Mindset Radio: Recent Episodes
Jeff Banman, Mike Brown
We took some time off but we're on our way back with a vengeance! No more seasonal episodes, just straight talk each week as we unpack the Art & Science of producing results in every area of your life. Join Mike and I as we re-create Mindset Radio in a whole new way!
Today Marin Richardson from Disrupt PR joins me to look at how we show up in the world and how to think about communicating our message so it lands the way we intend it to land.
Join Michael Ostrolenk and I as we unpack both sides and the anatomy of an apology. Listen in as we unpack the "I'm sorry's" we give and get.
It's a treat to be joined by my daughter Kate (Kat) Banman on this episodes as she shares how she chooses what's "in" and what's "out" for the new year to set her vibe in motion.
Join Dr. Erik Korem and I as we explore the idea of setting those "resolutions" aside and finding ways to build more capacity, open up more space and prepare ourselves well for the year ahead.
Here we go! 2024 is upon us and with it comes a whole new way to explore, well, everything! Join me as we begin to unpack, expand awareness and learn how to expand our thinking.
Eight time Olympic Medalist, three time Gold Medalist Veronica Campbell-Brown joins us to share her journey and perspective on how we can learn from our wins and our losses to continue driving towards our goals.
Today Coach Chris Lane joins me to dive deeper in to the art & science of training with an Unstable Load/Odd Object or known as ULOO. We look at the value behind it, the creativity it can add to your fitness regiment and the benefits it will deliver.
As part of the 2022 Built By Brute Force Challenge where our community is taking on 300 Minutes of Mindfulness, 30 WODs and at least 3 Performance/Mindset Lessons in 6 weeks, we've brought in some amazing people to support them along their journey!
Retired from the US Army Special Operations Command, Pat McNamara joins us for an incredible conversation around how to find, hold and maintain discipline is all areas of life. This is one you must listen to!
As part of the 2022 Built By Brute Force Challenge where our community is taking on 300 Minutes of Mindfulness, 30 WODs and at least 3 Performance/Mindset Lessons in 6 weeks, we've brought in some amazing people to support them along their journey!
Mike Brown, CEO of Brute Force joins in on the conversation today with an incredible conversation exploring how, when we get attached to the outcome, we begin to loose sight of the process that will actually produce the results we're trying to produce.
As part of the 2022 Built By Brute Force Challenge where our community is taking on 300 Minutes of Mindfulness, 30 WODs and at least 3 Performance/Mindset Lessons in 6 weeks, we've brought in some amazing people to support them along their journey!
Rob Sirstins, author of Ego of the Warrior, joins us today as we explore the process of, not just changing, but transforming to an entire new level in all aspects of life.
As part of the 2022 Built By Brute Force Challenge where our community is taking on 300 Minutes of Mindfulness, 30 WODs and at least 3 Performance/Mindset Lessons in 6 weeks, we've brought in some amazing people to support them along their journey!
As we welcome Beau Dorning, founder of V23 Athletics to the Brute Force Team, he shares what I believe to be are some of the best insights in how we can more effectively approach our fitness and then lays out the path for becoming that person we've always wanted to be inside the gym and out.
As part of the 2022 Built By Brute Force Challenge where our community is taking on 300 Minutes of Mindfulness, 30 WODs and at least 3 Performance/Mindset Lessons in 6 weeks, we've brought in some amazing people to support them along their journey!
Chris is our in house Physical Therapist here at Brute Force and shares a wealth of knowledge on keeping ourselves functional and ready to keep crushing it.
As part of the 2022 Built By Brute Force Challenge where our community is taking on 300 Minutes of Mindfulness, 30 WODs and at least 3 Performance/Mindset Lessons in 6 weeks, we've brought in some amazing people to support them along their journey!
Amanda Swyers, a FIT (Fully Integrated Therapist) dives deep in to the practices she uses in her therapy model to support her clients on their journey though massive changes in their health and fitness.
As part of the 2022 Built By Brute Force Challenge where our community is taking on 300 Minutes of Mindfulness, 30 WODs and at least 3 Performance/Mindset Lessons in 6 weeks, we've brought in some amazing people to support them along their journey!
Joined today by our new Nutrition Coach, Ruthie Massman, who is also one of the founders of V23 Athletics here in the Denver area to have one of the most real and practical conversations about nutrition I've ever had. You do not want to miss this!
As part of the 2022 Built By Brute Force Challenge where our community is taking on 300 Minutes of Mindfulness, 30 WODs and at least 3 Performance/Mindset Lessons in 6 weeks, we've brought in some amazing people to support them along their journey!
Today we are joined by Dr. Erik Korem, Founder of AIM7 & the BluePrint Podcast as he shares an immense level of wisdom about ways we can not only approach but maintain our overall health, especially through quality sleep.
As part of the 2022 Built By Brute Force Challenge where our community is taking on 300 Minutes of Mindfulness, 30 WODs and at least 3 Performance/Mindset Lessons in 6 weeks, we've brought in some amazing people to support them along their journey!
Today our dear friend and world renowned Mental Performance Coach Elliot Roe joins us to look at how to be more mentally prepared for the road ahead.
Today is a unique episode as Sachit and I share stories and offer up a joint episode to both our communities. There's always a lot to learn when we step outside our "norm" and that holds true as Sachit shares some powerful thoughts on how to discover our sense of creativity.
It was honor and privilege to spend time with Dr. Preston Cline from Mission Critical Teams Institute to discuss the release of his new paper, Residue: Processing Extreme Experiences. The view, insight and real-world value that came from this conversation is applicable to every single one of us.
Today is a special episode where I turn the reigns over to Drew Williams as he hosts a conversation between Dan Luna and I as we look at the ninja skills necessary to lead in volatile times. Dan shares he approach and secrets behind his long operational history and what’s he’s learned from operating with one of the most elite units.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Dave Rabin from Apollo Neuroscience to talk about resiliency, recovery and his next-gen technology that could completely reshape how we stay ready for every moment of our lives.
Today Chelsi McFadden from pulaskisandpencilskirts.org and I talk about what it is like being the spouse of a responder or service member. There are so many great takeaways you don't want to miss it! TOP TAKEAWAY: learn to share without a question mark or an exclamation mark at the end of it!
Today my dear friend Elliot Roe talks with me about the differences between meditation and hypnosis and we look at actionable ways to recover moment by moment. SPECIAL NOTE: There is a meditation at the end of this podcast. Make sure you are not driving, operating machinery and in a place you can close your eyes.
Today I speak with Capt Drew Willams of a large Metro Law Enforcement Department in the Denver/Metro area as he shares thoughts on leadership, response, management and personal safety during this crisis.
Today I am joined by Seb & Weezy from VETWOD where we pull back the curtain and take a look at how they got started, the why behind their mission and learn some awesome things about these two amazing people!
Today I am sharing what I call The Four Points of ultimate performance and we dive into how Uncertainty, Fear, Trust and Freedom play out in our ability to produce the results we want to produce.
Today it's you and I in an open conversation about control. I wanted to look at how we give up the control we think we want (or we would say we need) in order to have the control we fundamentally do need.
Today Mike Brown and I sit down to look at the world of self development, living an examined life and what things look like on the other side. Mike shares how he evolves his thinking in ways that benefit him in ALL aspects of his life.
Today we look at the differences between psychological development and understanding your biology. We'll see how one impacts the other and where they converge to provide us the best opportunity for growth in every aspect of our life.
After my unscheduled break I'm back to share what it has looked like to open Pandora's Box and get to the other side of my journey through self-development and healing the traumas that have shaped my life (unknowingly)
All right. Welcome to your Thursday episode, mindset radio. I'm your host Jeff Banman. Listen, before we get started on today's show I made an error in my broadcast at the beginning of the year when we were talking about the a hundred day challenge. I said it was going to begin on January 16th. I was incorrect. So the date that is well-researched and defined is the day that most people drop. Their new year's resolution is January 19th. That aligned with my plan to begin the program on a Sunday. So as a note of quick correction we will be beginning the a hundred day challenge on January 19th. If you want to get in and start with us right then and there, great. Get over to mindset radio.com backslash op your life or just go to mindset radio.com. Click on the banners, pop on over it, get registered for it, get in, get involved with me with it.
It's going to be a good time. At least that's what they say. It'll be well worth it. And then after January 19th, you can hop in at any point in time cause we're going to just make sure that it's running. So on Tuesday, had the privilege of Dr. Richard Gasaway, former fire chief retired from essay matters, situational learning matters on the show. So if you did not listen to that, I highly, highly recommend you go back and pick it up because it was truly a great one. It was a great episode, is a phenomenal conversation. I am, and I've said this before in the podcast, if you're a kind of a longterm listener, you kind of know that I am not a big fan of just people that teach situational awareness cause I think it's only a quarter of the battle. And not a lot of people approach it well or look at it in its entirety or full scope or really get into it at a level that I believe support you in developing a solid awareness profile, situational learners profile and you know, an amazing capability to really be able to do your job effectively.
So the conversation was radically awesome. In my opinion, I really respect chief Gaz away. His research, his effort, his work and his methodology is absolutely solid in my opinion. Which you know, carries about as far as this podcast, but but at least from my background and what I've seen out there, what I've taught for years, I've really do, I appreciate him. I appreciate what he does, his approach to it, and the fact that he's got some real meat on the bone with it. So if you did not catch that episode or you haven't connected with him or you don't follow him, please by all means do all whose information is up in the show notes on mindset, radio.com. I don't care if you're in the military, in the fire service, in the law enforcement, community dispatcher, EMS provider, emergency manager, entrepreneur, business leader, whoever it is you are, that is listening now, there is value in what he's doing, what he's offering, the conversation that we had.
And so by all means, get back over there, listen and tune in, see where it applies. Take the nuggets that are offered. It was, it was a good shell. So on today's episode, here's what I want to do. I want to kind of go one step further than we did on Tuesday. And I want to talk about predicting the future because it's a huge part of our job. Whether you look at it that way or not, I hope by the end of this conversation you will. Now, I wanted to tie these two episodes together cause I believe they just go directly in sync. You see, fundamentally, I believe that being aware is the gateway or is the source for us to read and then predict the future. And it's critically important. And I'm not talking about years out, I'm not even talking about months out, days out, weeks out.
It's not really what I'm talking about. In a lot of contexts. Now in some, we may get there, but what I'm [inaudible] I'm really speaking to is our awareness, our ability to be hyper present to the conditions as they exist right now will lead us to the actions that we need to take to produce the results that we want to produce. And all of that is a move from where we are now into the readily near future. And so really when you [inaudible] think about this in context and you just go with me for a second, cause you may be sitting back in your car or you know, listen to and going. All right, here we go. So I kind of want to talk about this for a minute because I want to, I want to challenge your brain on this one.
So I always believe right that are, that are that the proper level of awareness that our awareness is what gives way to action if we're not reading or seeing the conditions as they are, if we're not in tune with the conditions as they are, if we're not taking in the right information, right, the information that's available to us clean, like just as clean as it can be without judgment, without our own shit in the way, if you will. That's the gateway to really ultimate performance. That's the gateway to operating at a whole different level. Because when we do that, you know, the situation guides us. It tells us what we need to do. It tells us what actions we need to take. It tells us where we need to go, how we need to move. You know, if we're looking at it from the fire service standpoint, it's like the conditions as they are right now.
Tell me my next move, do I stay in? Do I get out? Do I, you know, vent. Do I, you know, what do I need to do? How do I approach this situation at hand? You know, if I'm in the military, it is reading the conditions. Maybe I'm, you know, you know, in a village trying to have a conversation and watching things unfold and seeing people, you know, move in a certain way. I'm seeing the indicators that say things aren't going well, that gives me the, the information that I need clearly to start moving into a course of action that I need to take. And so, you know, here's the disconnect with that. And that's a, that's an easy statement. And you know, I don't think there are really any of you that would disagree with that statement. The problem is very rarely are we actually there.
So like very rarely are we available to the conditions. Are we available to what's taking place? And that's just, you know, let's just lay it out. That kind of is a human pattern that is a, that's like a glitch in the system. And we're, you know, this month, this whole month is really focused on our mental acuity. And this is why I want to talk about this because if we look at it, our body, our biology, our sensation, right? Our sense is give us the ability to kind of really read the environment what interrupts that is the narrative or the thoughts or the thinking that has to occur around those senses. It's very difficult unless you've really done the work, unless you're really willing to take a look at it to begin to not label, interpret, bring in previous experience that may not be relevant to it may cause a corruption of, you know, it's like, like in a corrupt data file, right?
Your biases, your beliefs, your own personal stuff, your negative history, your past trauma, your things that have impacted you in your life that you, you know, may or may not even be aware of or may not be aware of how they play out. Like all those things are, are, are working to corrupt the data that's coming in, right? Corrupt the information that's coming into you. And when that happens, when we give, we give that up or we, you know, when we're enabling that to happen, when we're not paying attention to everything, then we've got a bad flow of information in. And we're really making decisions leading us to action that are really based more in a an expectation that we've created for ourselves or others or the situation or, you know, the people we're trying to serve or whatever it might be. And that's not a great place to operate from because we will all, you know, expectations.
Nine times out of 10 get unrealized. So that's a Gannett glitch in the system that kind of leads us down a road. We don't want to go. You know, when we start talking about biases or kind of our interpretation that comes through our own previous experience, right, that can really begin to shape our decision making, you know, and then the actions, subsequent actions that we take from that point. Because you know, that starts coming in in the should, right? The ifs, the winds kind of the, the idea of, of what you want it to be versus what it truly is. And you know, this is, this is easy to play out in certain areas of our life and very difficult to play out in other areas. But you know, where you begin to see growth and where you begin to really step up your game and really begin to operate it at a, at a higher level in all areas, right? I mean in, in communicating with your team and running and gunning and you know, run in and out of burning buildings or whatever to whatever the situation is, you know, or even coming home. It is a matter of just
Seeing things and I'm breathing there as they are Now.
You may be sitting there going, well, but you know, I, I need my past experience and that helps me do this and how it helps me do that. And it does. It does. There's a place for it. There's a, there's a a reason why we build experience. There's a reason why we train the way we train. There's a reason why I want to expose you to everything I can expose you to because I'm giving you options. I'm collapsing the time-span between, you know, recognition, decision, action, right? I'm speeding this cycle there. And there's high value in that. But when that slams into an expectation of how it should be, or if it was this way, or if it was alway or a real structured bias against something for something you know, you get attachment to an outcome or result. When those slammed, that's where we go awry.
That's where we start to get really clouded in our awareness. You know, and this is just a component of what kind of throws us off track. This is a component of our humanness that we just need to be one aware of, no pun intended, but we've got to bring some internal awareness to that. We've got to be able to call ourselves out. We've gotta be able to call bullshit on ourselves. We have to be able to kind of resist the you know, the aspects of falling into those traps there. They're just a bunch of trap doors that we can fall into. And so really what I want you to think about, you know, when you look at it from a practical standpoint and kind of a technical or tactical standpoint like we've talked about on Tuesday, you know, we've always got to kind of back that up with Dan.
Okay, cool. What are the behaviors behind that and what's the humanness behind that? And then, you know, what's really going to kind of throw me off my game? And so, you know, this is just kind of one piece of the equation that can really begin to impact how we see things. Now. We had a great conversation on Tuesday. We started talking about things like radio traffic and stressors. And you know, how various stressors impact us in certain ways. And, and again, here's another layer that we've gotta deal with. Here is a piece that comes into play. And so, you know, for instance, like my background and you've heard me talk about this, but when I would design a scenario or design an exercise, you know, I had, I had kind of two to dial, two sets of dial knobs and one of those sets is really relevant to what we're talking about today.
And it was the application of stress. Now, old school stuff, you know, the way I grew up being trained the way we generally kind of Trump most training occurs. It's like, let me, the more I can pile on you, the more I can push you, the harder I can push you. The more bombs, the more bullets, the more, you know, pallets right in the, in a burn building. That's, you know, that's quote unquote good training. The problem with that is it is good training, but it's, it's limited, right? So I classify stress in our world in three ways. One is direct stressors and those are things that are directly correlated to the mission at hand or the job or the duty or whatever it is we're dealing with. And you know, I mean in, in general terms, I would say 95 plus percent of the people that operate in this world are really good at managing, mitigating, dealing with, working through the direct stressors because that's our job.
I mean, our whole job is to deal with that and we've become very attuned to those. We can become, you know autopilot around a lot of them. We get it. We have an idea of what could happen. We know we've run the what if games. We've really worked on those. And so we're good at those. I don't need more of them in my development to tell me I'm good at them, good with them. So the second layer that we look at was, and we talked about was the indirect stressors. Now, the way I kind of frame these are, you know, these are things that can completely interrupt my mission. They can completely push me off pushed me off my, my objective they can totally disrupt what's happening. They kind of come out of the blue. They're often unexpected.
It's like being blindsided, right? Driving down the road blindsided. But there's at least a moderate level of awareness to the possibility of them happening. Okay. So I hope that makes sense. Right? So an indirect, straight, direct stressor. We got it. We're good. We know that shit's coming. We know how to deal with it. It's part of the game. Indirect stressors. We have a general expectation that it could happen. We don't always expect them to and they can really impact our ability to perform and or our ability to actually, you know, complete the mission or do something. You know, guys fall through a floor in a house fire, right? That's something we've trained for something. We plan for, something we discuss, we put it into our brain patterns. We talk about it. And you know, we don't, it's not a, Oh, this is going to happen at each every, each and every time.
So that's an indirect stressor. And from the research and watching this and doing this and putting it, it's practice. You know, we're still, we're still pretty good at those. Every once in awhile, depending upon the severity and what's going on. They may throw some things off the game, especially if they are wildly unexpected. And then that's a whole nother issue we can talk about on another show. But generally speaking, you know, we are pretty good at them. Well not always, but it's a, it's a, it's a better scope. This third factor, that was the unique thing that we found when we were doing all this work and developing the methodologies and looking at this is what I called a satellite stressors or you know, you can refer to him as the peripheral stressors. So these are interesting because these are, these are kind of a set of applied stress that we experience that has no relative connection to the mission at hand or the job at hand or the situation at hand or what's actually taking place.
