great speakers and I've also been able to chat with a lot of you and get to know some of your stories and what interests you and what you're excited about. And what I love is this pursuit of knowledge that you want to learn more and more and more. And that's why I'm so happy about what I get to do because I work with a lot of different branches of the military and as she said, my kids are both Marines. And so I hear a lot about leadership and I hear a lot about language. And what I can do is I can put the pieces together to find the commonalities. What do I see? What do I experience? And what I see throughout all of the different branches for leadership are two main traits. The first one is be your best. Be the best person that you possibly can be, expect the best out of yourself. And as a leader, you're going to be looking around you and seeing how can I pull out the best of that person? How can I help that person see more in themselves than they saw before me? How can we all be better tomorrow than we were yesterday? And the other component is do the right thing. We have that in lots of different languages, right, like respect and integrity, but doing the right thing. I don't know about you guys, but for me the right thing has almost always been the harder thing. It's always been the difficult thing. It's always been get up when I've been knocked down. It's do it when you're tired, when you're struggling. Do it no matter what, no matter who's looking. And when you have those two commonalities in leadership, man, it's amazing what can happen. The commonalities throughout the branch is about language is a little bit more different. Because you guys, I don't know if you realize this, but you don't really speak English. You speak acronym. So you all have your own culture. So what I have found about language, the barrier to really getting to understand people how to bring out their best, is not because of the culture's language. It's because of the individual's language. Because language is about what we think, what we say, and what we do. And when we can align great leadership with great language, then what happens is we're able to talk about behavioral problems in a way that in the same exact conversation that we're addressing the problem, we can also be building people up. So when does language start? It starts when we're little, little babies and we reach out into the world and we say, am I safe? Is someone going to come get me? Does someone care about me? What are my needs? What are my likes? What are my dislikes? And then as we grow, we realize as adults, we want this kind of connection with one another. We want to be with someone else. It's a whole lot more fun when we can do that. And in addition, when we collaborate with other people, we go farther, we're more successful. So I can understand that you're looking at these slides going, OK, she's a mom. What do these have to do with us? So I'm really excited that I was able to get some super secret soldier declassified photos. You ready? You ready? All right. So let's go back to the first point about being individuals. Each of us in this room want to be a unique individual. We want to stand out. We want to be different. So as an individual, when you say, I'm going to be my best, that's what we want. And when you own who you are, and you are your best, and you're striving for your best, you give the permission to everyone around you to be their best too. And when we have strong individuals that come together as these teams of everyone being their best, we have collaboration, we have cooperation, and we get this amazing sense of balance. With that balance, we're able to know that someone has my back. We're able to know that we can move forward. We have a bonding experience, because we've been through some problems together. We know someone has a certain skill set that I don't have, and I can rely on them. And we can drive forward relentlessly. And when we do that, we know that when we come up to an obstacle, we don't get freaked out about it. Because we know as a team, you can see right through obstacles. We can collaborate. We can say, hey, I have an idea. Let's go over. Someone says, let's go under. Someone else says, no, right, left. Let's go through it. But you don't see these obstacles as things that are so unsurmountable. Obstacles become opportunities. Your struggles can become your strengths. And for me, I can tell you, your tragedy can absolutely become your triumphs. So when you put together strong individuals, strong teams, unity, optimism, you're ready for it? You get the land of utopia, where we all live and daily in love, respect, and kindness. All right, so now you're going to say, wait a minute, wait a minute, that's crazy. We don't live there. That's not what happens to us, right? So what is the problem? I'm going to tell you, there is one huge problem. It is that guy. That guy is a problem. You know, you all have one, right? You have someone that you have to work with. And you're like, ugh, no, not him, not her. Don't put me up with that person again. They're slow, they're lazy, you yell about face, and they don't turn around. They can't follow simple commands, right? So as leaders, we need a strategy. Like it's easy, we need to know that it's OK for you to initially have this, what is wrong with you? We have been over this, over, and over, and over. I can't understand. You are a malfunction. You don't fit in. You're not smart, right? It's easy to feel that way, kind of human nature. And think about it, we're all running a little bit low on our fuel tanks. Lack of sleep, you physically hurt, you've