All right, hey everybody. Welcome back to the ones ready podcast. I'm a special guest with us today and we're gonna talk about a lot of different things

and I'm personally very excited about it because I don't think I should share this room with the individuals that are here with me today. I don't feel worthy, but Eric, welcome to the team room, man.

Thanks a lot. Appreciate you guys having me and I think it's outstanding that what you guys have built also this platform and being able to put the career fields out there and you're represented well, so I'm very grateful for it.

Yeah, well, I appreciate that. Yeah, we're trying. We're good tryers, right?

We'll do our best. We'll do our best.

So for the folks at home, if you don't mind, just to introduce yourself a little bit and go through your brief history.

Sure. Eric Ballester, I was a combat controller for 20 years. I retired in March of 2020. I had a great career left the four special tactics squadron. I actually left this as a green team instructor was my last assignment part of the organization.

And then before that special tactics squadron, which was kind of like the pinnacle of my career and I got a chance to do everything that I wanted to do in my career and have the impact that I wanted to have on the battlefield.

And the highlight, you know, pinnacle of the career is a lot of guys say the team leader position. So it's very fortunate to be a team leader on red team for special tactics squadron.

And getting a chance to deploy and do my job over 10 combat rotations, Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa, and Syria was my last one where it was a really unique experience for me.

And I reflected a lot on it and just seeing what real and I say I say this slightly, but what real turmoil looks like and what and what real struggles look like.

So going and helping the Syrian people and specifically the female fighting for us out there, very formative experience for me.

And at that point, I was at the pinnacle of my career, I got the best CCT of the year for 2016. And then they said, that's it.

You're going to green team like, wait, I don't want to do that. I'm doing a good job. But I learned about, I learned about a different aspect of service there.

So I was told to go over and be an instructor and see what the impact was that I can have way more than just myself.

So I really enjoyed that last three years, my career, but that was also a sign for me to say, hey, after 20 years, that's it.

Like you got to go and do something else. This is a young man's game. And there's some things started coming up also at the same time.

So like once that purpose leaves, things start being presented to you. And you got to start dealing with them.

So I was fortunate for that. So at 2017 started looking at some things and addressing some of the issues that I was dealing with.

And that kind of ended up being the next theme after I retired was, I got a lot of stuff to deal with.

I got a lot of things that need to be deal with because I felt like I deserved it.

So I ended my career, retired and picked up move to Arizona and had a chance to address some of the things that I had been confronted with while I was in the service.

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