They have no impact. They have no, you know, play out in the outcome, any of it right there. They just occur. You know, it may be kids on the battlefield, right? Not a great one, or kids in the area when you're about to, you know, take down an objective or something and they'll may probably run away. They're not right in the middle of it. But they're out there or like I've talked about on Tuesday, you know, radio traffic, you know, you're, you're responding to an incident, you've still got one radio on the main channel. You know, you hear that, you know, engine five got in an accident and all of a sudden now you're thinking about the guys on engine five and you know, your best friends driving that day. And now all of a sudden that's a, that's a satellite stressor that ha, and you're on your way to a house fire.
So that what that causes now is all kind of a level of cognitive dissidence, right? It causes me to separate and draws my attention elsewhere from what's going on in front of me. So here's the problem that we found was when we really kind of amped the satellite stressors, the peripheral things in the environment that the annoyances or the irritations or the, the things that it kind of subtly impeded progress but didn't really, you know, because they were frustrating. We watched just this massive drop in wearness and performance in producing the results that the, you know, the teams were out to produce. And, you know, and so this is a huge play into our ability to stay present because the other factor is this, the kind of this cognitive separation that occurs in a way, right? This, this is where we talk about the mental acuity aspect.
It is the, the drawing my attention away from the mission at hand, the focus on what needs to take place, the things I can deal with. You know, I'll say like out on the range when we're doing our meditation shoot stuff, I'll tell guys all the time, I said, Hey, you know, you've got to give up the control. You want to have the control you need. And I'll say that again. So it's you gotta give up the control. You want to have the control you need. And we've talked about that in breathwork especially like there's a control to the inhale and then giving up control to the exhale. Just allowing the breath to leave the body. It's a great little practice to get into because really these types of situations are no different. You know, so can I, can I do anything about age of five in the accident as I'm going to a house fire with people trapped in a Marty stress and I'm everything else.
And Andrew five just wrecked. I can't write. I have a mission in front of me. I'm worried about my buddy. Sure. But if I let that play out, when then when I show up on the scene and I started doing my size up where I start to do my walk around or I start to collect the information I need to collect. It's skewed your getting bad data at that point because a good chunk of your cognitive energy or brain power, your mental capacity is being utilized in a space in time that has no bearing on the current need. Right? The current point of attention. And so that's another big piece that we talk about, right? And that can come in little minor ways. You know, dispatcher say certain things or you know, there's some miscommunication between the officer and the driver or you know, the officer on the fireman, he didn't quite hear things.
Now you're worried about stuff. You've got to really tune yourself into what is, what's impacting you, what is, you know, something you can deal with, something you can manage, something you can control. What is it you can't control or can't deal with or can't manage and all ultimately, does this give me the ability to execute my mission and do what I need to do right now? Or does it take away from that? And no, that's kind of a constant mental game. That's the, that's that, that's that kind of peak level of a level of mental acuity that enables you to ebb and flow in the environment to see what you need to see. Allow the system to processing information rapidly, you know, against training, against previous experience, against all the stuff. Clean and clear of biases, cleaning clear of expectations, wants and wishes. And, and really just gets down to you, your team, your people in this moment right now, handling this situation as it is and taking these actions because this is the result we're producing.
This is the road we're traveling, you know, get on it, get in line, let's make this happen. And I can separate all those things out. And so that really to me is where we take, you know, this level of situational awareness, this level of awareness to the situation. The environment, people, the others, you know, if you've listened back to my other podcast where I talked about awareness and kind of broke down the, you know, the four points I discuss, you know, all of those things come into play for how I need to be available to read the conditions and when I can be available to read the conditions, I get to do something cool, which is predict the future. You know, I sat in a class year, you know, seems like a hundred years ago now, but I think when he started teaching the art of reading smoke class you know, Jim Kaiser, it was like magnificent to me because it was truly the opportunity to get in and see things as they were and then where they would be going.
You know, and that was all based off reading the conditions in the smoke conditions and understanding that you have, you know, structure, burning contents, burning, what's going on, what's the, you know, how what's the fire load inside? Like, you know, what's the velocity, how's it moving? How rapidly is a traveling, what's a projected heat inside? I mean, all of these sing, all these things you can, the environment will tell you, we'll just show you, we'll just lay out right in front of you. You know, if you're an officer, you know, on the streets, you, you can look back at call after call after call and be like, man, I knew this was about to happen. I knew X, Y, and Z. You know, you felt it. You sensed it. You saw something. Did you connect to what you saw in that moment?
Maybe not. Right? But I can look back. This is where, you know, foresight 20, 24 site comes into play. When you're present, when you're there, it, there's no doubt because it's actually happening. You know, it's not a version of what's happening when you've settled in, when you been able to mentally transition from wherever you were to this moment right now, and you've made yourself available, men were then we're just dealing with like facts and evidence and, you know, quote unquote truth, right? We're dealing with what is so in this moment. And that's a powerful place to be. That is a, that is a a subtle skillset that again, really drives who you are and how you act. And, you know, most times you'll acquire those skills. They wanted two things happen. You either acquire those skills and become that way over the life of your career, or you go kind of the complete opposite direction and then you're just left with like, no, it will be this way.
And so this is how I see it. And unfortunately, you know, people are like that and you've got to deal with that. But you know, if you're listening to this podcast, my guess is you're probably somebody who is wanting to is either go on. Yeah, that's, that's, that's right. You know, you just, you just explained how I feel most days or, yeah. That's where I'm going. That's what I want to do. That's how I want to develop myself. So, so yeah, I mean I think that's really the, the core components when we're looking at kind of the human impact, the internal impact on the external world as it relates to how we drive and build and create our awareness profiles. You know, how we become in tune with, and if you didn't listen to the episode for my four points of awareness the situation, the environment, others and you and to me, if you are not aware in each of those go sections on the quad, if you're not truly connected, each one of those all simultaneously and individually, you're, you're not aware because you're missing something if you're not aware to how you are, what's going on for you, what state of being you're in or state of mind you are in at a given point in time.
If you're not connected to the other people around you, whether that's on your team or the people you're dealing with. If you're not really connected to the environment and the impact it's having on you and the impact you're creating on it. And then of course the situation as it is happening and as it is unfolding, you know, if you're not connected in all four of those areas, you're not connected, right. You're just, it takes everything to, to make that link. So, so yeah, I mean that's kind of a may, it sounds like a little bit of rambling. I'm not sure you'll have to give me some feedback, but, but fundamentally I think that's where those are the areas that we've got to get curious about. And you know, what do you do about it? You get curious. You begin to listen to yourself first, right?
You begin to heighten that self-awareness model that is like, okay you know, I'm wanting it to be a certain way, which now I know corrupts the information coming in, so I'm going to give that up. I'm going to set that down. Or, you know, I, I really accept the fact that maybe I don't like this community or I don't like these people or you know, I have a way that this goes or you know, and it always happens this way or you know, these people are always like this and you know, if those live in there, those are true for you and some of you know, that's, it's gonna impact you. It's going to impact your ability to see things as they are in the moment. Mmm. That doesn't mean everybody goes out and gets a hug. Not by any means whatsoever. That's not, that's not what I'm speaking to.
But you know, everything is different. No situation is ever the same. You know that, I know that. We all know that. We logically know that we will speak to that, but yet we treat things opposite of that way too often, you know, don't do house fires from the same Hutu police calls are the same. No two emergencies are the same, you know, no two callers and the nine one one are the same, you know, no two villages are the same. Like, we can kind of globalize everybody, but when we do that and we're really screwing out right then and there before we, even before we've even step out the door, we're screwing it up. So I talked a little bit at the beginning of the show and I said, you know, this is where it gives us the chance to read the future and I feel like we've, we've covered some of the topics that deal kind of in the, the current situation and the relative immediate future.
Like so what's happening in the arm suite, what's happening in the next 30 seconds, one minute, five minutes, right span. Like how is the situation unfolding if you're at a command level, if you're looking at things on a larger scale, if you're dealing with larger scale incidents, if you're dealing with military actions, if you're dealing with, you know, a much broader spectrum, the same thing can blow out a little bit. Right? When I stepped back from kind of the the tediousness of certain aspects and get a view of what's taking place and get a real awareness of, you know, she stepped back into half of my world, right? To get a real awareness of the battle space, what the current situation is and then where that situation is moving, right? Where are the trendlines going? How are we beginning to move in, you know, the space that we're operating.
When I can do that, I can then begin to really understand what is taking place and begin to see kind of the options for progression, right? So I can really begin to say, okay, well if this is currently happening and this is all true and factual information and it's not tainted, at least to the best of our ability, this is as accurate as we can have a picture we can create and get. Then you can see that there are only a few, you know, lines of approach forward and you can exercise those, you can look at those, you can run those out, you can run the scenarios based off that. And it really gives you an opportunity to be predictable in a way, you know, predict the future in a way that you may not normally do. But if that current picture is based off biases or assumptions or you know, you the ways you think it should be, or frustrations or past incidents if you're not coming kinda raw to the table, then you're going to miss some stuff.
So I think the essence of today where I want to leave you is a stop cropped in the files, right? Stop corrupting the data and, and take the time at the incidents where you can to see what might be impacting you and just have the conversation with yourself. Just be honest with yourself or a little bit like really assess or go back and look at some of the incidents that maybe didn't go well or you think they could have gone better. You kind of know maybe you screwed something up or you didn't screw something up, but it didn't quite play out the way you expected. Like there was something off from it. Take those, take those into an internal state first. No blame, nobody else gets rained. Responsibility for it. Just you, you get to sit back and you'd be like, okay, what, what did I see?
What did I not see? Why did I see what I saw and why didn't I see what I didn't see? Right? And so you're able to kind of just ask those questions and look at it in a way that enables you to begin to see where things interfere, where the interference is coming from, where the disruption is happening. You know, you, maybe you were just frustrated. Maybe it was you were, you know, hadn't done the trans, the mental transition from the last call to this call and you know, maybe this was your 500 time to the same house or the same people you know, and basically the same call except this time, you know, it went completely arrive. What, what did you miss? Not from like a guilt standpoint, but from what caused you to not be hyper present to that situation as it was that time, right?
Not the 50 times before, not the multiple calls before. What happened in this one? What didn't you see in this one? What indicator didn't you pick up on? You know, and so that's a, that's a healthy thing to do, especially when you do it in that way. Cause you know, you're not a, you can't get into the blame or the guilt aspect or the something you did something wrong. You can't do that. You know, if you did something wrong, you did some wrong but, but don't dive into that world. This is an exercise that enables you to really create a different pattern, a different brain pattern moving forward. So I really hope that makes sense to you. I hope that adds to your capacity and then kind of expands the conversation from Tuesday. I'd love to hear thoughts on it. So whether you're commenting on the article online, on mindset radio, you know, the show notes and stuff, or in Facebook or send us a note in the mindset radio on Facebook.
You know, get in comment under the post when I make it right. And give me your thoughts on it. I'd be curious. This is a good, this is a good conversational topic to have, right? This is a, this is one of these that, you know, if you're listening, you know, maybe you guys are talking about in the squad car, maybe you're using this episode or kind of the foundation of this episode for an in station training or you know, if you're doing the chalk talk or the whiteboard talk or something you know, this is a, this is a good one. This is a good one to exercise is a good thought exercise to play out. And a lot of ways and you know, if you need some help, formulate some training, shoot me a note, let me know. I've got some great stuff around this.
Things I used to do, you know, across all the spectrums of my life and, and the various places I operated or worked. I've got some really good techniques that seem to always prob really cool conversations and get you in touch with what each other, what you each other seeing. So feel free to shoot me a note wherever it is. You live, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, email, whatever it is, just send me note, knows a Hey dude, send me some of that stuff or you know, let's talk about it. Happy to share that with you. Happy to make that available to you. So, all right Joe, we're going to wrap this episode up today. Thursday next week is going to be pretty cool. We're going to continue this month through with really these aspects of mental acuity and taking a look at some stuff. Again, a hundred day challenge if you're up for it, if you're ready to step up to it and really take on some stuff.
Don't forget swing by mindset, radio.com backslash hop your life up into the program. All those, it's donation-based, all that goes to the foundation and supports the podcast and the training that we're delivering. And again, if your interested in bringing some of the training to your department as you hear in the spots on the show, get over to the, get over to the site, fill out a grant app. That's a, that's an empowerment tool for me to go raise money. And really get some good stuff out to you guys. So we've got some things coming up this year with some departments that look like they're going to be a lot of fun. So you'll see some more stuff from us and you know, as always, be safe out there. Keep your head in the game, step up to it. If you ever need anything, don't hesitate to ask. So, all right, we will yeah, we'll talk to you next week. Have an amazing weekend. Enjoy it. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.
All right. Welcome back to mindset radio. I'm your host Jeff Banman. Today. It's going to be a lot of fun. I am bringing in the well chief, if you don't mind, I'll say the man, the myth, the legend around situational awareness. That's a, that's a big setup. Hey, you know, I mean, it's a big show. We gotta like step it out there, but today with me, chief Gasaway
[Inaudible]
Chief, thanks for joining me. I really appreciate you taking the time. We kinda did this on a little bit of short notice and you know, as I shared with you before the show this month, we're really kind of unpacking and getting into those aspects of mental acuity, that aspect of situational awareness, of self awareness, and really kind of pulling the curtain back on why we do what we do when we do it. What causes us to see what we see what interrupts our decision making cycle and how do we improve it? And so I really appreciate you taking the time. It's cutting some time out of your busy schedule to join me. Right.
Appreciate the the invitation. Jeff. It's quite an honor and I'm really, really excited about having our conversation.
Yeah, I mean I think, you know, this is the, this is the cool thing I like about the show and the way that we go. It's, it is, you know, whether we're bringing somebody out of a law enforcement community out of the military or the fire service, you know, these things we're gonna talk about today are kind of applicable to all, right. They, we, we all deal with them. We all find ourselves in these high stress, highly complex, highly diverse environments. And, you know, I think part of the charter now is, and we have a culture chief. I you, you tell me. I actually, I'm kind of excited about the shift in the community cause I feel like we have a culture now that wants to understand why we're doing this.
But it's, it's getting, it's getting, it's getting better. I, you know, one of the, one of the books I wrote was that was kind of like the compilation of my dissertation. And there are some people who buy that book and say, man, I really dig. I really dig the science in the book about the why behind it. And then I get some other people that say, if I knew this was a book about science, I would have never bought it. How dare you trick me into, into learning science? Yeah. My, my, my background or, you know, my research is cognitive neuroscience. So I'm teaching what I'm teaching, I'm teaching the, the science about how we think and make decisions. And I try to do that in really friendly ways and fun ways. But there are, there are some that really dig that. I mean, really dig it. I mean, like they're nerdy about it and, and, and then there's some that just are objectionable to it. And, and, you know, I, I try to find a happy middle, you know, I can't go full nerd with the nerds when I'm teaching a class cause everybody else will be rolling their eyes. But yeah, but then I can't, I can't just set aside all the science either because it's, you know, it's the foundation of how to explain why we do the things we do or don't do. Yeah,
Yeah, yeah. I, you know, yes. I've been excited cause I, well, here's what I feel like it's over the last decade, decade half, maybe two, we have come to a place now where science is very, V has become very validating for a lot of our work. And we've crossed, I feel like we've crossed through the threshold of the, you know, this is snake oil kind of stuff. Right? I mean, that's, you know, I grew up in that environment where, you know, nobody, nobody wanted to hear it. Right. And it was very you know very ad hoc or very slang terminology used to kind of describe some things. But what's interesting to me when I look back at, you know, the guys that taught me how to be a fireman back in the 90s, you know, these guys are been Firemans to sixties and seventies. The things that they said are now scientifically evident need of scientific evidence today. Which I really like in a lot of ways. And
There's also some science refuting some of the things that I was taught early as a firefighter. And there are some people who are very resist of, of that because, Hey, it's worked for me for 20 years and I believed in it and I've done it and it's turned out okay. But then you get science-based evidence, like from the NIST and UL research that's shows some things that are different and it, you know, and they're, they're using, they're using very sophisticated monitoring equipment to show these changes in he, in, in movement of air and such. And are still some people that have just, you know, just holding their breath and turn them blue in the face because, you know, and like, who knew who needs all that science? You know, I'm just gonna do what I've always done. And, and, and I, and I, and I, I kind of re relate to what they're saying, but part of me just says it's so sad to have people attacking, these are these researchers who are showing scientifically in some ways validating some of the things that we've been taught and in some ways refuting some of the things that we've been taught.
And I guess if the science validates what you believe in, then you're like, rah rah for it. But if the science refutes what you've believed in, well then those researchers are a bunch of idiots.
Yeah. I love, I love being disproven, you know, in a theory. Yeah, you're right. I mean, I think that's the, for those of us that get into it, those of us to kind of unpack it, it's like, I don't know, but we're going to find, you know, I mean, this is, this is my theory, this is what I think and we're going to figure it out. And if it disproves it, then awesome. Right. Then I think that's, I think that's the, it's hard. You know, there's, we've had a couple of guests on the show and we've kind of talked about the rigidity of, of people and our communities right over time. I mean, it's just, it's a, unfortunately it's a model of culture. You know, when I rewrote the math equation for what a mindset looks like you know, and I say we're always solving for our C3, which is our creativity, our comfort and our confidence.
