Own Where You Are: The Discipline of Presence

In my early Air Force days, I was one of the few enlisted analysts in a flying squadron dominated by officers. It was a pressure cooker of ego, expertise, and learning. In this environment, many lessons were learned, but one stuck with me throughout my career. The teacher was Lt Col “H”.

Lt Col H was new-ish to the unit. He had been around the block for quite some time and worked in just about every squadron this aircraft could be stationed at. One day as the young Captains surrounded Lt Col H in the squadron bar for story time, the question was raised: “Sir, which squadron is the best?” From the group’s demeanor, some bravado answer was expected about how a particular unit was better than any other...or better yet, that the current one was the greatest of all time.

His answer, however, threw them off. “The best unit is whichever one I am currently at.”

He went on to explain that wherever he worked, he put his heart and soul into it. Instead of complaining about how it “wasn’t as good” or how “previous locations were a mess,” he focused on his current teams, he tackled the problems he discovered and worked to improve where he was currently at. Making it the best unit he has ever been at.

That moment defined my understanding of professional agency. It wasn’t just a lesson in “blooming where you’re planted.” It was a masterclass in the Discipline of Presence. Regardless of whether you are in the military or in business, the current job is the best job if you spend more time in the present, improving things where you are at.

The Discipline of Presence: Moving from Tenant to Owner

We often mistake “presence” for merely showing up. We think that if our bodies are in the chair and our names are on the roster, we are present. But Lt Col H. was describing an active state of being. He was describing a transition from a “Tenant Mindset” to an “Owner Mindset.”

Imagine the difference between someone renting an apartment and someone owning a home. A tenant pays the rent and follows the rules, but when the faucet leaks, they wait for the landlord to fix it. If the neighborhood declines, they simply wait for the lease to expire so they can move elsewhere. They are psychologically ghosting through their residence.

In the workplace, a Tenant worker or leader does the minimum required to avoid reprimand while mentally auditing their LinkedIn or reminiscing about a previous job. They view their current role as a transaction and a temporary stop on the way to their real life.

An Owner, however, realizes that the quality of the foundation dictates the quality of their life for as long as they reside there. If there is a leak, they fix it. If the culture is toxic, they work to purify it. They don’t wait for a better neighborhood to start acting like a homeowner. The Discipline of Presence is the refusal to let your real career wait for a future date. It is the decision that the meeting you are in right now is the most important one on your calendar, and the team you have right now is the only one that matters.

Positive Brain vs Negative Brain

The Lt Col’s advice wasn’t just a leadership platitude; it was a tactical maneuver against biological self-sabotage. There are negative mechanisms and positive mechanisms that steer our perceptions and how we think about our current position.

The Negative Loop

When we focus on the negative aspects of our current location, we trigger the Amygdala, the brain’s threat detector.

When your Amygdala is constantly firing, searching for reasons why your current situation is suboptimal, it effectively hijacks your Prefrontal Cortex. The Prefrontal Cortex is the “CEO” of your brain; it handles complex problem-solving, creative innovation, and empathetic leadership. Without the discipline of presence, you unintentionally surrender your biological command and control to your brain’s survival centers:

• Cognitive Tunneling: When the Amygdala takes over, your vision literally narrows. You lose the ability to see out of the box solutions because your brain is in survival mode, scanning for the nearest exit.

• The Cortisol Drain: Chronic dissatisfaction floods the system with cortisol. This leads to burnout, decreased immune function, and a loss of the spark that defines high-potential leaders.

• The RAS Negative Filter: Your brain has a filter called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). If you tell yourself this place is a mess, your RAS will filter out every positive occurrence and highlight every failure to prove you right. You become a prisoner of your own confirmation bias.

The Positive Loop

To enter the positive loop, you must engage the brain’s upward spiral by consciously directing focus toward agency and potential. This shifts the neurological heavy-lifting from the alarm (Amygdala) back to the CEO (Prefrontal Cortex), who is responsible for emotional regulation and cognitive reappraisal. While the negative loop narrows your vision, the positive loop expands it, creating a biological advantage through the following mechanisms:

• The Dopamine Spark: When you identify small wins or progress, the Ventral Striatum releases dopamine. This isn’t just a reward; it is a cognitive catalyst. Dopamine enhances cognitive flexibility, allowing you to see pathways and solutions that were previously obscured by the fog of stress.

• The PFC Modulator: By practicing ownership and presence, you activate the Prefrontal Cortex to send inhibitory signals to the Amygdala. You effectively lower the volume on your internal threat detector, which restores full processing power to your Prefrontal Cortex for high-level strategic decision-making.

• The RAS Opportunity Filter: Just as the RAS can be tuned to find failure, it can be calibrated to find resources. When you commit to an objective, your RAS begins to highlight the tools, people, and data points that will help you succeed, effectively turning your environment from a series of obstacles into a landscape of tactical advantages.

Psychological Tools to Wield

But how do you control your brain to get it on the right loop? Lt Col H’s mantra was the start. He tapped into psychology elements to steer his brain in the right direction. Through tools like priming, we can consciously and unconsciously bump steer our brain down pathways of thought that influence everything from how we perceive, to what decisions we make.