had a fight with somebody, you have a big bill you have to pay. So that's when we as leaders go, OK, you know what? I'm going to step back. I'm going to take my time because what I really want to do is I want to be able to take a step forward and be the best leader I can be. I want to be the best person in pulling them up. And ugh, I'm going to do the right thing. So why is that so hard? Why is it so hard for people? It's because it's called what I call purple threads. Purple threads are your personal beliefs. They're limiting, self-sabotaging, thoughts that we all have. We get them from the time that we're babies to adults. They're those limiting statements of you're not enough, you're not smart enough, you're not good enough, you're not tall enough, you're not good looking enough, no one's going to like you, right? And they get woven into you so that you actually start believing them as your truth. These purple threads become your personal thoughts, which have become your personal truths, which then become your personal triggers. And because they are actually hardwired in our brain and woven in our cellular body, they have to be physically torn out and, well, psychologically torn out and physically trained to remove them so that you no longer believe these limiting statements. And the interesting thing about purple threads is that you see them, they're so vivid to you, it's all you can hear, it's all you can see. But to the outside world, you don't see them. You're not aware of this, right? They look wonderful. So let me give you an example of that. A lot of people look at me and they think, oh, wow, you have this amazing, wonderful life. Your life is so easy. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that one. Your life is so easy. My daughter was just rotated out of HMX-1, so presidential helicopter. My son is an intelligence. They did really good. I'm really proud of them. They're outstanding individuals. I get to travel around the world and see these amazing places. I get to work in front of people like you. I work across the military. One of my co-teachers is a former rear admiral. He was a commanding officer at Camp David. I work with two CIA global executives. I mean, it's a pretty cool life that I get to live. Like, I'm really kind of pinched me sometimes, right? But I can tell you, like the person in front of you, the person behind you, the person you respect the most in this world, like everyone in this room, I too have purple threads. From the time I was a little girl, I had to endure childhood abuse by both of my parents. After 10 years of marriage, when my money ran out, so did my husband, leaving me with a five-year-old and a two-year-old to raise until adulthood all by myself. Then many years later, I decided to trust again, and it was in a four-and-a-half-year-long relationship that one night he freaked out and I found myself literally in hand-to-hand combat. I was in a fight for my life. It was a repeated, violent, physical attack on me. It ended because he picked me up and he threw me out the front door into a wall and I landed really, really, really deep down in the pit of PTS. When you're in the pit, when you have your problems, you need a strategy. I looked up from that pit and I saw these amazing kids staring down at me. It was the first time that they saw this strong, independent, I can do it, I can, I try, I will. All the things I taught my kids is the first time they saw me, not able to eat, not able to sleep, not able to go outside, never having my back to anybody. It was scary, it was beyond scary. So I needed a strategy. So that's when I came up with this purple threads idea. So I needed some humor thrown in there. I was like, okay, what is this gonna look like? I had to have artwork, I had to have language behind it. I had to understand it in my head. It had to make sense to me. I had to have some self-awareness. I had to have self-ownership because I took a little vow when I was eight-year-old that the abuse would end with me. And in that dark pit, I felt like I failed. I felt like I was not giving my kids the life that they deserve and that I wanted them to have. And I wanted to do better. So I made up all the stuff because it helped me and it reminded me, oh yeah, that's right, that's right, that's a lie, that's not truth. I am worthy, I am good enough. And the other strategy, I'll be honest with you, you can't do it on your own. And I'm kind of a strong independent chick and I don't really like saying, I'm weak, help, dinosaur arms, get me out of here. But I realized there was no way I was getting out of that pit without help. So I reached out and I asked for help. I don't know how to do this alone. I'm stuck. This is not okay, can't keep going like that. So I had someone throw down a ladder. When I realized that I couldn't climb up that ladder by myself, as strong as I think I am, I couldn't do it. So I went to the crisis center. And you know what they did? They jumped in the pit with me. They went, no! And they said, it's okay, we know the way out. So understanding the language, they knew where I was. They knew how to talk my language. So there's a couple different ways of doing language. The first one is about unity, cohesion. There's everybody's equal. I'll be honest, I have yet to really find this on a routine basis. It comes, it goes, it's here, it's there. But in a real utopian world, that would be wonderful. What I find is the middle one. I know you guys have seen this one. The old knife hand, right? Military knife hand. It's clear, it's calm, it has a direction, it's a purpose. It makes sense. The last one up