The key factor in all of that is our level of openness and, you know, people kind of step back from that. I'm like, but that's measurable. Like I can actually, you know, assess that. We can run through that. We can find how open you are to experience, to new knowledge, to learning and to growing, et cetera. You know, through an evidentiary process. But that's really to, to me, the key, and I don't know from, I know in the fire service law enforcement community, I mean, I think you're seeing kind of those, those sex or you for you. Well, those groups kind of pull apart from each other. You know, you've got the old school rooted in as the way we've always done it thought versus a larger group. Now I feel like that's growing. That's saying, okay, but why? You know, and I think that's part of the generational too thing too. You know, these kids have, they've been able to go to Google their whole life or ask Siri you know, they've been, they've been in the world of Y where we for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's shifting.
Mmm.
You know, it, it, I guess it remains to be seen as to how fast that shifts. You know, there was, there's a, there's a great book that I had read that was written in the 60s. I've got the name of it just escaped me, but it talks about
How, how so
New paradigms are created. It'll, it'll, it'll come to me in the course of the conversation. But in a talks about how people, it through the course of millennia have resisted new ideas when they come about, you know, and they give some examples of, you know, ideas that came about, you know, in the 17 hundreds that, you know, people resisted and, and you know, and then eventually it, it takes hold and becomes, you know, the new the new paradigm or the new way of thinking and it kind of re, you know, works its way into replacing the old way of thinking. And then, then as you look back, the old way looks so antiquated and out of date that you makes you wonder why, why did anybody ever do it that way? You think about how we used to like fight on the battlefield in the civil war, you know, we lined up, we lined up 300 long and the first row shot across the field to the first row and who didn't fall down, reloaded, moved to the back and reloaded in the second row, stepped up. And you look at warfare today, you know, and how we, how we fight today compared to then thinking why did, how, how did anybody back then ever think that was a good idea at the lineup a hundred yards out.
Exactly. Where was, where was the private going? Hey eyes, this is a stupid plan.
Yeah. Here's a rock we could get behind a tree. A tree.
Yeah. I don't know about you, but I'd like to, I'd like to use that thing over there cause I think it might provide some [inaudible].
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It might reflect the bowler, you know, and they all stand up and fight with honor kid,
Right? Yeah. No, but that's, but you know what, you just nailed it right there, right. It's this, it's this, this culture of, you know, the, I think you just hits up on the head there, you know, it's honorable to stand there and sacrifice yourself or do it this way that we've always done it. And, you know, I think the hurdle is doing it more effectively, doing it more scientifically, doing it in new ways can be perceived as soft or, you know, maybe we're not going, you know, ah, ah, you know, I don't know. And because I'm a, I mean, I'm,
It is seen as is that you're, you're more, you're, you're tougher if you do it the harder way and you're softer if you do it the easier way because there's a better way that's come about, you know? And, and, and I think we're, we're making the turn.
I don't know that that's what [inaudible] I mean, you've got a tick no, no, absolutely no, we need to talk about, but, but, but I think it's all part of it because what at least needs do here is, so let's talk, let's talk about kind of cognitive development. Let's talk about situation. Warn us. Let's, you know, cause there's you and I go through incident after incident after incident across the multiple spectrums and looking at where a lack of situational awareness or a lack of awareness in general, self-awareness, situational awareness, you know these, these points impact our ability to make decisions and then drive actions that ultimately lead us down a path that maybe we don't want to go down or leads us into a path of trouble if I would say so. So let's talk, let's talk situation one is, let's get into the nitty gritty of it. You know, and I know you teach a variety of programs, but like why, why do you see this as such a significant point? Like what's your, what's your take on it? A couple perspectives on it. One it's not, it's not
Part, at least for firefighters, it's not, it's not part of any curriculum that is out there for that or that is required to get trained and certified as a firefighter. You know, even if you take a the 1001 and ya, and you get one of the big publishers books, there might be four or five single sentence mentions of situational awareness, but not nothing in the form of a comprehensive enough lesson to really do anyone any good. And that's the first problem is it's not, it's not part of the foundational learning too. There are a lot of people that misunderstand what it is and, and how, how you develop it. And three, there are a lot of people that think they're better at it than that, you know? No. One of the things I say is that, you know, you can, you can have terrible, terrible situational awareness, horrible situational awareness and still make a great decision.
We call that lucky and out and out there in the world, there are a lot of people locking their way into successful outcomes. All the while thinking they have a skillset and they, what they really just have is a, is a run of law, you know, and, and they don't, they're not, they're unaware of how unaware they actually were in the moment that they lucked their way into success. And, and, and that's scares me. You know, most of the incidents that I work with in departments I work with in interviews that I conduct are the people who happen to be on the sharp end of an outcome when, when the lock brand out and, and you know, for a variety of reasons they couldn't see it coming. And you know, that and that, that's my tagline. Help, help, help individuals and teams see the bad things coming in time in time to prevent the bad outcome.
And a lot of times they don't see it coming in time and then the outcome occurs and then they say, wow, I had fond situational awareness. But they're looking at it after the fact and not in the, in the, I don't think anybody in the moment, very few people in the moment will realize their situational awareness is being impacted. Yeah. Most of the time they think it's solid and then something happens and then after the fact they look back as data comes in after the fact that they're able to see all the things that they didn't realize or didn't know or thought it was this. But it was actually that. And you know, I know we're not to the point of the big takeaways yet, but I'll give you one of the big early here. I'm flawed. Situational awareness is never a root cause.
Never. It is only a simple, it's only a symptom. You know, no one dies of chest pains. Yup. They, they, they die of a, from a blocked artery. No one dies from flawed awareness. They die from the, what caused the awareness to be flawed. Font awareness is just the symptom. It's just the chest pain. You have to dig deeper to find out or what was it? I, well, I wasn't paying attention when that happened. While you were paying attention to some things, maybe not what you should have been, but something had captured and held your attention at the moment. You wished it was on something else. So let's try to figure out what that was and why that happened. You know, where were you distracted? Where did you have split attention? Were you interrupted? Was your mind drifting? You know, there's, there's a lot of ways in awareness goes sideways.
They want 100%. I mean, and then, you know, physiological effects. And am I managing it? Am I, you know, am I generally, you know, an excitable human being? Like, am I, am I implementing key strategies to keep myself, I mean, this is, I've always said, you know, fear and, you know, body, body experiences, fear and excitement, exact same as the same biological function. Fear and excitement and, but fear is really just nothing more than a projection into the future of an outcome that we don't want. Right. And so I think a lot of times, a lot of my work has been around how do I get somebody hyper present to what's actually occurring right now? Cause this is the information I need that's happening right now, not how I perceive it or how I think it should be or has someone has told me it should be like the dispatcher. Right. I mean I think that's a big cluster we deal with in any of the emergency response community is we're trusting information that's coming from some citizens somewhere. You know what I mean? Who isn't trained, who isn't developed, who doesn't know how to give accurate information and who is seeing their own world through their own eyes relay through to somebody that's not anywhere near the incident. Then given to us is we're in routes screaming down the road, you know, trying to set up for what we might do. Yeah,
All of that is fraught with problems. But one of the things that that contributes to making that even more challenging is that we, when we as responders are receiving that information from dispatchers mentally, we can be fooled into believing that we're being given facts from a person of authority and all the dispatcher is the by which the caller's information is getting passed on through. You know, I often say the dispatchers have situational awareness too of the call that they're sending you to. Their situational awareness comes from the color, whatever the caller says forms the awareness in the mind of the dispatcher. The dispatcher then tries to create something called shared awareness by sharing what there is in their mind, their understanding of the call with those responding in the field and to say that with a level of confidence and authority and then the people in the field believe that what the dispatcher told them is true and accurate.
And really what the dispatcher told them is simply the dispatchers imagined reality. Totally off somebody else's perception of an event that you know that may or may not be off of a lay off of a lay callers observation, which they might have set told the truth. They might not have lead sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose, multiple callers say multiple different things. The dispatcher has to try to figure out which one is telling me the truth. And so they're making a credibility judgment of the caller or callers, you know, language barriers can cause you know the dispatcher frustration, there's all kinds of, and then if you add in a call taker and B, you know call taker who then transfers information to a dispatcher. Well now you've got like the game of telephone going on cause you got the original caller to the call taker, the call taker who then documents onto a computer and you can only type so fast and you can only listen and comprehend and put so much onto that computer screen.
So some of what the caller is saying isn't going to get transcribed and forwarded on to the dispatcher. So the dispatcher will have missing information that, that the, the the CEO. Then later on when they played the nine one one tape at, they'll say, well the caller told this. Nobody told us that. Well you find out the call taker didn't document it but they were VE. They were busy documenting. It's not like they were eating Bon bons, they were busy processing the call. But the color goes faster than the, than the call taker can comprehend the information. And that information is just quickly shuffled out of short term memory and lost. And you know, I've had call takers, swear to me, they never said that, but until they played the tape back and then I went, Oh my God, they said that. How did I not hear them say that? Well, if you're busy thinking about something else they've said, you will filter out what they're saying in the moment because your mind is on something else that they've already [inaudible].
I mean, that's, you know, this is the interesting thing. I was sharing with you a little bit beforehand. When I was at the agency and we did this entire research pile to kind of dissect stress, right? To assess stress on the human system at multiple levels, inaction, right in the course of action. And so we ended up dividing them into three primary groups. They were direct stressors, things we deal with, the time, things that may disrupt our mission or disrupt our intent, whatever may be going on. The indirect stressors, things that will impede our progress or, you know, interfere with our mission to kind of come out of the blue. And then the third pocket is what I always called, like kind of like the satellite or the peripheral stressors radio traffic, things that, things that have no bearing on the outcome, no bearing on our course of action.
You know, no bearing on the event itself. But in the study we did, in looking at it, we found that where the greatest drop of awareness, decision making and, and performance when a satellite Tresor from the peripheral stressors were at their peak, you know, and so it's injury cause it causes that distraction, right? It takes our attention, like you're saying, away from the what we're focused on to something else, you know, that could be, you know, radio traffic room, another engine that could be, you know, one of the units responding gets in a car accident. Well, you know, I can't do anything about that and it doesn't stop the fire or it doesn't stop the emergency from happening. And I have no bearing on that now. But my, my, my, both my mental capacity and sometimes my emotional capacity gets hung up in that place. And so now like I've got that, that's split awareness point where my brains, you know, trying to sit in two different locations at the same time. So it's all good.
Yeah, that'd be the, you talk about that, that, that peripheral stressor. So I'll ask you a question and I don't know what your is going to be, but I hope I know what your answer's going to be. Have you ever been in an environment that is so noisy? You can't think?
Yes.
Okay. So, so then take a firefighter and put them in the presence of a chainsaw running. Could that chainsaw creates so much noise, even if they got headset on, could it create so much noise that they can't think? Well, if you can't think you can't process, you can't comprehend the, the direct yeah, yeah. The, the, the ones closest to you around you. It literally can impact your ability to process and understand what's happening around you simply because you're in an environment that is noisy and a lot of people that are in noisy environments, what they strive to do is get somewhere quiet where they can think. But you know, it's not always possible. You know, if you're working by a chainsaw shorter, you know, turn the chainsaw off so you can think, but you can't always do that. Even like a police officer responding to a call you know, they got the siren on and they're, and they're in there trying to comprehend either dispatch traffic or MDT traffic. All the while with the siren on that just, that siren is enough that could, could impact their ability to comprehend and process. Now what some do unknowingly and uncontrollably is their, their brain will filter out the silence noise. Yeah. You know, so, so that the, either it's either gets diminished or it gets silenced completely.
Yeah. I mean, go ahead. No, I was just going to say that's, I think that's, I think you're, you're exactly right. I mean, that's one of the, like in, in development, right, in stepping up our game, it's, we have those systems available to us, but those are things that you have to kind of understand the science behind how you leverage that. Right. How you auditory exclusion is not a bad thing when used effectively. Right. you know, it enables you to use your brain and the body are designed to segment out and give you the ability to focus your attention where you need it. The question is, have you created yourself in a place where you can do that effectively or not? You know what I mean? It's like, okay, recognizing the sirens going, sirens going fine, but there's radio traffic coming in my attention now, you know, is the radio traffic versus, you know, whatever else.
And then, you know, you've got to add driving into the mix too. I mean, that's, you know, there's, it's chaos. It's definitely we're, we're not w we've got a lot stacked against our ability to, to see what so is, I would say like see what's actually happening. What are, what are some of the ways that you, you go about looking at this, how do you, how do you teach people to, to begin to really be able to, to function at a different level when it comes to their situational awareness when it comes to paying attention?
Well, I think the first component of it is making sure they understand what situational awareness is. If I were to ask 10 lay people a LA, I'll call a person, somebody who hasn't had a deep dive and situational awareness training, what it means, they're likely to say, well, it means I got to pay attention or I got to keep my head on a swivel. I always gotta be looking around and [inaudible] and all of that is true, but that's only the first part of situational awareness. That only helps in what is called the perception level of awareness. You know, when you keep in your head on a swivel, you're looking around, you're being perceptive of your environment, which is good. I mean you definitely want to be paying attention. So it's, it's, it's nothing to be ignored or to be diminished, but it's only, it's only the first part.
It's kind of like saying, the drive my car, all I need is my keys. No, you have to do a few more things besides just half car keys in your hand and, and, but, but, but you still, it's important. You've got to have the keys, right. So you know, so you know, step one, understanding how to be perceptive of the environment, how to pay attention, what to pay attention to, how your attention can be drawn toward things that are loud, bright, moving proximal movement. And these are primal triggers that try to veer your attention and perception away. And so one, understanding what perception is and some of the ways to get tripped up in perception and then how to take what we perceive and understand it. You know, it's one thing to see it, it's another thing to understand it. It's one thing to hear it.
It's another thing to understand it. Do you think that you can take two people, put them in, in a quiet room, face to face, across the table from each other and they can miscommunicate now add stress changing conditions, noise lights, multiple auditory inputs muffled radios through SCBA face pieces. Sometimes people talking too fast. It's one thing to perceive it. It's another thing to be able to comprehend it and know the meaning of what is coming at you. In the, I think of, I think if perception, the way I describe it as perception is gathering up a bunch of jigsaw puzzle pieces, eyes gather some ears, gathered some nose, mouth, skin. They all gather a big jigsaw puzzle pieces, send them into the brain. Then the jigsaw puzzle has to get assembled there. You know, there's some point where the brain takes what we see, adds it to what we hear and feel and taste and smell and put all those pieces together to form one coherent understanding or to comprehend really what is happening based on the input from all the senses and benchmark it against history and you know, previous experience and learning and everything else that can way you were raised.
Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, yep, yep. So yeah. No, so like when somebody is trying to understand, you know, I always encourage them to adopt a mindset of being inquisitive instead of being assumptive. [inaudible]. So to be inquisitive would say like to have your mental puzzle put together and then look at the puzzle in your mind and say, what does this mean? What's the deeper meaning of what I'm seeing, the deeper meaning of what I'm hearing is what I'm seeing aligned with what I'm hearing. If it isn't aligned, why is it not aligned? Why am I seeing this? But hearing that and so to, to be inquisitive and to ask these kinds of questions, but then to force yourself to answer them as well. And it asks a question like, is this what I expected? So this is where you bring in your past experiences, your biases, you know, cause we bring expectations to the table.
We bring expectations from what dispatch tells us we're going to be seeing when we get there. And that can cause you to actually see what dispatch told you was going to be happening. Even if it isn't happening, you're literally hallucinating a reality. And, and I have people in my program say, no, no, no, that would never happen to me. Ranch. This is all psychobabble theory. You know, and I, I appreciate the fact that you learned all this in a book, but it would never happen to me. Fail. And I gotta, I gotta sit there in a program and try to convince responders that they can hallucinate, reverse hallucinate, go deaf. The auditory exclusion that you talked about, they can tell lies and not even realize they're telling lies. And I try to convince them that these things can happen and I can just see in the faces of people that they're, that some [inaudible] just not buying it, you know, they're just like, ah, that's, that would have maybe happen to somebody lesser experienced than me, but it wouldn't happen to me.
But then then what I do is I have this exercise that I do where I demonstrate it and we run this exercise and I tell the people to be, I said, well by the time this exercise is done, some of you are going to hallucinate, some of you are going to reverse hallucinate. Some of you are going to go deaf in, some of you are going to go blind and some of you are going to tell lies. You're ready. And then I would go, I do my exercise. And there they are with their eyes about the size of 50 cent pieces. When I, when I asked somebody, you know what did the person in this, in this clip that I showed, what did this person say? Let's just hypothetically say, what did this person say the color of the car was? And they'll say green. And I'll say, well, how confident are you that they said the car was green or completely confident?
That's exactly what they said. No, they didn't. The car, they said the car was yellow. No, they said it was green. I said, I'll play it back and you can do it again, but you put, you put people under stressors, they hear what they want to hear, not what reality is. They hear, they hear things based on past experiences, biases, previous training that they've had. It's just it can turn into a storm of a problem and then when I'm done and they're in there, the exercise is complete. All those people who thought that would never happen to me, they're very humbled because they now realize just how vulnerable they really are to some of these, what I call barriers to situational awareness. And you know, up to that point, I can just see the skepticism. Oh yeah,
Yeah. I start off, I gave a talk at [inaudible] firehouse expo in Nashville, you know, and I started off all my talks, especially in community. And I say, listen, before we even begin, I need you to take judgment and set it down. You can pick it up when you're done and you can take it out of here. But if you can't set it aside for the next two or three hours or however long we're together, just leave. Right. Cause I, I can't overcome that barrier. But yeah, you're right. Yeah.
I say, I see, I say the same thing. I just use different words. I say, just Greg, give me a gift of your open mind. That's all I'm asking you. And then, and then when I'm done, you can close it up and throw everything away that I said. But that's given me the gift.
