FIELD NOTE TWO
Writing Soldier Girl: Reflection Before Architecture
The release of Soldier Girl did not begin as a business decision.
It began as clarification.
For years after leaving the Armed Forces, I carried experiences without fully integrating them. Operational intensity, responsibility, transition, reinvention — they remained stored as memory rather than examined as pattern.
Writing forced structure onto experience.
Reflection slowed narrative. It required sequencing events, analysing reactions, identifying decision points, and questioning assumptions. What felt like a story became something more revealing: a map of identity formation under pressure.
Research in expressive writing (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999) demonstrates that structured reflection improves cognitive processing and emotional regulation. When experience is translated into coherent narrative, the brain reorganises it. Fragmented memory becomes integrated identity.
That process was not therapeutic in the clinical sense.
It was developmental.
I began to notice recurring themes:
Discipline over impulse.
Responsibility under scrutiny.
Belonging within hierarchy.
Identity tested in transition.
These were not isolated experiences. They were behavioural patterns.
At the same time, I deepened my formal development in cognitive and behavioural frameworks, including NLP Master-level training and structured decision models such as STEPPPA. What became clear was that the patterns I had lived could be examined through deliberate architecture.
Stoic philosophy provided grounding. The distinction between what is within control and what is not (Epictetus) is not abstract — it becomes operational in high-responsibility environments.
NLP provided cognitive tools — reframing, pattern recognition, language awareness — enabling deliberate influence over interpretation.
STEPPPA provided decision architecture — structured movement from situation to outcome through disciplined questioning.
Writing Soldier Girl revealed something important:
Experience without reflection remains reactive.
Experience examined becomes transferable.
This realisation shaped the move toward 1:1 Identity Architecture.
The work is not storytelling.
It is structured integration.
In organisational psychology, identity work is understood as the active construction and reconstruction of self-concept (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002). Without deliberate examination, identity forms implicitly through context. With reflection, it can be strengthened intentionally.
The aim of 1:1 work is not motivation.
It is pattern recognition.
To identify:
• Where identity was shaped by environment
• Where discipline was adaptive
• Where behaviour was situational
• Where responsibility can be reclaimed consciously
Soldier Girl was not an ending.
It was the first deliberate act of identity architecture.
Writing clarified the internal model before I ever articulated it publicly.
Now the work extends beyond memoir into structured development — grounded in reflective methodology, cognitive discipline, and trauma-aware awareness of how pressure shapes behaviour.
Reflection is not indulgent.
It is foundational.
Without reflection, identity remains assumed.
With reflection, identity becomes chosen.
References
Pennebaker, J. W., & Seagal, J. D. (1999). Forming a story: The health benefits of narrative.
Alvesson, M., & Willmott, H. (2002). Identity regulation as organizational control.
Epictetus. Enchiridion.