Priming

At its core, priming is a psychological phenomenon where exposure to one stimulus influences how you respond to a subsequent stimulus, often without you even realizing it. Think of it as a mental warm-up or a subconscious suggestion that prepares your brain to perceive the world in a specific way. Lt Col H’s mantra primed his brain, and when he said it aloud it began its work on the other officers in the room.

Priming the brain for the positive loop is a pre-tactical exercise in neuroplasticity. Before you even step into a high-stakes environment, you can set your cognitive thermostat by using intentional positive priming.

By reflecting on past successes or articulating a specific intent for the day, you stimulate brain’s CEO that helps maintain focus on goals despite distractions. This proactive engagement creates a neurological buffer that prevents the alarm system of your brain from seizing control at the first sign of friction.

You aren’t just thinking happy thoughts; you are physically strengthening the neural pathways that prioritize objective analysis over emotional reactivity, ensuring that when the pressure mounts, your default setting is one of high-performance agency rather than defensive retreat.

Positive Psychology & Optimal Friction

Deciding that your current unit or job is the best leverages the Broaden-and-Build Theory of positive psychology. When we adopt a positive perspective, our brains broaden the array of thoughts and actions that come to mind.

This is where we find the concept of optimal friction. In high-performance engineering, friction is usually seen as a negative. But in leadership and personal development, friction is the very thing that builds muscle.

• The Reframe: Instead of seeing a resource shortage as a failure of the system, a leader practicing presence sees it as a masterclass in lean operations.

• Growth Mindset: When you decide you are in the best place, you stop viewing obstacles as annoyances and start seeing them as training exercises.

  
  

Beware of The Ghosts of Past and Future

Most professionals are haunted by two specific ghosts that steal their presence: the Perfect Past and the Fictional Future. Lt Col H’s perspective specifically sought to prevent this from happening.

Rosy Retrospection (The Perfect Past)

This is a cognitive bias where we remember the past through a filtered lens. We smooth out the jagged edges of 80-hour work weeks and toxic coworkers, remembering only the glory days of a previous job. When you say, “At my last company, we did it better,” you are weaponizing a curated memory against your current team. You are signaling that you are slumming it with your current colleagues, which creates an immediate barrier to trust.

The Mirage of the Fictional Future

Your brain gets a hit of dopamine from the fantasy of the next job. This is known as Anticipatory Reward. The next promotion, the better city, or the prestige firm looks perfect because it hasn’t happened yet. This fantasy makes the current role feel like a prison sentence.

When you live in either of these ghosts, you are a ghost in your current organization. Physically present but emotionally insulated. You cannot lead and integrate in a team if they feel that you are only using them as a steppingstone to something better.

The Pathogen of Complaint and Emotional Contagion

For many venting is a required step for processing. If you don’t like something you have to do, a good vent session gets your frustration out so you can think and move on.

But continuous venting without progress turns into complaining, and complaining is a contagious pathogen infecting teams and pulling down progress. This is not to say ignore the problems and friction. Friction and problems will exist in every situation, but the discipline lies in how you process it and what you do with it.

Emotional Contagion

Humans have mirror neurons that cause them to unconsciously mimic the attitudes of those around them. This is especially true of leaders. If you are mentally ghosting or constantly comparing the present to a better past, your team catches that apathy.

• The Mirror Effect: If your team seems uninspired, look at your own investment levels. Apathy in a team is almost always a reflection of the leader’s lack of presence.

• Innovation Stagnation: If the narrative is “this place is broken,” your team will stop trying to fix it. Why innovate for a sinking ship?

Reputational Suicide

Complainers are rarely promoted to high-stakes roles. Decision-makers don’t look for people who are waiting for a better environment to show their potential. They look for the “Turnaround Specialist”. That person who took a forgotten outpost and turned it into a center of excellence through the sheer force of their presence.

Agency and Amor Fati

If you struggle with the concept of the Discipline of Presence, we can look to two fundamental Stoic principles:

The Dichotomy of Control

Stoicism teaches that we must distinguish between what is “up to us” and what is “not up to us.” You cannot control the legacy software, the budget cuts, or the geographic isolation of your current station. Complaining is an obsession with externals. The “Best Unit” mindset focuses entirely on internals: your character, your effort, and your reaction to those externals. When you focus on what you can change, your agency expands.

Amor Fati (Love of Fate)

This is the decision not just to accept your situation, but to love it. Amor Fati says that the mess isn’t an obstacle to your work; the mess IS your work.

• If the unit is disorganized, that is your lab for organizational design.

• If the team is demoralized, that is your lab for emotional intelligence.

• If resources are scarce, that is your opportunity to master logistical innovation.

The Final Choice

The Lieutenant Colonel at the bar understood that the “Best Unit” isn’t a destination you arrive at; it’s a state of being you bring with you. It is a refusal to let your environment dictate your excellence.

The grass isn’t greener on the other side; it is greener where you water it. If you spend your career waiting for the perfect job, you will find that by the time you arrive, you’ve lost the habits of excellence required to sustain it. You will have spent so much time “ghosting” that you won’t know how to be present when it finally matters.

The next time someone asks you which role was the best, or which unit was the greatest, have the discipline to give the only answer that reflects true professional agency:

“The one I am currently at.”