Yeah. I told her, I was like, the only reason I'm alive today. The thing that's kept me alive throughout my entire career is curiosity is just the willingness to look, just the willingness to ask the question and, and not, you know, I think we have this perception that being curious or asking questions is a nuisance, is a pain in the ass, you know, blah blah blah. Like, that's my, I grew up that way. You know, guys like, don't ask that, you know, you don't need to know blah, blah blah. But really just being curious, am I seeing what I'm seeing is this, you know, am I feeling this correctly? Am I reading like there was just, just this internal curiosity button that constantly is fluctuating and it's kept me alive. It's kept me, I can, I can point to many times, you know, why is the we just, we just, you know, we just found it properly. Why is there no smoking alleviation? Why is there no heat alleviation in this building? You know, what's going on right now? Like this constant model of curiosity in discovery of you know, what's actually happening versus you know, not being connected in this fitness phase right now. Right. So I, I'm with you when it's that, you know, it's that place of perpetual discovery, right. It's an attitude to me, it's like a way of being, we just are curious or we're not in some ways. Yeah.
Yeah. And I think, I think it, you know, as you say, curiosity has saved you. I think that curiosity is definitely a trainable skill set. You know, you can't really say that a person is either born with curiosity or they're not, and if you don't have it, you never will. I mean, there maybe are certain talents, like, you know, for me, I would never be gifted in basketball. Right. You know, that's just one of the things, you know, genetically that was for me, that option. Yeah. No matter how much I try, just don't think I'm ever going to get really good at it. But curiosity. Curiosity is a, is a trainable mental exercise that the more you practice it, the better you get at being curious about why things are the way they are. You're literally by being curiosity, developing situation, awareness.
I think that's what's missing in a lot of these areas. It's like this is situational awareness, curiosity, openness, all these subtle underpinning traits. Like they are all there. They need to be exercised, right? They are just like muscle. They are just like tactical training. They are just like running a hose line or doing a two minute drill or you know, shooting and putting rounds down range, senior front sight post, right? They are a skill that when you give over to them and you begin to develop them, they all take on their life of their own and they're, to me, those are the skills that'll save your ass down the road. You know, somewhere at some point. Yeah, I'm with you.
Yeah. So is is I, you heard me talk about jigsaw puzzle pieces, you know, gathered up by the senses. They, they come together form that picture of understanding Curio. One of the ways that curiosity would be extremely helpful is when one of when you formed the picture in your mind and you think you know what's happening and then here comes a piece of jigsaw puzzle that just it doesn't fit. You know, you know your puzzles put together and it's an outdoor scene and all of a sudden you've got a jigsaw puzzle piece of a typewriter. Then you say, well how does that fit my, you know, this is a field and a stream and a mountain, and now here's a typewriter. Some people who lack curiosity will take that piece and say, Oh, those darn kids mixed up the puzzles again, and throw that piece away as if it's coincidence instead of displaying the curiosity of how does this new piece of information make sense in context to the, my perception of what reality is.
So you know what I, what I tell folks is, you know, perception is 100% of the time reality and the mind of the person who has that perception. So how do you know when you have a flawed perception of reality? One of the telltales is confusion. So you've got this picture of understanding, here comes this typewriter that doesn't fit into the, you know, the mountains and the streams to have the curiosity to, to say, why does that piece not fit? I'm confused. And when you can realize that you're confused because you have puzzle pieces that don't fit your perception, there's a good chance that your perception of reality is flawed. And the telltale indicator is your confusion. Yes.
Yeah. I th you know, it's so, it's so crazy to me because also like any exploration in my world, like I've done, I've done a lot of deep dive into then, you know, sensation like triggered sensation, right? Or intuition or gut feeling. Well, however you would call it, right? To look at, you know, sensation registers before thought. So when I find something, when I find that odd piece, when there's a piece that, that I don't think fits, there's a, you know, there's an actual feeling that occurs inside like, wait, something's wrong or something doesn't work. And then I have to work through the cognitive process, right. To transition into, well, is it wrong or does it go somewhere else or what is the like, why? Why does it exist? Right, and then it goes back to that level of curiosity to explore it,
But you're forcing yourself down a pathway of critical thinking when you do that. Not everybody does that. You do that, but there are, there are a lot that don't and those that don't are then more vulnerable than those that do.
Yeah. I want you to, I'm going gonna I'm going to back you on this line because I don't want to skip over that word and because this is the, I don't have too many naysayers to listen to the podcast and if they do, they only listen to one episode and I've usually pissed them off so then they go on and do something else, which is great. Which is why this exists. Yeah. I have no qualms about it whatsoever, so I'm going to make another call out here. If you're, if you're already kind of going, Oh no, sure, I want to listen to this, then this is, this'll definitely have you hit close on the app. If you don't take these things on, if you don't step up and recognize that this is a part of your job and a measure of protection for yourself, those you work with the people around you and those you serve, then you are leaving yourself vulnerable to something, right.
You are, you are completely do you have a chink in the armor if you're not willing to really take that on and you're making an absolute, you're putting everybody and yourself at risk, everyone around you at risk. Yeah. And you know, you and I could spend probably two or three more hours going through incident after incident after incident where, you know, the, the skillset wasn't developed and like you said, it's why it's not a sit down first day class, you know, or within the context and, and, and, and at depth. You know, we leave ourselves at risk. We're great at that. And I think that's, that's one of the frustrations of the, you know, of the industry we live in across the board and military is no different. It's, I mean it's and you know, I will have sat in a lot of people's quote unquote situational awareness classes in your life. All they really deal with is that first layer of, of perception, right? The perceptive process of it. And that to me is a very small factor in the, in the larger equation. Yeah.
We haven't even talked about the third component. So we've got the first component perception. The second opponent come on understanding and the third component in my opinion is probably the most important and least developed of all three. And that is prediction. Being able to accurately predict future events before they happen to be able to envision outcomes ahead of them. You know, hindsight, hindsight's always 2020 and it can be really painful. You know, trying to teach the foresight of anticipation of bad outcomes as things are unfolding in the moment is really the gold of situational awareness, you know? But to be able to make accurate predictions, you gotta have perception and understanding. You know, I, the way I teach it as foundation, walls and roof, the foundation is perception. The walls are understanding and the roof is the prediction. While you can't start with the roof, the roof, the last part that goes on the house, the prediction of the future is predicated on having good perception and good understanding that allows you to make accurate predictions.
And you know, I, I teach a process for prediction, but I always, always put a disclaimer on there that even though I'm going to give you a formula for how to predict the future, I can't tell you how to predict every possible future outcome. But if you use the formula increases your probability. But there's no, there's no guarantees because there are some things that happen in life that are just completely unpredictable. I know some people who've had tremendously good situation awareness in the moment and still got blindsided by a tragic outcome that you, you, you couldn't see coming. I mean, after the fact, somebody can then see and criticize it. But in the moment, yeah, let you know, I think a one real quick fire example is these firefighters responded to a commercial building fire. They went on the fire attack and it was it was w it was a setup.
They didn't know it. The building, it was on fire. They opened a door to a room where the fire was and the arsonist had set a bucket of gasoline so that when they opened the door, the bucket of gasoline would spill and ignite. Well, who could predict that? Nope. Right, right. Yeah. There's just some things that are happened that are so far outside the normal w two when two firefighters got shot at up in West Webster, New York on Christmas Eve into Christmas morning I had the national, somebody from national media call me and say, well, isn't that something that they're taught to be, you know, prepared for? And yeah, that's what I laughed at. I mean, I didn't even grant them an interview. I said, you know, tell me, tell me that we're not being recorded so I can tell you what I want to say.
And they said, no, no, we haven't started recording yet. And I said, well, that's not no firefighter. I mean, unless you may be, you're from inner city. And you're in a crime stricken area, but in suburbia America, no firefighting crews shows up on the scene of a house fire two in the morning and expects that somebody to range is going to be laying in the bushes across the street with a sniper rifle waiting to, to kill you. It's, it's not even in our psyche to think that way. And again, in some areas of some cities may, yeah.
But even then, that's still a big leap. Yeah, it's a big leap. I mean that's, we just had the guys in San Diego a couple of years ago, you know, checked a welfare cops called enforced the door. They go, of course the door guy inside with an automatic pistol lights off Adam, you know, I mean, it's like, wait a minute, the game, the game is changed, you know? I mean, and, and these are the tools, these are the new tools, right? I don't care, you know, I always said 99% of your ability to successfully negotiate the outcomes to whatever you face is all internal process. You know, gear, equipment, training, everything else. 1%. It's your internal ability between your body and mind to be able to pay attention, understand, comprehend, see what's so mega decision and take the actions you need to take and then adjust. You know, I always, I always teach my 10 degree roll 10 degrees left or right, right.
I always say you can do your three 60 walk around, you take the door, you go a step inside the conditions of change. I don't need to change my decision or my mission, but I do need to blow 10 degrees left or right based on the conditions as they're occurring. You know what I mean? You know, rather than getting into this constant iteration of, you know decision making around it, it's like, no, I'm, I'm actually in flow with the moment as it's happening and when I'm there, the environment will tell me what I need to do. Get out, stay in, move here, move there. Like the conditions will guide me. And I think that's part of like part of this core aspect of situation. Awareness is giving, giving a little bit of that over to the conditions as they are to help you really assess and guide, you know yourself. I'm kind of a weird a fruitcake like that a little bit Gus, I've been called. Yeah,
But you're, you're right. As long as the person is is comprehending the clues that the environment is providing to them. Some, some ignore the clues, you know, they, they go, they go places they shouldn't go to do what they shouldn't be doing and then justify it in the name of something that they were trying to accomplish. And, and, and, and die in the process or get severely injured in the process where the clues in the indicators were telling them this, this is, this is a no go situation, but you know, bravado and ego is going to say, don't tell me
Arrogance. Arrogance will get you 100%. Yeah. It was a very politically correct way of saying it chief. But yeah, people make really pissed board decisions in a moment based off of what they, how they believe they should act or what they quote unquote should do. Or, or how they want to be perceived. I know we've all done that. We've all been young, stupid firefighters or cops or whatever else. We've all, you know, done things. We probably, hello, we look back on and they're like, all right, well dumb ass. I'll do that again. Right.
Okay. You know, you, you, you said how it'll be perceived. That's a big deal. How making, making decisions based on how we think others will perceive our Curry. If I make a conservative decision, I will be labeled a coward. If I make an aggressive decision, then I will be seen as a courageous or heroic. And there are, there are plenty of people who their guidepost is what will others think of me, not what is the, what is the smart thing to do? Yeah. They make the decisions based on, based on their perception, their perceived judgment that's going to come to them and, and ignore all those
Percent. I mean I can, I, you know, the part of this for this podcast is, you know, being a very authentic and real, I was that way for some of my time in the fire service. It was like I, yeah,
Yeah. And yeah,
Yeah know if you weren't, then I don't think you come to this place where you can look back and learn, you know what I mean? Where you can be like, okay, I really, you know, I made those decisions and put myself even sometimes maybe my crew at risk because I wanted to be the, you know, the fireman. I wanted to be the guy who did this or that.
And well, and some, some of that when we were younger. If I could, you know, not the, not the justified some of the foolish things we did, but I will say this for myself, there was a time when I did foolish things cause I didn't know what totally know. I didn't know I didn't, yeah. Some of, some of it might have been ego driven, but some of it was, I just didn't know any better about what is good decisions. And bad decisions. And most of the time I locked my way into success. And there were some times when I didn't. And thankfully, you know, I never suffered anything more than short hospital. You know, and I, I don't even want to, I don't even want to laugh about that cause it's, it's tragically serious how close I came on some occasions to paying a price that would leave me either dead or disabled.
And I, and I just didn't know better now to the defense of firefighters today, I think there's, I think we are a smarter group today. There is better training, there is better science, there is better ways. There are, there are ways to accelerate learning and to get smarter quicker and online training. And I'm not saying it's all about online, but that's the, that's one component of it. I mean we have access to so much now that we didn't before. You know, like, like my department, my department when I was young, of course it was before the internet was invented. If we wanted to have a guest speaker come in, we had to hire that person, have them come in and speak in our fire station. Well now we can beam them in virtually, you know, and literally just put them up on a big screen, have a conversation with them, let us, let them train us.
You know, they're in, they're in California, we're in Idaho and we're conducting a training session with with a significantly name speaker that's highly sought after and they didn't even have to leave their house. And we're, we're having our drill in, we're getting this training, you know, there's so many opportunities now to be smarter at this craft and for that we should all be thankful. And I think many are taking advantage of it. Some still aren't, but I think many are. And, and I'm encouraged by that. I'm so impressed by how smart some of these younger firefighters that I meet, you know, and how, how, you know, how committed they are to the craft. It's, you know, I, I don't, I don't teach as many police officers, which is the say occasionally I'll have a police officer in my program if, if the fire department opens it up for a regional participation. So I, you know, I, I'm sure the same thing is, can be said there about the policing profession. So I don't want to leave them out of this conversation, but I see it, I see it, I see it directly, you know, with the, with the firefighters in it that, you know, that I'm meeting along the way and I'm very encouraged
Time over there too. And, and it is, you're watching the same, you're watching the same emergence, right. And you're seeing the same cultural breaks and you're seeing the, almost the identical issues. There are, there's different complexities clearly that they deal with over the fire service. There are a whole new host of issues that, that, yeah. That they have to deal with. And you know, and, and, you know, I mean most of the law enforcement farmers across the U S are, you know, 10 people or less, right? I mean, they're smaller. There are people out there today, there's a couple of people that have sent me emails that listen and they're like, you know, the one cop for, you know, the net if they call for help, it's 20, 30 minutes before anybody's getting there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I, I always say, you know, when I grow up, right.
And projects are you same way, right. I mean, we used to take a house fire with, you know, nine, 12 guys that you know now requires 52 and seven chiefs and eight safety officers and you know, everybody else. I mean, yeah, it was a total different world and, but those are the things that I almost feel sometimes like the way we've, you know, we watched the pendulum swing I think in the fire service to, to to a hyper safety environment, which then almost created a little bit of a, a break point between, you know, the level of awareness necessary to kind of mitigate the incident. Right? Yeah. More people, more resources, better gear, better equipment. I dropped my situation, warn his profile. I bring that profile down a little bit, you know, you know, why, why do we have more gear, better safety, everything else and greater injuries or, you know, issues still going on. And I think it's, cause we kind of create this false blanket of protection in our way at times too.
I've had firefighters say to me I don't need situational awareness training. That's from, that's what my company officer's supposed to do, or I don't have to worry about my safety. We have a safety officer on the incident scene who supposed to watch out for me. And I think, where's the, where's the personal ownership? This, you know, they can, they can only see so much. You got to own your own awareness. You got to own your own safety sphere, you know, and it's, and yeah. Then there, there are some that, that, as you say, they, I think they're the sharpness of their awareness, the sharpness of their self. They're, they're owning their own safety is somewhat dulled by some of these, some of these safety nets that we need, that we have in place. And I don't want to say they're, they're bad, but for you know, for every good that happens that you know, there's, there's a bad offset, a ying and a yang.
And, and you know, the yang has been that we've done a lot to improve safety, but the yang has been that there are some people that are now probably the last vigilant because they feel more cocooned, you know, think about turnout gear. You know, back in my day we didn't have, we didn't even have Nomex hoods when I started. We turned the air flaps down. Then when your ears started to get hot and it was time to leave and now we're, so, we're so encapsulated that you know, that there, it is probably very easy for a responder to stay in an environment beyond the point when they should leave because not feeling the heat that is the indicator that they're in, you know, they're in a potentially vulnerable spot. And so for the good, that turnout gear has been progressed there, there is a potential downside to that.
I think it's a, I think it's an interesting conversation. I mean, I think it's one that never ends, you know, I mean, I talk about, you know, awareness of multiple levels, you know, situation, the environment, others and you know, myself like what's going on with myself and what's happening? What am I bringing to the table, what's going on at home? Like there's so many things that, that definitely you know, can impact us, knock us off our game. And I, I think so. I'm going to, I'm going to say this and I would like you to either, you can feel free to like rip it apart and be like, no way Jeff. You know, I think at the end of the day, please, by all means, I love it. I love it when we get into that. But I fundamentally kind of draw it down to a simple fact that says, listen, at the end of the day, your entire job is to be present, is to be here now and everything is, is pulling to take you away from this right now.
Work, home life, dispatch, sirens, house on fire, whatever it may be. Everything is trying to pull you out of what's happening right now and your only real job is to stay connected to what's actually taking place. Because that's, that will be the that, that the I, the answer lies there, right? If you're not privy to the situation then, then you can't do things like you talked about like being in that predictive posture, right? Seeing and anticipating what's, what could happen next and flowing accordingly with it. So I don't know if that's my, that's my, my thought in the,
No, you're, no, you're, you're, you're absolutely right. And, but one of, one of the challenges is that is we are so subjected to distractors every day that I think we're losing in general Ted scoff the emergency scene and just talk general life skill. We're losing the skillset of being in, staying in the moment. You know, I was just out to dinner with, with my family the other night and we're, it was a pretty nice restaurant. We are going, you know, celebrating a birthday and, and I looked over at the next table and there was mom and dad and all three kids all on their phones during this nice dinner out at a very nice restaurant. None of them in the moment unless they were texting with other, and I'm not rolling that out, but well I S I should actually, four of them were on the phone.
The youngest one was on an iPad watching or playing some game on her iPad. And none, none of them were in the moment mindful at all of anything that was happening around them. And I think the reason I want to tie this back to what you said is I think the more we allow ourselves to be distracted out of the moment, the more that becomes kind of like a habit that we develop is to allow ourselves so easily those distracted moments. And if we're not practicing that mindfulness in our routine of, of our daily life, then we're not developing a habit that on an emergency will pay off for us. And that is the habit of being in the moment to be here and now to be mindful of your environment. Because we're so used to all of this distraction in our lives. And I'm not anti social media or anti-technology, it's, it's, it's, it's, this is we're, we're talking a societal challenge. I want somebody, the other day I was sent at a red light. I want somebody the other day, literally with their head down on their phone, walk right in front of a moving car and the car was going slow enough that they could slam on the brakes, blow the horn. The person was so startled by them blowing the horn, they drop their phone, then pick up their phone and then scrape the driver
Underground. Yeah.