there is called finger pointing. Finger pointing is the essence of shame, blame, judgment, and isolation. And the reason I personally call it finger pointing is because my dad, from the time I was really, really tiny, would come up with his index finger and pound it on my chest, right over my heart, with every single time he had something to say to me. You are stupid, you are dumb, you are lazy. Any success that you have is a fluke. The world is gonna chew you up and spit you out. You are never gonna make it, and you are not liked here. Meaning in my family. So I don't care your rank, your power, your position. I don't care where you are in your life, as much work as you've done. If you still have purple threads in you, and you have people doing finger pointing language at you, and then you have wave of wave of stress, this is honestly how it makes all of us, even our biggest warriors feel. And why is that? Why do we go back to this state, and we don't even know how we got there, and it happens that fast. It's because the purple threads are consciously and subconsciously woven in. And unless you pull them out, the more finger pointing that you get, the tighter those knots. And what happens is they become marionette strings, and then you go into fight, flight, and freeze. So that guy that you're yelling about face, can't hear you because he's in this state. He's in this moment. And I wish I could say that it kinda ends there, but it doesn't. What happens is it will continue to grow just like any kind of problem. You ignore it, it grows. It gets bigger. It gets into a larger problem. So these types of behaviors then become manipulations, which then move into harassment, which then move into abuse. And the problem is with fight and flight, you either become the person who's doing the abuse, or you become the person who becomes an easier target, like I was, of abuse. Now wouldn't it be great if we could say it ends there? Newsflash, it doesn't. It then spirals, and it goes into what I call the adverse spiral. So the adverse spirals were stress and fear. Again, the small little things, right? That if we're aware of it, we have the life skills. We can recognize them and stop them when they're small. But when we don't, they move down the spiral into unworthiness, and then they go into depression. And no one wants to feel depressed, so just for tonight I'm gonna have a beer. The next night, I can't sleep as well, I'm gonna have two beers. You get into cycles of addiction. Then you go into cycles of abuse, then PTS and suicide. The whole key to the adverse spiral is as you go down, there's so much finger pointing language, shame, blame, judgment, and isolation. And people are like, well, why didn't they just ask, right? Well, the problem is, at that point, you're doing the finger pointing back at you. How could I be so stupid? How did I end up here? How could I have done this? So we need innovation. We just need life skills. We just need people who can talk about this, who are saying, I'm gonna go on the edge. I'm gonna talk about being the best. I'm gonna talk about taking some risks. I'm going to be able to understand this so that we can have a better culture that we can be better individuals. And to me, there is no better way to do it than with tough love, respect, and kindness. Tough love, respect, and kindness means I care about you and I am not going to let you walk with a crutch. I'm not gonna let you run with a limp because I am here for you. So remember what we think, what we say, what we do? So what we think is not what is wrong with you. What we think is what wrong has been done to you. Then what we do is we move into what we say. And what we say looks a lot like no shame. Hey, dude, we all have purple threads. We all do. No judgment sounds like it's to be expected. Look what you've been through. Look what you've done. Look at all the pressure we're under. It's totally to be expected. Yeah, yeah, but I did this to myself. I was the one who started this. That's okay. That's okay. It's to be expected. So that's shame, blame, judgment. And the last one is isolation. This is where as leaders it's really critical. You build the bridges before you need them. You prove that you're a person to bring people together, not a bulldozer that pushes them away. And you say, you're not alone. I care. I care about you. And trust me, you can come to me and tell me anything. And I honestly care about each and every one of you here. I truly do. I have been the first confession for many people when they didn't have a safe place to go to say, this happened to me. And I welcome you to do that. You can reach out to me. And then you've got to find other bridges. We each need at least three bridges that we can go to. And then the last one is what we do, right? So do you get up early? Do you have their back? Do you say, I'm going to lift that pack. I'm going to carry the weight. Now it's not yours to carry for them, to take off of them. That's theirs. They've got to own their purple threads. And that's when you can say, you know Abigail, that's a purple thread. And I can say, got it. You're right. That's my stuff. And you can have those types of conversations with one another. And someone can look at you and say, that's your purple thread. Because you know each other and you care about each other and you have each other's back. And when we can do that, when we can make these great individuals who are full of their own vibrant, amazing colors. And then we can come together and build those bridges. Not only Air Force, do you fly. But each and every single one of you then can soar. Thank you.