For blowing their horn and causing them, causing them to drop their phones. Definitely crazy. It's crazy. I mean
Like the seriousness of this and that's where, you know, I'm sure you do it in your classes. It's like how do I correlate the seriousness of what we're discussing to the job? Right. And, and that's the thing, it's like if you're, it's the little subtle pieces over the course of the day, how you exist in your normal day. If you're hyper distracted, always on your phone, always just connected, always thinking into the future or you know, dealing with whatever has happened earlier in the day or last week or whatever else. If you're not practicing that, that level of breath and where am I? And okay, I'm right here and this is what's going on. Like it's a skill I get is a, it is a perishable skill and yeah, and that will lead you to not see what you need to see, make a bad decision, take a, you know, go down a course of action that's going to lead in a way that leads you down the road and in a negative result that you don't really want. So yeah, crazy, right?
[Inaudible] And you probably will not even realize that you're boiling down that route to an undesirable outcome until, until it's too late. And then you'll look back and say, wow, I could have been more perceptive of the things that were happening around me. Now as I look back on it, man, I missed this. I missed this, I missed this. I should've saw that. I should've heard that. I should've known what that meant. You know, and that, that hindsight is such, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, if they open themselves up to learning in a first, some kind of after action assessment that kind of captures the, the, the factual information, you know, thin slices the event allow you to see how the slow motion timing of how it unfolds. Then many, many times those, those lessons reveal themselves and allow people to see what otherwise they, they didn't for a variety of reasons.
You know, any of you articulate, we wrap up today. Any other, any last final thoughts or anything for everybody that that you wanna leave anybody with? Yeah, I want to give a, maybe one golden more soul toward toward how to use situational awareness to improve high risk decision making. Right. So this is a a 32nd snippet from, from a a training that would take me an hour to set up. So you're kinda just getting, you know, you just kind of, it kind of coming in right before the credits roll. All right. So as you, as you're setting up to make high risk decisions and you're trying to use situational awareness as the foundation for that, remember to be perceptive of your surroundings, be in the moment as you say, to be to understand your environment and to be curious, you know, bringing the curiosity and the questions to try to make those puzzle pieces fit together.
And then when once you get there and you understand what's going on, you're gonna make a decision. The decision, you know, is a choice from alternative. So you've got to have at least two alternatives when you're making a decision. So you should be thinking, I've got decision a or decision B. And what I try to encourage people to think about is you should always have like one decision that your aggressive kicked butt, take names, decision option and one decision option that's conservative. The just in case decision a doesn't end up being such a good idea. I've got an alternative. I'm a little more conservative decision to make. But if all you ever train on is aggressive action and you never train on conservative action in the moment, you'll not even think of a conservative. You only think of the aggressive cause. That's all you've all you've trained on.
Okay? So make your decision. But before you take that decision and put it into action, I want you to pause for just a moment. See if you go decision straight to action, you literally can take an action without really thinking about is this going to work or not? So what I want your, I want your listeners to do is make a decision and then take a slight pause and make a prediction about the outcome of that decision. Kind of mentally look ahead in your movie and see the outcome of the decision that you just made. And try to see whether it's going to turn out well or not. And this is just a one to five second look into the future. You know, what you're trying to do is just kind of anticipate the landmines that may lay ahead of that decision before you put it into action and then see the landmines.
So the whole thing is perception, understanding, decision, prediction, then action. And of course then you would assess whether that action worked or not. And then it takes you back through the cycle again of perception, understanding decision that the big takeaway here is once you make your decisions, always pause and make a prediction that allows you to just momentarily look into the future and see if that plan will work. Or if there's some landmines that might cause you to think about not taking that action. And that just momentary pause might keep you from charging ahead with an action.
No, I thank you. Thank you for that. I really ferry, that's my gift. Very strong. Very, very real. And I like what you said about like giving myself the choices, right? Okay. Here's the aggressive posture. Here's the conservative posture. You know, here are the two things. Because then if I've already mentally exercise those a little bit, you know, and we're talking in rapid succession, you know, very short periods in time, it's, ah, it's not unfamiliar to me to then fall back on. Right. Or it's not unfamiliar to shift. It's kind of already been, you know, it's, it's, it's available if you will. You know, I think I chief, I, I really like that and, and I appreciate you given, given your time today to us. I, yeah, yeah. Well we could talk forever. Absolutely. [inaudible]
Back in cycle and stuff. Cause this, this whole month we're talking about, you know, core aspects of mental acuity. And part of that explanation now to the audience is how do I make these logical cognitive transitions moment by moment, by moment, you know, whether big or small. And you know, this is, this is a huge component of it. And I really, I hit, I'll be honest with ya, I rip a lot of people apart for the way they teach situational awareness. And I've, you know, cause it's, you know, there's a lot of garbage out there. And S Oh no. Well, but I think you're, but I, I, I, I've, I've, you know, I've gone through and done my research. You wouldn't be on the podcast if I didn't think you actually hadn't had delivered something of substance. Right. I've sat in too many. Give me a pill stuff.
Sure.
Yeah. Yeah. Well you're, you're, you're, you're right. You're right. You're right. The column, the task, cause this is one of those things I say Jeff, is if you teach it wrong, you can cause more harm than not teaching it at all. You know? Yeah. I'm teaching. Yeah. If somebody said, how do I do brain surgery? And if you'd really don't know, but you try to show them and then they go and do it, that's more harmful than to say, I don't know. My advice to you is don't do it. You've done less harm to try to not teach them the wrong way then than to not teach them at all. And I wish some of these people who really are situational awareness would their heart's in the right place. I truly believe it is. They're saying things that just, it does. It's the same thing with mindset. It makes me, it makes me [inaudible]
Mental attitude, mindset, development, any of that stuff. It is, it is graded me for years. I mean this, the operation mindset, the program originated w I sat, you know, the agency forever had this combat mindset course they taught, which is awful, just awful. And I sat in at one day and I, I looked around and I looked at the guy sitting next to me and I'm like, okay, none of these people are going to combat nobody in this room. They all work for the agency. They're not trigger pullers. Nobody in this organization is, is directly engaged in combat operations. That's not the way we work. You know, there's a very small segment on the paramilitary side that does certain things, but, but why are we in the first slide of a mindset class? We're wrong. You know, by teaching these people combat mindset, like, like, like, like this is, there's a, a skewing that happens.
And so I really appreciate what you do. I appreciate what you said today. I think you're, I really I love the approach on some stuff. That last little bit was, was gold. You're right, it is gold. And so I'm gonna make sure that you all, your information's up on the show notes on the thank you website so that anybody that follows through can get in touch with you, can link into you. I'll make sure your website's up and all the information is out there for everybody to to access you. And, you know, chief, I just, I appreciate you coming on and taking the time today. It was a big ask and I'm glad we could make it happen. Awesome. Stand by one sec and I'm glad we could make thanks, Jeff. I really appreciate it.
All right. Welcome back to mindset radio. This is your Thursday episode. If you caught Tuesdays, you know where we are. You know we're talking about planning for the new year. You know, we're talking about taking a look at ourselves and trying to figure out like what in the hell we want out of this year and how we're going to get it. And on Tuesday, you know, we talked a lot about discovery and you know, the real purpose there was to get more in touch with what's important to us because all of this is going to lead to a point here where we're going to begin to create some clear intentions for ourselves and what we want to operate like throughout the year, kind of in all aspects of our lives. And so, you know, that's why we kind of take a look at what, what do we want right now?
What are we frustrated by? What are our deeper fears? Like what keeps us up at night and then what do we really aspire to be? And so that was Tuesday's episode. If you didn't catch that one, then I highly recommend you just kind of push pause real quick. Go back, listen to that one first and then come forward into this one because we're going to build on that episode and really start taking a look at how we take kind of what we learned in that exploration and in that place and start to put it into some clear action plans. So if you did the exercise with me on Tuesday or he kind of went back and listened and did it, awesome. If you didn't, I'm going to do a wrap up Friday, uh, as a Facebook live in the Facebook mindset radio groups. If you're not a part of that, go ahead and pop in.
I will backtrack and add that back link into the show notes and stuff for you as well. But just the way that we've shaped up this week, I'm going to have to do on Friday. I'm on a plane tomorrow, so now bear with me a little bit. Well, we'll get that live up on Friday. We'll go through some of the, uh, uh, the actual forms and the downloadables that'll be available for ya. Uh, and so all that will be up and ready to go if you want to do that and kind of listen back through some of it or work through it with me. But even if you did the mental exercise on Tuesday, if you really got kinda down to where you are, right, what do you currently want current wants and frustrations, kind of the current right now situation, what is it I want, what's frustrating me?
And then future look what are my biggest fears and then what do I really aspire to be? And so today what I really want to do is, uh, kind of begin to focus and break those down into kind of quadrants. And so if you did this exercise, more than likely what you found was my want and frustrations almost mirror each other. A lot of times, you know, if I want to be more physically fit, my frustration is I don't have time to be at the gym or it's tough to fit into my schedule or I feel, you know, overwhelmed by my day and I'm exhausted, et cetera. Right? So if you really look at it, you can often kind of find the want and then the frustration that's associated with it. And if you really want to go a little bit further, you can even take that one.
It's like, okay, I want to be in shape. Great. Why? Like go a layer deeper. Why do I want to be in shape? Why is that important to me? What will that do for me? You know, I have a, I feel better physically in my body. I don't wake up with aches and pains. I don't walk around feeling lethargic. Most of the time I have more energy. Uh, I've got a little bit more vitality. I get a little bit better pep in my step. Maybe my physical appearance is better and I feel better about myself. It's gonna roll into the comfort and confidence I have to take on and deal with my life. Right. So that just kind of an example. That's, that's a good example for me. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that on Friday, uh, related to my own stuff.
And you fill it in if, uh, you know, you want to get promoted at work. Okay. Why, what does it actually do for you? Yeah, I'm sure there's some financial gain and it feels good to be promoted. But what's important about you being promoted? What's important about you making the next rank or being in a particular unit or making the grade somewhere or transitioning to a different role. Like why is that important to you? And if you go deeper and deeper and deeper, I think what you'll even find there is that actually begins to link into aspirations. And so this is why I kind of love this exercise and this is why it's going to take a little bit of time to like roll through this. It's not something you just kind of sit down and bam knock out. You kind of got to spend some time mulling this over, take a look at it and then come back to it and go a little bit deeper with it.
So let's kind of back up just a little bit. Let's go into simplistic fashion of it cause I like you to kind of get somewhere with it, right? It just doesn't need to linger and you can do the deep dive a little bit later with it. But right now let's kind of take the face value of it. Let's take one of your wants or frustrations. So I either want to eliminate my frustrations or I want to fulfill on something it is I want, right? So let's kind of stay in the current PLA process. Here's what I want you to think about. What is life look like currently for you? If you take a want, if, if I want to be in shape, if that's a want of mine, what does life look like for me? What's the current right now? Truth that exists. The truth is I'm not going to the gym when I need to be going to the gym.
I'm not giving the time and attention that I need to, to my body and my physicality and my working out and my, uh, my health in a lot of ways. You know, that may be very true. Uh, you know, I don't feel great day in and day out. Aches and pains. I wake up a little bit more lethargic. I wake up sore, I'm tired most days. I don't have the energy to really push through my days and be great the way I want to be. Great. Kind of all the way through my life. Like that's the current scenario. Then if I kind of really take a look at it, it's like, ah, I don't like that. Okay, cool. Let's set that aside for a minute. What's my desired state? Right? If I could snap my fingers right now and wake up and be physically fit or have different state of being, what would that look like?
And so this is a good point to take a look at it and be like, okay, well, you know, I'd be going to the gym regularly and I would feel good about going into the gym. Like I would be propelled a call to the gym because there's success there because I have a tie in there because I want to do it and I want to do it because I feel better. I look better, I feel more confident in my body and who I am and how I look and you know, all these things. Then I've got more energy throughout the day. I feel stronger, you know, I feel more capable, whatever I'm, I feel more ready for whatever life may throw at me. Right? That's, that's that desired picture. So once we take a look at that, then we're going to start going down into the next step.
And again, the forms will be available at the end of the week for you. But that desired result, like what's the outcome or what's the shift if I'm currently here, but I want to look like this or I want to be like this or I want to have this in my life, what is that? So let's take a look at that and let's start listening out. What's the desired result that we want to produce and list it out. Like, write it out, doesn't have to be long, doesn't have to be some long sentence or anything else. They can be bullet points, they can be a couple of different things and you can make the list as long as you want. So I'm going to list those out. Right? Desired result is I'm, you know, in great shape. Okay, cool. Now the question is what are the obstacles and objections that are in my way of being in great shape?
Like what's the bullshit I run in myself? Or how do I create my day that doesn't support that if I want it, cool, well, you know, how does it feel to want rad, but what's in my way? What am I not doing? I'm not scheduling my day appropriately. I'm not responsible for myself in cutting out that time or segmenting that time. You know, and I'm using this as an example cause I think this is one that resonates with a lot of us along the way. Uh, and a lot of what we deal with and so, you know, this is the, this is the component piece to that.
Now [inaudible]
you know, so again, what are the obstacles? What are the objections? What am I saying to myself? Well, I'm too tired. Well, I don't have time. Well I need to be there or somebody needs my attention there. Or you know, I've had a long shift or we ran, you know, we're up all night running calls, running EOS calls where we had a storm and we were chasing fire alarms all night. Like whatever the objections is and the obstacles are, but just be and call them out. Like just be truthful with yourself and just list out what they are. Okay. I mean that's, that's really, that's all I'm asking you to do and it's all we really need to do in some ways, but I'm going to list those out and I'm just going to write the next column and just go, okay, here's my desired result and here's my objections and here's my obstacles in the way to having that result.
And then now what I want to do is I want to explore the options. Like, this is my life. And you know, we don't have quote unquote, the perfect life that we want in a lot of ways, right? We don't have sometimes the freedom to do what we want to do or work out when we want to work out or eat the way we want to eat or be be who it is we want to be or whatever it is, whatever is there. So within the context of your life, what are the options? Can I get up earlier? Can I just segment a specific time? Can I create a flow pattern that I know I can commit to and be a part of each day? Right? Do I go to a, a group fitness class so I'm a little bit more motivated? Do I need to work out alone?
Do I need a workout buddy? Do I need somebody to hold me accountable? Which I think is kind of crap, but you know, I mean, every once in a while it helps to have somebody kicking you in the ass. Um, you know, what is it? What are the options in front of me? I could hire a trainer or I could, you know, download an app. I could, you know, do whatever. Like there's a million options to achieve that outcome, right? But get real and get clear on some real options that are in front of you and list them out. Now from this point forward, what I want you to do is start to look at two or three actions you can take that will lead you down the path of achieving that result that you want. What are the action steps I'm going to commit to, you know, this program, bam, I'm going to hire this trainer, bam.
I'm going to shift my diet to this, bam. Or you know, I'm going to do whatever it is I'm going to do. Just don't make a bunch. Don't write a bunch out. Don't write 10 or 15 things and don't make it. Don't make it unobtainable. Don't set yourself up for failure. Really call yourself out. That's one of the things that we really deal with in this hundred day challenge is identifying that more often than not, when we commit to something, we're actually setting ourselves up for failure. Because we haven't looked all the way through it. So do me a favor, just pick two or three specific actions and make them simple and achievable. Period. Every day. That's it. That's all I want you to do. And from that point then we're going to bring those action items into reality. And so what I want you to do is break your calendar out.
Whatever you use, if you use something on the wall, if you use your phone, whatever it is, I want you to start putting that into your calendar and I want you to contextualize it like what does your hour at the gym give you, feed you, Hey, this is Jeff being stronger, capable, more confident, whatever the whatever, whatever that it is attached to, kind of that want that aspiration, that deeper level of stuff. That's how I'm going to create the context for what my time is and my time being spent is, and then you got to put it into a calendar. You got to create it and put it into existence so that it's there. And if you need to set reminders or you need to set yourself up or you need to communicate it out with the people around you and maybe your husband and wife or whatever, whoever it is, Hey, this is, this is the deal.
This is what I'm doing. This is where it lives. This is my time. This is what I'm committed to. I need your support for that. I need X, Y, and Z. That's got to go into play because if it doesn't go into play, it will falter. Again, that's kind of a critical point of failure. We don't put things with good ideas. We have a desire, we kind of say we're going to do X, Y, and Z, but don't really put it into existence and we don't put it into existence. We're not accountable to ourselves around it, and so that's really this pattern. Okay, and you can blow this thing out and do this at multiple levels at any level you want in any way, shape or form you want, right? We talk about it. We talked about it earlier. You could do it directly related to work.
You could do it directly related to relationship or family or whatever it might be. You could do it related to a promotion or an effort or operation you're going to run or whatever that is. You can kind of wrap this whole thing together and bring it together in a way that really works for you. And so today's episode pretty short, pretty straightforward too. It don't need to spend a lot of time on it. I really hope that you'll pop into the mindset radio, Facebook group that you'll join me from the model alive tomorrow or catch it on replay or catch it, you know, through the show notes and come back and watch. Um, cause I'm actually going to share the forms. I'm going to write them up. You're going to see how I'm going to kind of work through this stuff and we're going to talk through these pieces and parts with a little bit more extensively.
And you know, again, don't hesitate, like reach out. I've got a fire already. Got some notes from a Tuesday's episode with a couple of questions from you guys out there and not a problem, right? Clarification. You're not quite sure. You need one a little bit deep dive. You need some support in there. It's just send me a note, ask. Um, that's an easy day. That's an easy answer. So guys, this is where, this is where I want you to really look at and this is how we're going to set ourselves up for this year and uh, on Friday and a few other episodes. And then moving forward we're going to start looking at how we operate with intention. And this is really the underpinning of all of this because in the research that I've done in the way that we looked at the operational life cycle and the way that we operate in our careers and in our jobs and in cycle, if we don't set ourselves up to step out of the door with intention, if we don't set ourselves to operate with a clear line of intention, with a clear purpose, we are vulnerable to the conditions.
We are vulnerable to the things that will show up. And that's the biggest piece that we need to avoid. So you're going to hear me this season and you know, throwing on or through the beginning of the year. I'm going to do some teach backs online and I'm going to get geeky with you. I'm going to break down the science behind it. I'm going to lay it out for you. I'm going to teach you what it is and why this point of intention is so critical and you're going to begin to see, especially in our operating operating environments, especially with the way the conditions are constantly changing, things are constantly popping. We have to be on our game and the way that you're on the game where you get ahead of the situation, the way you're actually in command and control of it, the way you're going to bring calm, the chaos and all the things that we spent six months talking about this all going online and your ability to ground yourself, anchor in the present moment and operate with a clear line of intention or intentionality necessary to handle whatever it is that comes your way.
So I hope you got something in front of the day. Check out the show notes and join me tomorrow or yeah, join me tomorrow Friday, uh, in the Facebook group. We'll kind of go through this thing to talk about a little bit more. Download the form. She can go to the website later to pick up the forms, work them through yourself. Ask me any questions that you got. I hope that it helps you set yourself up for an amazing until you read 2020. So again, listen, thanks for listening. I really appreciate it. We're going to close out today's show. We're only running probably, you know, 15, 20 minutes in today's, which is perfect. I don't need overrun yet. We don't once it's out, it's out. So, alright ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate you listening. Thanks so much. Next week I've got retired chief Gasaway on with me from essay matters.
It's a great conversation whether you're in the military, the law enforcement community or in the fire service, and if you're in the fire service should probably know who he is. He's on next week. We have a great conversation about situational awareness, but a real deep dive into it. Really enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to getting that podcast out. Uh, because the rest of this month we're going to get into this mental acuity point. This is partly why this week was important, and understanding, kind of creating this intention in the background or this idea of creating intention in the background is critically important because I'm going to be talking about it through each episode or specially on the Thursday episodes where it's you and me talking and I'm trying to, you know, give some little, little teachbacks in there. We're going to really begin to explore how that unpacks and can impact us, uh, either in a great way or can really throw us off our game. So catch me on Friday. Send me any questions that you got. Tune in next Tuesday. Mental acuity chief Gasaway. It's a rad conversation. Listen, have a great weekend. Be safe out there. Happy 2020 and we'll talk to you soon.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 2020. Yes, it is a brand new year, which means a lot of new stuff going on for all of us. And you know, of course you're jam packed with what are you going to do in the new year and new year's resolutions and blah, blah, blah and whatever the end of the day. I think for most of us in this world, we kind of just look at it as another day. I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know if it's like new beginnings, but I will say that even for myself, while I just kind of, I don't get all wrapped into, Hey, new year's resolutions and I should be doing this or I should be doing that, uh, cause nine times out of 10, well it just never works. Anyway, I like to look at what my intention is for the year.
And so this first episode of 2020 and Thursday's episode is just going to be me and you. And we're going to spend a little bit of time working on a few things and talking about some stuff. And I want to give you some tools and really the same tools that I look at and I use kind of each at the beginning of each year. I started this a little while ago, which really helps to set me up and then helps me find kind of my core intention for the year. And you know, what I want, what I want to achieve, what I want out of it, uh, rather than just kind of average goals. And so I want to spend some time with you today, uh, kind of walking you through an exercise I like to do. I'm going to get a little bit more into this. Uh, I'm going to do a live in mindset radio and a group on mindset radio, Facebook group.
Uh, so if you've got a chance pop over, check it out. I'll also probably edit it and post it on YouTube, put it into the show notes so it's available for you this week if you want to come back and visit. Cause you know, I'm not really sure where you listen in the source of the podcast. If you're busy during the day or maybe it's on your drive, maybe you don't have the chance to take notes. This is something you can come back to. You can check out the show notes, you can go over to mindset radio.com it'll be up there. If you're in the Facebook group on set radio, it'll be up there as well. And I'm going to put up some downloadable PDF files that if you don't want to kind of draw it out or whatever else, if you need a little bit of support with it, just download them, pick them up, do the work, uh, take a look at it.
But really what I'd like to do is set us up for a really spectacular year. Now, many of you know and I talked about it towards the end of last year, we are launching our a hundred day challenge. Uh, the official launch date is actually going to be January 16th. Why? Because studies show and it is actually scientifically proven that January 16th is the day almost everyone's new year's resolution fails. It's like the day just, you know, I don't know. Shit goes to shit and you're done and you check out and you don't hold onto it. I mean 16 days into a resolution, it's pretty crazy. Uh, so you know, I don't know if it's right or not, but regardless, that's when we're going to kick this thing off. You're welcome to join any time after that. Uh, cause it'll just flow in the process and it'll be available. And I've had some questions for you guys that listen overseas that you're deployed or you're on about.
Yeah, it'll be fully online, fully accessible. You don't need to be in person anywhere. It'll be up and available. So if you want to do that, make sure you check out mindset radio.com backslash op your line for, if you just go to mindset radio.com on the homepage, you'll see the banner ads for the a hundred day challenge. Click on that. Go through and come on in and join me. I'm looking forward to a good time with it. Now let's talk today. Let's talk about discovery. You know when you think about it, there's this place where we really want to get down to what's important to us, what matters to us, why we do what we do, what the purpose and intention is behind, and that's why I like this exercise. I think because if you really take it on and you look at it, it will begin to unpack for you the roadmap that you need to have in order to produce the results you want to produce or operating.
Why you want to operate or have the life that you want to have. The thing I like about this exercise is you can do it for life, right? You can kind of do it in the big picture if you want to or you can shrink it down and kind of condense it down into your role or your job or your task, or you can separate out your job. You can just look at it from a home life aspect. It doesn't really matter. You can do multiples. You can do it all. Like you can really approach us saying as you want. Now the particular format for this cause, I love giving credit where credit is due, came from a guy by the name of talky Moore. Now you're not going to know talking more than likely unless you happen to be in the services and happen to be a coach somewhere.
But this guy, you know, they call him the million dollar coach. He is a coach of coaches. I had an opportunity to do some work with him a few years ago, be involved in some of his programs. I really appreciate who he is as a human being, what he offers his people that he want to talk about getting like great content, great information and just really learning the guys got it down and you know this particular exercise he uses in a different format and I was able to take a look at the single and wait a minute, this is, there's some real value here outside of kind of the structured business side to it and it's a really neat opportunity for us to look at what we want. So if you're listening and you're driving or whatever else, don't worry about it. Just do it in a thought exercise with me, right?
Just think it out. And then maybe go back and take some notes later if you have the opportunity to break out a sheet of paper and you want to kind of work work at as we talk through it. Brad, if you know you're listening later and you want to go back and do the show notes or watch the video, do that. But I think what I want you to do really is just kind of listened through what we're going to discuss and I'm going to share some of my stuff with you. Uh, and you know, hopefully you get something out of it. And my hope is that this will help guide in setting you up for success this year, right? Wherever you are. So let's get down to it. Here's the exercise. When you look at it, we're going to look at our Watson frustrations and then we're going to look at our aspirations and our fears, right?
And fears and aspirations. We're going to look at kind of the current present moment, what's there for us, and then we're going to look a little into the future and I want to get too far. We may stretch a little bit, but it's always good to take a look forward and to see what's out there because that can begin to align and start to build a path of where it is we want to go. You know, sometimes we can just get lost where we're just feel like we're trudging through day after day after day. I know I do, you know, when I lose kind of sight of my Norstar whose side of my objective or I lose sight of really what I want out of life, you know, and I get bogged down in the day in and day out, grind in the crap going on and really kind of start to, I dunno, I hate to use this word, but almost like fall victim to the circumstances around me to whatever it is.
It really starts to impede my progress, if you will. And so as we begin to look, right, I want to explore and kind of take some background, look at this stuff. And really at the end of the day it becomes about our intention. And, and you'll see later this year and then throughout this season, and we're going to talk heavy about it starting in about March or if you're in the program, you'll get it earlier. We're going to talk about how intention plays out in our operational capability and being intentional, being purposeful, uh, and, and that plays into our awareness and all kinds of stuff. And so we'll get into all that stuff later. But, but really for a minute, I want to help try to set you up for the year. And so if you've got a sheet of paper or you don't, or you're just kind of visualizing it and doing this as a thought work, uh, you know, just go ahead and draw me out kind of a quad, right?
Four squares or you know, draw a big X on the paper. Just give me four sections out there and just think about that for a minute. And in the top left section. Let's look at what we want. Now, we don't often do this with ourselves. We don't really sit down to say, what is it I really want? Like what is it right now, right here, right now, look around. What do I want? You know, if I'm relating it just to my job, do I want to be promoted? Do I want to make SWAT or do I want a promotion or do I want to make detective, do I want to go to this location or you know, do I want to be a part of this unit? Like what is it you want? And don't be afraid to say it cause nobody else is around you, right?
This is your time to reflect, to actually sit down and look at what it is you truly want. You know, if we look at the big scale of life, what do I want? I want to be fit. I want to be physically strong and capable. You know, for mine, my notes, I want to be physically fit. I want to be strong and capable. I want to be able to do 10 pull ups without question, like walking down the park and be like, Oh, there's a pull up bar. Let me hit it and knock out 10 you know, those are things I want. What do I want? I want to, you know, a stable income, right? Income for me, he's been up and down over the last couple of years. It hasn't been great. It's been stressful. So really what I'd like is this year's to stabilize that right then not to be much, just bring it into stability, bring it into where it works and provides me just the basic necessities of life for what I enjoy doing and how I enjoy living my life.
Right? So, so I look at myself, one, uh, physicality, right? I want to be a more physically capable. I want to be stronger. I want to be faster. That's what I want. I want to generate a stable, stable source of income from a single point where I can trust and rely on that and I can kind of pick that stress block off of me. What else do I want? I want, you know, I want good, healthy friendships. I want friendships that add to me, not take away from me. I want people in my life and around me that really get me, that I can have great conversations with at depth, um, that I can share in their life. They can share in mind that we can go be adventurous and do stuff right. I mean, those are, those are some of my top wants for 20, 20, um, you know, of course I want my children to be healthy and happy.
I want a better relationship with them, own, expand that relationship with them and want to meet them where they are. Uh, you know, I want to grow the relationship with my family and you know, for me, I want to, I want to feel more stable in my own life. You know what I mean? This has been a, is most of, you know, and you've listened through the podcast. This has been a journey. It has been a journey to kind of discover life newly in some ways. Uh, some of the challenges that have been, uh, shown to me over the last several years and doing this work and taking things on and taking a look at it and then sharing it out with you. You know, the other thing I want, I want more listeners, right? I want to expand the audience. I want to grow our community in a way that I know we're making a great impact.
I mean, I know we already, the emails that you've sent in and the notes that you sent in, unbelievable. It's just unreal and it means so much to me, you know, but I want to expand that. I want to, I want this conversation to go forward. I want the, the operation mindset foundation to really become a major player on the stage for you all this year. I want it to be a resource that you can trust and rely on. I want to bring a different conversation forward. I want you to be engaged and I want to be engaged with you. Like those were my wants this year. And if I don't speak them or I don't share them or I don't really get in touch with what it is, I won't know where to go. And so that's really just the value of exploring that. And I think, I think we have an issue in our world that we just don't speak our own desires, right.
Our own personal wants very often, you know, we worry about everyone else around us. We put everyone else around us in front of us and we don't just sit down to go, you know what about me for a minute? So this is your moment to be, it's okay to be selfish right now. It's okay to actually just think about you and what you want and whatever's there, just write it down right. And just be okay with it. It's just what it is. Now, once you've gone through your wants, you know, and it may be more money, it may be a business, maybe you know, better relationship may be a better relationship with your wife or your girlfriend or your husband or your boyfriend or maybe finding love. I don't know. You know, it could be anything truly and it's okay for whatever it is, but once you get through those wants, here's kind of the flip side to it, right?
Then we're going to look at our frustrations. Like what are we frustrated by? You know, if I'm, I'm looking at my life, what am I frustrated by? Frustrated by, you know, a small budget for the foundation right this minute. I'm frustrated that, you know, we don't have the reach that we want or I don't have the, the extra budget to, you know, run Facebook ads and do the marketing campaign and push us out there as a major well known source for you all. Um, you know, I'm frustrated that I'm stuck doing the podcast backend work constantly. That's just takes a lot to do and a lot to produce and I would love to get that off my plate. But I'm frustrated by that. I'm frustrated by my time and schedule and I don't feel like I've done a very good job so far of, especially over the last six, eight months of giving myself to space and time to work out, to be healthy, to take it on, to meet that challenge, to eat the way I need to eat, right, to do those things.
I'm frustrated by it. I feel constrained and kind of confined by the circumstances of life, if you will. Right? I'm frustrated by that. And so, you know, I want you to actually use you think through it. I want you to feel that for a minute. I want you to feel the frustrations and what that brings about for me, it brings about anxiety, right? Frustration leads to anger. Uh, I'm frustrated most days I'm upset at things. Uh, you know, and that kind of triggers into this not nice GF place. And so really when I look at it, the things that I want, I can almost draw a correlation to the frustration that's, that's really standing in the way of having what I want. I'm going to say that again. If I really look at when I'm frustrated, I'm frustrated by the things that are impeding me from having the things that I want.
And really it's kind of all just circumstantial. I mean, I can do whatever I need to do, right? And that's where I've realigned myself this year to say, okay, well if I want to be in shape and I want to be working out, then I need to set the conditions for that. I need to put myself in a place for that. I need to designate my time for that. And then I need to protect that time. Like it's the most important thing in the world. If I want healthier friendships and healthier relationships, then I have to be willing to say no that the relationships that don't feed me right, that don't advance me, that don't give me what it is that I really want out of life and I've got to be able to segment that stuff. You know? If I want to be promoted at work, well then what is it?
What's frustrating me that I'm not being promoted? What's the road? So when we look at it from a standpoint of wants and frustrations, we can actually begin to build a road map, right when we actually call out the frustration for what it is, and then we can take a step back from it and we can look at it to say, okay, what actions do I need to take to eliminate that frustration? Because if I eliminate that frustration, it will lead me down the path of what it is that I actually want. Right? So it allows me to see what gets in my way. And you know, unfortunately the reality is the kind of kick in the ass is nine times out of 10 it's me. That's in my own way of having what it is I want. So, you know, if I want to raise more money for the foundation, then I've got to work the phones right?
Then I've got to be out on the streets more than I've gotta be out engaging more. That's the way it goes. That's just what I have to do. And so there's the roadmap, right? To alleviate the frustration and achieve what it is I want. Now, that's all kind of current present stuff. And I want you to go as far as deep as you can. I mean, you may have two or three pages of wants and frustrations. Really, if you never done this exercise, if you've never looked at anything this way, you may throw up for a couple of days around what did you want and what it is that's frustrating you. And I really encourage you to do that because getting it out will actually give you the power to create the new path and the new road map around it. Now here's the thing. So if we look in our, if we're looking at our Claude top left our wants, right?
You just them out in their bottom left is our frustrations like what's there? So here's the interesting thing. When we flip over to the other side of the sheet and we begin to look at those other areas, we want to start actually looking at the future a little bit. Now you've heard me say on other podcasts on this one, you know, fear is nothing more than a projection in the future of something that may or may not happen. You know, fear doesn't exist right here in this moment. It is very much a projection into the future. And so when we start looking at aspirations and fears, right? Those are the next two blocks. What we aspire to and then what we fear. And you know, when you look at what you aspire to, it's like how do you see yourself in the future? Who do you see yourself to be?
What is it you really want to be in the future? Who do you want to be in the future? How do you want to be viewed in the future? What do you want people to say about you when you're gone? What do you want written on your tombstone? What will the conversation be about Jeff Bandman when he's Jeff Bandman no longer exists. Will it be while the guy was an asshole and you know, always frustrated and always upset. It's stop. Or will it be, Hey, this guy gave everything he could do, the community he loved and cared about. I mean, that's really an aspiration of mine. You know, my, my aspiration is, you know, that every day I wake up worried about you that I care about you, that there's somebody out there that actually gives a shit. And you know, if you're not doing the work, I'm doing the work for you and then trying to bring it to you and give you some thoughts and insights and possibilities around some stuff.
Right? That's my, that's my mission. That's my entire objective in life now. And so, you know, if that's who I aspire to be, I aspire to be a great dad. Right? A great man. I just, you know, I want to, I think we all in some way, shape or form want to be admired. I mean, I think that's a very human trait is just admired for what we do and why we do it. And when we're not that, you know, it beats us up quite a bit. And so, you know, just the willingness to speak that and say that it's like, yeah, I want to, I want to be admired. I want to be admired for my life and my effort and the things that I've done. I don't want to be discounted or shut down or told I'm not good enough. I mean, that just doesn't work right?
And so I aspire to be someone you can rely on someone that is credible, someone that you know will speak the truth, someone will, that will say what others aren't willing to say or don't notice say so. You know, that's the big aspiration for me. Now what do I fear? Well, I fear being left out. I fear being unknown. I fear not fulfilling on what I believe is destiny. I fear not fulfilling on the skills and attributes and lessons I've learned and things that I feel like I was put on this earth to do. I fear a piano loser, right? I fear not being able to provide stability for my family or to raise my children into amazing human beings. I fear I fear being alone, right? If you're just kind of being isolated and you know, sometimes I fear myself, I fear being locked into a place of frustration and resentment and regret for the rest of my life.
I mean that's, that's honestly where I kind of said, you know, I mean it's like what if, what if life didn't happen? What if you know, the podcast doesn't go any further. What if you know, things don't take off? Well what if, what if, what if, and I can play that all the way down to the end and there's actually kind of a healthy view at that at some point in time. And that's what I want to give you permission because so many people say, well, don't dwell on it. Don't look at it. Don't, yeah, take a look at it because that's the picture and what we don't want. That's the picture of where we don't want to be. Or B, that's the admission that those are the things that really keep me up at night. Those are the things that linger in the back of my brain and when I can identify them and when I can be honest about them and when I can speak into them, they will diminish.
Because what I'm able to do is reality check life. I'm able to look back and go, you know what? If I wake up every day committed, if I'm consistent on the podcast, if I'm just consistent with you in the community, if I'm giving you everything I've got, I mean, I already feel like I've diminished that fear significantly just by the responses that I've gotten. You know? And we're not out, you know, we're not have 6.9 million subscribers. We're not spread out everywhere yet. But I know that at least in the shows that we've done and the actions that we've taken, I made an impact. I've made an impact on you and I appreciate you allowing me to make that impact on you. And so really the fear, is it really a fear now? It's not because it's, I've already conquered tat. I've already surpassed that.
If I want to, you know, if I sit in the mode and say, what all of 100,000 emails back in, what does it matter? Right? So I've already resolved that in a lot of ways, but the fact is when it creeps back in, I can see it, call it out and identify it and then actually validate it, right? I can, I can begin to, to understand how to maneuver through that fear with a strength and a comfort and a confidence that I need to keep going each and every day to not let that fear be overwhelming, but I've identified it. I've put it down, I've written it down on a sheet of paper. That's a fear. Okay, cool. How do I resolve that? What actions can I take that would eliminate that? What can I do that I know and trust I can deliver that will eliminate that fear?
I can have better conversations with my children. I can be more present with them. I can set work aside and actually be available to them when I want to. When I'm, when I'm with them, I don't have to be occupied by a lot of other things. Those are the actions that will foster and lead to an amazing relationship with them. When I can set myself up to be successful in those moments, right? What enables me to touch this community when I actually dedicate myself to the work that needs to go into place to deliver something to you. And so this is really, to me, one of the most valuable things you can do to set your year up, right? And we'll give you the roadmap for where you want to go. How do I want to be? How can I be more, you know, emotionally stable?
How can I be more, uh, mentally strong or, you know, mental toughness or whatever verbiage I wanna use around that, right? How can I improve my mindset? How can I bring something new to the table? How can I shift my day, moment by moment by moment? How do I know when to transition and recover? And all of these things that we've talked about, how can I be more physically prepared? How can I take care of my body? What do I need to do to take care of my body? All of these things go into play and you know, so it's, it's kind of a constant move of identifying it, reality, checking it, and then laying out the actions that I want to take. So for instance, if I say I want, you know, one of my objectives, 5,000 subscribers to the podcast by the end of the first quarter.
So I've got three months to do that, right? And we're doing really well. But what do I want? I want that. So what actions do I need to take to have it? What processes do I need to put in place to produce that result? If I'm frustrated by my lack of time, which then impacts maybe what I want, right? A healthier body, right? A stronger capability, whatever it may be, then what hacks can do I need to take to resolve that? How do I set myself up? Do I get up earlier? Do I stay up later? Do I just communicate with the people around me? It says for this hour I shut my phone down, I'm off, I'm offline, don't bother me, don't touch me cause I'm in the gym cause I'm doing something for myself, I'm taking care of myself. Right? And so those are the, those are the aspects that really, this is where things come into play.
It's not just dwelling on what's there, it's not just having the conversation of like, Oh well this is what I want and this is what I'm frustrated by and you know, this is what I aspire to. But then this is what I fear. Cool, great. Let's get those out, let's get him identified. But then once we have an identified, what actions do I take to resolve those or achieve those? Right? What is the roadmap that I'll follow that will actually lead me to where it is I want to be in life because I think that's the biggest thing for all of us, right? We all want to be somewhere. We want to do great at our jobs. We want to be the best police officer, best firefighter or best service member. We want to get promoted. We want to go to certain units, we want to achieve certain things.
Those are the ass absolute things. So when we go from once we can check that, do I have the ability to achieve that? And if I do or if I do or don't, right, why or why not? Right? So I take, once I take that list at once, I can convert that into reality checking against my abilities. You know, I want 5,000 subscribers. Rad. Do I have the ability to do that? Yes, actually I do. Okay. What's the roadmap? You know, I want to be in better shape. Do I have the ability to do that? Yes I do. You know, I want $1 million by next month. Do I have the ability to do that? Probably not. If I reality check it, you know, unless I won the lottery, right? That's, that's a little bit of a far stretch. And so we want to keep that, that place to it.
And then again, when I look at my frustrations, what actions can I take to resolve that frustration? How can I set myself up? This is where personal responsibility really comes into play. When I look at my fears, reality checking, are they real or are they perceived right? How do I move a fear to a state of peace or peacefulness? What does it look like? What does the road look like that would bring that fear to fruition? You know, that's always an interesting exercise. If you look at, if you take one of your fears and you actually map it out, it's like what would you have to do for that fear to become reality? Who'd you have to be for that fear to become reality? And in doing that, man you, you'll sit back and be like, okay, that's not me. I'm not going to do any of that.
So literally that fears bullshit. And so a good opportunity to do that. And then, you know, how do I bring in my aspirations into reality? What would I need to do or be to really achieve this aspiration to really be in that place? So that's the model that I want you to look at. Uh, here off. Today's episode, you know, is to really get in touch with all of that. Because I think what that does when you line out, like we talk about mentally, physically, and emotionally, so what you're able to do out of this exercise is extract all that goodness, extract all that information and be able to look at and say, okay, where do I want to be mentally? What's my intention for 2020 mentally? Well, that's my intention for 2020 physically, what's my intention for 2020 emotionally? Who do I want to be on December 31st of 2020 and then what's the road to get there?
What work do I need to do to achieve that? And then I don't future cast that I don't look three months ahead. I go back to today. So did I go to the gym today? Yes or no. Period. Did I meditate today? Yes or no. Period. Did I study more or learn something new today, yes or no period. And those were the questions you ask yourself, right? And my intention guides me and guides me on the actions that I want to take. And the result, if you just stick in that mode, that result will produce itself basically, right? You'll be able to look at the end of this year and go, Holy shit. Right? You'll be able to flip back after you write this thing down, date it, sign it, do whatever, stick it somewhere, seal in an envelope, mail it to yourself, do something so that at the end of the year you can open that puppy up and you can see whether or not you even came close to it.
And if you didn't achieve it, well then you know, you go through and you look at it and you look at why, but we'll be doing it in a whole different context. And so that's what I really, what I want you to encourage you to do out of today's podcast, you know, instead of bringing a guest on right now, instead of doing all this other stuff right this second, I wanted to share with you what I do, right? I wanted to give you kind of the core aspects of what I spend my time doing, how I try to set myself up and how I take a look at it. And so I hope you get something out of it. And again, you know, you'll be able to hit the Facebook group or the show notes or whatever else and I'll line it out for you.
If you want to use the PDFs, great. Download them. No problem. They're there for you to take and use 100% and if you've got any questions, send something to me or if you're struggling with something, right? If you're struggling to figure out what it is, reach out, right? I'm available on messenger and Instagram and everywhere, email and everywhere else. Just take a minute, shoot me. You know, it'd be like, Hey Jeff, I'm really hung up on, you know, my fear, so I'm really hung up on my aspirations. I'm happy to feed something to you. I'm happy to give some to you or we'll just hop on a call and talk about it. I mean, that's just the way it goes, right? That's a part of life. That's what we're, what I'm here for. Right? That's why that's my whole world now. So don't be afraid to use that resource if you're getting stuck around it and go back and don't feel like it has to be done all in one sitting or all in one day.
You know, take a week, take a month, don't take six months, don't take 12 months because then it will be next year, you know, aspect to it. But take some time with it. And if something new pops up, go back and add it. I mean that's, that's the way life goes. So listen, I want to say thanks for all the support last year and the love that came in and the messages that came in. I greatly appreciate it. I think we're set up for a pretty amazing year this year. We're structuring out the content. I'm going to try to bring better guests, more guests, not really better guests because we had phenomenal guests last year. Uh, but continue the same process with some really exceptional guests that contribute out to you that have something to offer. Um, I'm working on the backend stuff, so show notes are a little bit tighter so the transcripts are available.
So some of the other stuff that you know, kind of supports you in, uh, doing research or looking through stuff. I'm doing my best to step that up and deliver more of that for you this year. Uh, now on Thursday's episode it's going to be me and you again and we're going to look at kind of how to put our lives in action a little bit deeper. I'm going to have a little bit more for you around that and we'll talk a little bit about that more in the Facebook group as well. So really my objective for this week is to give you some tools to help set you up for the new year, to really set you up to be successful this year and whatever it is you want to achieve and produce, right? So that'll be Thursday show now the rest of the month, what we're focused on is mental acuity.
We've got some phenomenal cast coming up this month to really look at kind of the cognitive structure, how we think in process, how we improve our awareness, uh, how we connect and read the environment and then kind of maneuver through some things. So we're going to get right into action next week, but we're going to dive right into some mental acuity aspects for the remainder of the month. And then in February, uh, I'm really looking forward to February. I got an opportunity to really start talking with and getting to know a lot of the other companies that support our community, uh, that I think are really exceptional. And so February we're going to highlight a bunch of those. We've got some great conversations mapped out now, some really cool people coming to the table. And so in February we're going to do it but highlight and some deep dives so you can actually hear from some of the people that are out supporting you why right.
And get their story. And, and I think some of it you may really be surprised and blown away by. I, I know I've already been that way. And then through March and probably into April, uh, we're going to dive into C3. We're going to dive deep into comfort, confidence, and creativity. And we're going to blow that out. We're going to extract that. We're going to look at the math behind mindset and we're really going to get in and bring in both great guests from the community, outside the community, some really forward thinkers around some stuff. And my objective is that through this podcast this year, we're going to elevate your game significantly personally and professionally. Write it because I believe in our world, they go hand in hand. And so that's what our focus is on for the remainder of this year. I'm going to do my best to give you everything that I got.
Uh, don't forget if you're a new listener, uh, starting January 16th, again, we're starting to a 100 day challenge. It's going to be unique opportunity to really kind of uncover some stuff and learn some great valuable lessons along the way. You know, I've had questions around, uh, the physicality of that couple of people, you know, recovering from injuries or doing whatever. There's no standard for that. It's not a fitness challenge by any means, but we will look across all three primary areas, mental, physical and emotional. And in that a hundred day challenge in the first week, I'm going to guide you through a process of how to kind of unpack one core thing that you want to focus on for the a hundred days and kind of the shear behind that is right. The piece behind that, you know, there's a lot of stuff out there on what, how many days it takes to create a habit and whatever, whatever, I'm sorry, I can't buy into that.
What I really want you to get out of that a hundred days and why the a hundred days exists, is we're going to rewire some of the biological systems. We're going to retrain the elephant to understand what it means to win and really embody that sense of achievement and winning over those hundred days. It will be tough. It will be simple and tough, I promise you. So that's available upon the site. It's run through the operational mindset foundation. So all the proceeds go to benefit the operation mindset foundation to help us get out. So that's a by choice donation, uh, to the program. Check it out mindsetradio.com/opyourlife/ or just go to the main page at mindsetradio.com. Click on the link and follow through to the a hundred day challenge. I really would love to have all you in there and you know, if you can't hop in on the 16th do you want to hop in a little bit later?
Not a problem that the program will run kind of as it is for the remainder of the time. And we'll support it with the group and it won't matter where you are, cause you'll fold right in. You'll see what everybody's working on. A really neat chance to be a part of a cool community and I'll work and contribute together on some stuff. So that's going to wrap up today's episode. It is January 7th, 2020 wow. 2020 it's pretty crazy when you think about it, so I hope everybody had a great holiday season. Hope everybody had a safe and great new year, and I hope you're looking forward to this year. So you know, tune back in on Thursday, we're going to talk about what life in action looks like. We're in a dissect a few things. Give you four more tools. Again, thanks for sticking around. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you on Thursday.
All right. Welcome back to mindset radio. I'm your host Jeff Banman. And today I have begged, pleaded, convinced, guilt, tripped and otherwise, and probably now responsible for dinners and drinks for the rest of my life. Uh, but our guest today is the man, the myth, the legend, Jordan harbinger, and more, more myth, I think. I know. Don't beat yourself up. That's not allowed. Uh, you've done an exceptional job. I love listening to your show. Believe it or not, not everybody knows who you are, which is unfortunate. I've run across people all the time and I'm like, Hey, I finally convinced Jordan to come on the show. And they're like, who? And I know that's hard to believe...
it's easy for me to believe, man. My, I have an infant son who doesn't give a crap who I am. Right? And he never will. I think. Isn't that how it is with kids?
No, I, I don't know. Cause here's the funny thing with even with a little man this morning, right? So just turned two in November and we were getting ready to go for a walk, do whatever. And I turned around and I cross my arms, he looked right at me and just crossed his arms. Exactly. It's a big grin on his face. So that'll start, it'll start to come eventually.
I gotta tell you this, uh, I've got, I interview a lot of people for the Jordan harbinger show as you know, cause you, you do listen to the show and thank you for that. And I've got, you know, acquaintances, I should say buddies, whatever that are like well known household names across at least America. And they're like, yeah, you know, I thought when I have kids I'm gonna finally be the cool dad because you know, super famous, super rich person that everyone, you know, cow toes to walk into a restaurant, never wait for a table, never pay for stuff half the time. And he's like, no, my kids are still like, can you drop me off at the corner? I don't want people to see that I'm with you. And like, and some of it's for different reasons. Like, you know, most of us, we're just going to be too nerdy to hang out with the kids.
And for him, maybe it's like half nerdy half. They don't want their friends asking questions for their dads or something like that. Like you're dead if during that one time or that one movie. But still, it's kind of like no matter how cool like you can be on, we literally had this conversation on their yachts and they're like, yeah, well, and I'm like, I'm on your yacht watching the NBA playoffs on a big screen TV that comes up from like the mahogany whatever. And your kids are like, dude sucks. You know, like it's you just, you can't,
no, never, ever. You can't man. I mean it's, you know, I've got the spectrums. Like we were talking about 15 and a half. She splits a year with me. So I spent my 45th birthday standing in line at the DMV to get her learner's permit. I'm excited though. So I mean, and you know it, it's coming back around. That's what I'm watching. They kind of, especially with the girls, you know, my oldest now coming closer to 16, we have a whole different relationship and it's very cool to kind of see that come around. Like she's excited to do stuff with me. Um, so it does, it ebbs and flows, but yeah, dude, it doesn't matter who you are. You could be the coolest cat on the face of the planet. Your kids going to still be like, alright, leave me alone. I think that's the way it goes.
Yup. Exactly. So I, he's five months old. I got a few more years.
A bit of time, man. You got a little bit yeah, that that first, uh, that first year and a half. You're just like you are, I have no idea who I am.
Right? Yeah. I would say common. Common advice I've been given is the first 10 years they'll think I'm cool and then the next 10 years they won't. And then like in their twenties, it's kind of 50, 50, and then after age 30, again, they realize I'm not a total dumb ass and I actually have something to say. I put my own experience with my own parents, like my parents are awesome. My parents don't know anything. Oh, turns out all that stuff that I thought I knew better than I was only half. Right. Okay, fine. I was 10% right, but I'm still going to count it because I can never let them have this one. And now that I'm 40, I'm like, Oh, time is limited, you know, just enjoy it. But I don't want to waste your listeners time with reminiscing or
I think it's, you know, it's all relevant and it's all things that we, uh, deal with. You know, it's like when I had Phil McKernan on and, uh, even Sherry walling and some people, you know, uh, you know, we talked about the family issue several times, especially in our community. It's like, how do I go from being fireman, a cop, you know, quote unquote hero, which I hate that term. Um, you know, but, and then step in and be a dad and be like a normal dad or a normal mom, you know? Uh, it's tough.
Why do you hate that term? I think a lot of people your position, they hate that. I mean I, my dad loves his hobby is like paying for policemen's meals at restaurants, which by the way I think is not allowed in most places, but indeed in Detroit they're like, thanks. Yeah, they're hot dog, but out here in California they're like, I cannot do that. Please do not do that. I have to fill out paperwork when you do that. So, but he loves it. And, and uh, it's funny cause I think a lot of people look at servicemen, firemen, cops, et cetera as heroes. But yeah, I guess I guess it's probably uncomfortable hearing it to your face. I would, I don't know how I'd feel. It's hard to say that
it's caused a lot of conflict. It's interesting because Phil Phillip has asked me to give my one last talk in February here in Boulder. Um, and it's brought up a lot of stuff. And some of that is what you know, we're dealing with now is like, really now you've done this, you've done a lot of work on yourself, you've done a lot of different, you know, aspects. But I think for me it's like I don't, that's not, it's not why I did what I did. It's, I, I didn't do it for any of that and I'm not, you know, I think part of the thing, it's like I laid in bed and like, I want your house to burn down because I want something to go do. I want to like, I want war and conflict because I want to fulfill my destiny, my job. How does that, you know, mentally conflict with and emotionally conflict with you? Saying thank for, thank you for my service or you know, Hey, I think you're a hero. No, dude, I'm actually not because it's not how it works inside. Uh,
that's, that's funny if, yeah, I think if people knew that firemen got accepted, wow, look at this big ass house burning down, man, there's, this one was really expensive. This is going to be a fun one. Then probably public perception change.
Well, I mean, in, it's in for me, you know, old school, you got to think, you know, I started back in the early nineties and then when I, it's like when I came back from Kosovo in 99 nobody knew what the hell was going on. Nobody knew the services invaded and committed mass atrocities in this country and the things that we dealt with, you know, it was just, it was a blank. Right? I mean, it was, it's interesting to me pre nine 11 post nine 11 you know, when nobody gives a shit that I was a fireman. The only people that cared that I was a firefighter was the, you know, seven year old kids coming in to check out the fire truck. Nobody, you know, you didn't walk down the street. Rarely did anybody offer to buy your meal for ya on occasion. But it was super limited and nobody was walking around saying, Hey, thank you for your service. You know, pre nine 11 it just wasn't existing. And now it's in your face always. You know, and, and I, I, I get it, you know, Mike Brown and I talked about this the other day. It's, he's got a buddy that always responds with thank you for your support when they say that and then they get a little awkward because it's like, wait a minute, did I, do I support the war? Do I, do I agree with that? So it kind of is a throwback to them, uh, in a kind way, if you will.
Yeah. And, and, uh, look, I think people now more than ever appreciate it just because it is in the media a lot, but I understand how the, to bring this back to value for your listeners, I understand how your self image doing whatever you do might not match what the public sees and that can actually cause some discomfort and have that not because I do anything particularly heroic, let's be clear. But people will say things like, Oh, I'll get a video from a friend. And they're like, I met the mall and the person in line in front of me at this restaurant is listening to your show. So I started talking to them and they were like amazed that I knew you. And so I'm sending a video with this random like Chinese woman in line for dumplings. She is really excited and sort of getting all like, you know, Oh my gosh, she's Jordan harbinger.
I'm all excited and that makes me uncomfortable. Not because I don't enjoy it. I think it's awesome. And I think most kids up til age, whatever 30 I probably like if only that would ever happen to me, just one time in my life. But when it actually happens it can be highly uncomfortable because people get so excited and there's a part of me that's like I can never live up to that. Like I can never live up to that. And we see our own blooper reel in our head because we, they got like tripped over his own foot last night cause he stepped on a Lego and like yelled at his kid and then felt bad about it and then like got work late because he spilled coffee all over his crotch and didn't want to get laughed at. So he had to turn around and go home and change his pants.
Like what? That's our self image. And then when other people are like, wow, you're so awesome. It's like thank you. But also the, you have cognitive dissonance that comes into play, doesn't feel comfortable. And so if you're in a service position and you feel uncomfortable when people give you those kinds of accolades, then congratulations. You're a normal human being and you're not a narcissist or just somebody who's maybe not done a ton of work accepting that kind of praise, which makes you a normal human being. So I want people to feel comfortable with that and not feel like, Oh yeah, I don't like that. And that makes, that makes me even more weird for not liking praise. Something's wrong with me. That's not the case. It's always almost always the case that when you feel awkward about somebody giving you high praise, it just means you probably have a healthy self image. Maybe you skew a little bit more towards negative, but that's okay because I think we're as humans kind of designed to do that. We have a negativity bias. And it's completely healthy,
man. I, you know, that's exactly, so this is perfect conversation because you know, the way I look at one, why I wanted to bring you on the show, it's like you're the encyclopedia of knowledge now, right? You've been interviewed just a massive amount of people and you've gotten a chance to really one, learn a lot, but, but contribute a lot out there and you know, for today, the problem that I wanted to kind of have the conversation with you around that, that I feel like we all deal with is, especially in the services we have, this need to be everything to everyone all the time.
I understand that, right? So let me, let me disassemble that a little. You mean that if you're, let's say you're a policeman, you mean you've got to be a cop both when you're at home, but also when you're out with your friends, but also when you're at work naturally, but also even on your lunch hour when you're just trying to house a steak hoagie and not get any on your uniform or cheese steak and not get any on your uniform, you can't really turn it off cause it's part of your identity. Right?
Which component of that there? It's a 24 hour gig.
Sure. So in every occupation has that, but you guys, and I say you guys meaning just fire, police, military, whatever. Hopefully that's clear. You guys have it more because yes, I'm a or interview or radio host or whatever you want to call it all the time. But nobody's like, Oh my God, is anybody a radio host? This man's having a heart attack, right? Like that will never happen. Interview his wife and see how she's feeling right now. Like that's never going to happen to me and no sane world will that happen. But if you're hanging out with your family on your one day off, cause you've been working a bunch of overtime, putting out fires in California and you finally got to go to your kid's party for like three hours and somebody passes out, you can't be like, look man, I have been working a lot. And that's all you, you can't do that, right? You're, you're on. And if you're a police officer and your daughter brings home a sketchy looking guy, you're not like, you know, I'm just going to pack these in guy.
Yeah, this is okay. I know I recognize the gang tattoos, but look man, I am not on the clock. Have fun honey. Like that's not going to happen either. Not only because you're a dad, but because you're like, I know what that symbol means and that's, there's no way you're leaving the house with that guy. Right. And I'm sure that that happens all the time. And so in a way it's like with VR, it's, it's one of those with great power comes great responsibility. But sometimes it's like, well fine, but I want to turn the responsibility off. So I can play Xbox, dammit.
Yeah, man. There's, yes. And there's this place where it's like, I mean, I, years ago all confess, long time ago I, you know, when I first started the fire service, I had firefighter plates, you know, tagline, license plates. I eventually took them off. I was like, you know what, cause I don't want to stop at the accident anymore. I don't want to, I don't want to be this. If I'm not in it on it, I want to be just average person. I want to be okay to just be, you know, Jeff, not fireman, not, you know, military guy, not agency guy and anything else. I just want to hang out. Uh, you know, I think that's a big problem.
I can imagine because you can't, it's like never taking a day off, which I think we all know what that feels like as well. Just owning my own business. I know what it's like to be like. I mean, I'll sit down to a nice relaxing meal on Thanksgiving and Christmas and I'm like, I should be answering fan mail, zeroing out my inbox, reading this book for doing some prep for this show. What do I have to do? I mean, I will literally be, I try not to do this one. I'm holding my kid, but even sometimes it happens and I'll go, Oh man, in five minutes I got to put him down because I really have to get back to work. And I'm like, no, I don't. It's Sunday at 1:00 PM what I need to do is put him in bed and go watch Netflix.
You know? That's, that's what I need to do. But I can't really turn it off. And I think for people who are in positions, like what your audience and what you, the position that you're in, it's even more dangerous because if I say, what's the worst thing that's going to happen if I don't finish this book today? The answer is, well, I guess I could do it tomorrow. I just have to get up a little bit earlier and maybe listen while I'm at the gym. But if somebody says, what's the worst thing that happens if I don't stop at this accident? You start catastrophizing because you either start saying, Oh my gosh, well this could happen, this can happen. You start catastrophizing or you just start thinking nothing. Who cares? I got to get on with my life. But then you probably have a crisis of conscience that's like, yeah, I shouldn't think that way.
What kind of horrible person drives past an accident when they have the training to stop it. So you're compelled to, nothing's really compelling me to bust out my Kindle. Right. Like a little bit of guilt that I can turn off cause I realize it's a little irrational. Your guilt is maybe that person's child is in hell a and you don't stop because you're halfway to whole foods and your kid's crying. You know like w what, what? It's a different game and I don't think, I don't think a, what do you call us? Civilians? Like I don't think us, right. Joe's like understand that fully. Because if you're a teacher in somebody who doesn't understand their math homework and they can't get ahold of you, Oh well you'll, you'll help them out on Monday. But if somebody passed out on the sidewalk, you have almost like a moral obligation and it's hard to turn that off and realize that you need your own sanity.
So I think a lot of people in your position, you put yourselves last more so than most parents do, more so than most teachers, more so than most, I don't know, public servants in another position, like the mayor of most towns is not sitting at home on the weekend and worrying about what's in the office. Um, it may be a big city, but most, most of them are hanging out with their family and having Turkey, you're the one that has to be awake at 3:00 AM for the call. And that, that level of stress is not good for you longterm. And then of course they say take a vacation and you're like, I wish I freaking good. You know, I'm on vacation thinking, hope nothing bad happens to my friends. Even if you can put society out of your mind, you got your buddies out there.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and it's, you know, it's interesting because like we do, we, we leave ourselves last in line and there's a level of expectation I think even in relationship and friendships and et cetera. Like there's this normal like why can't you just turn it off? Why can't you just be home right now? Why can't you, you know, you're not at work, why can't you just leave that at work? And so that's kind of this be everything to everybody all the time that shows up. It's like, okay, so I've got this side of me that I can't turn off. It's a 24 seven deal that I have this moral, ethical and you know, emotional response of ness to right. That I just am always tuned into what's happening. And then, you know, my wife wants me to be freed up and easygoing and have fun and not care, right. And, and not have this thing. And so it's like there's this ebb and flow, constant conflict. And I know, cause I've listened to some of your shows that have been radically helpful for me and a lot of ways, uh, you know, the people that you've had on and just kind of beginning to dissect how I begin to create transition points or points of recovery or understand kind of how I flow from one ideal person to another ideal person in a way, right. Without then the guilt and shame and crap that goes with it.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of cognitive, well we've mentioned cognitive dissonance, but there's brain science that goes into to this like catastrophizing, what's the worst thing happened? And you start going down the if trail and the stakes are higher for what you guys are doing, guys and gals, let's be clear now, there's a lot of women out there now and I, I like, um, and you know, you're in this weird position where society will look at everything. Well, police especially now, um, firemen, I dunno if are, if you're immune to this, but, uh, I can't, nothing comes to mind. But with police man, now it's like you're under fire and all of you under fire. Whenever there's any kind of negativity. And I, I would imagine any cop out there now, in fact, I wonder this, I'm so curious if, if police now feel like they're looked at differently by a lot of folks just because of what's been in the news and that really, it really sucks to hear that because I mean, when I was little, the police would come in your house and you'd say, Hey, do you want some coffee?
And they'd be like, sure, thank you. Now I feel like that would just never happen. Um, because there's just this more arms length distance, at least in bigger cities, especially, um, with where the police stand. When I grew up, I didn't grow up in a small town, but they would come in and they didn't take their shoes off because, you know, that's, that's a little bit too much. But they would have, you can make them tea or coffee and they would be like, thank you. Yeah, that's, that's great. Now I don't think that's allowed. And I remember recently, I live in San Jose, California. We had a package stolen and the cop came in and sat down at our kitchen Island and open up his laptop and did the report. And I was like, wow, this is such a different experience than I've experienced anywhere else.
And even just the, the times that I've dealt with the police in other big cities, even in New York, when they come in, it's just like, you almost feel like you're at the police station. And I'm like, I didn't commit any crime. I called you guys, you know? And I remember just like feeling really intimidated and I realized, Oh yeah, they have half or one, some percentage of the time these guys walk into a house and someone tries to stab them or something, you know, like, so I gotta just sort of keep that in mind, but you can't live your whole life that way. And that's just really easy for me to say as a fricking podcast or it radio guy and you guys can't turn it off. And that takes its toll. There is science behind this. When you are in fight or flight mode or when you are at least an elevated stress for a long period of time, you don't, uh, you wreck havoc on parts of your brain. Um, you age faster, your heart, uh, is obviously not as healthy as it should be. And if you're always eating on the go, those two risk factors combined are just not good lifestyle. Um, I don't want to say choices because it's, it's hard to say that it's a choice, but they're not good lifestyle factors I should say. And that's, that's really bad for everyone around you too. And so you're really caught between a rock and a hard place. I had
one too. Yah. Which is not only all those core factors to it, but then, and it's finally cool because that's why I think we're doing well with the podcast and we're growing significantly in this community because we can now have these conversations and five years ago, 10 years ago, like this just, it wouldn't even be accepted. The kind of, the idea of looking, of looking at what's going on of, you know, emotional safety and the things that we deal with. Like when I grew up that, that, those were not conversations that were had at all ever around, you know, we live in a world of suck it up, shove it down, slam it down, deal with it, and do your job. And that's how a lot of us, especially kind of in our upper thirties and forties, you know, that's how we grew up. That was the environment.
And it's cool for me to at least to see that today we're able to have these conversations and they're listening, right? And people are more curious about how do I deal with this? How do I transition emotionally? How do I understand all these core factors? Right? They're just kind of the task and purpose factors and then the internal factors that are in play. I mean, I, I remember flying the episode you did with, uh, Gabriel as Rocky when you guys were talking about self-development, uh, and kind of go and add it, right? I can't remember what the tile they upset was right off hand. Uh, but I was texting you all the way through it. Like this is, you were spot on with it. Uh, I,
I always remember Gabe and I do a lot of stuff together because he's a frigging genius with his research. Go ahead.
Yeah, like in that [inaudible] that, that particular episode, I'm going to find it, tag it and put it into the show notes because that particular episode, you know, you went through and you talked about all the kinds of the bullshit that's out there, the reality of things, you know, he did a phenomenal job and kind of breaking down a look at self-development in a way that I believe made sense to our, would make sense to our community rather than kind of this hoopla, hippy dippy hang out kind of stuff. You know, you were talking about some of the programs you've gone to where you just felt like totally violated in it. Like, get me outta here. Uh, and you know, and you were sharing some of those stories along the way that I think really resonated with me. And resonates with our world because it's like I don't, I it, there's a fear that if I become soft or soften myself, I won't be capable of doing my job as well.
Yeah. And there may be some truth to that, but it becomes, it becomes problematic because of course you wouldn't parent the same way that you police. Right? Like, well, I, in theory you should probably not do that. Yeah. I mean, what, who am I to tell anybody how to police? But that's the idea behind it and it's really, really tricky to make recommendations like that because I'm sure people out there see therapists and things like that and it's like, okay, great. Have you ever been to Iraq, Afghanistan? No. Have you ever put out a fire I've ever seen burned a child, you know, and you're there and the parents' reaction, have you ever had someone pull a knife on you? Uh, you know, while you're in a closed space and your partner is taking a leak? I don't know. You know, like all of these things are, it's hard to relate to and it's, it's hard to have somebody be like, you just need to relax more.
It's like F you, right? Like, what do you tell? Sure. Tell me that while you have another sip of your latte over there buddy. Like, sure. I just need to ask some more. And then it's like try yoga and like what planet? It just feels like the people giving advice to first responders and military. It's just, they're on another planet. They're from a different planet. It's completely nonsensical in a lot of ways. And so it's not, it's not relatable, which makes it worse because it's like hearing some quack tell you to do something and it's like you just don't even understand my reality at all. And it makes you feel more isolated of cool because then you think, Oh, the help that's available is some Yodel with a four year degree who's never even left, you know, our city or state and has certainly never held, uh, held a position like mine in a F in a dirt lot like Iraq or Afghanistan.
And now I'm sitting here like listening to him tell me what I need to do. It's just gotta be really isolating and frustrating and that I think is just part of the problem. And of course you've talked to other people with the same problems. It's a good support group, but you're mostly just venting as opposed to getting actionable strategies and that. That makes me kind of sad to hear because I think it's no surprise we rely on you to do your jobs to have a functioning society where I can sit here and sip my latte and Dole out unqualified advice. Right? Yeah.
I mean I used to have this statement where it's like if I went to see somebody went down to sit with a psycho or whatever, I'm like, listen, if I am actually honest with you, if I actually share with you what you want me to share with you, you're going to have PTSD by the time we're done. You know what I mean? Yeah. You're going to be fucked up, like, like, and, and then I'm going to end, the problem is like we live in a world or the way our brains work, it says, so there's this whole world for me now kind of uncovering, which is this understanding of how to bring calm to chaos. All right, so we're back and you know, here's where we kind of left off and we were talking, you were, you were, were kind of exploring this understanding from the law enforcement aspect where you know, you're Sharon, you know, cops used to be able to come in and sit down, have a cup of coffee, you know, actually converse with you where today it's like 24, seven always on edge.
And it's this, you know, it was interesting as we're going, because I've been looking at this quite a bit, it's like this collapse of, of stress between the public and the providers, if you will. Right? So it's like this, there's this vicious circle that's happening. I think now that's been happening over the last several years where you know the police are a little bit more under fire being watched being you know, putting them on edge, the public's on edge about the police. It's like this high state of conflict where somebody has got a run in the middle and be like, okay can everybody just settled down for a second and take a breath and kinda hit the reset button. I do see that happening significantly.
Yeah, I can imagine that there's not a whole lot of resources out there. I mean it's like there are and there aren't and everyone complains about things like the VA. I don't really know much about that, but I do know that no matter how many resources are out there, it can be really tough. When you go home and your friends and neighbors are kind of oblivious, you almost maybe feel like you're living a secret life. Maybe you are living a secret life.
Yeah, which my neighbor, my neighbor in Florida for years, it's like, dude, what do you do? Cause you're like disappear for several weeks and then you just play golf when you're home and your work in your garage. Like I don't understand what you do. Yeah, man. I mean I think the, I, you know, it's been an interesting conversation so far because we've kind of explored where for us there's not all the, the resources are limited and in the way that people understand or give us, and I'll say us from the community, the opportunity to express ourselves fully and actually deal with some of the struggles that we face and have an open, honest conversation or dialogue without freaking people out. I was, you know what you're talking about. If I said, if I sat out with a psych, it'd be like, you know, you'd have PTSD by the time we're done. The problem is if I lay out what I actually feel inside, I'm going to hit all the trigger words. You know what I mean? They're going to be like, you know, well I gotta call somebody, I gotta, we gotta fix this. This guy's, you know, suicidal or this guy's, you know, homicidal or whatever. It's like, no, this is just my life. This is just the way I operate.
Yeah. I think that there's probably a bit of, what would you even call this, like a protective shell that everyone's in your position is able to put on, but I don't, is that healthy? That's the question, right? Is that something that is healthy and I'm not totally sure that it is. I think maybe it serves a purpose, but I think that it's also probably, there's probably a problem that I don't think most people can switch it on and switch it off. I think that's the biggest issue. That's the biggest problem is it's hard to turn it off. Then when you're at your daughter's graduation, it's just still there. And so yes, it sort of protects you, but is that something that you actually, is that healthy for you mentally?
Yeah, it does. It actually work for you longterm? I mean it is, it's like we've, you know, I, I re relate it back to when I was a kid when I was three or four or five now my mom would always laugh at me because there's two things I played growing up. Fireman and army. Like that was it. And I had to put on blue corduroys to play fireman and then go change into Brown corduroys if I wanted to play army, like I had to be in context, if you will. Right? Even as a kid, and I think I've looked at that skill right now. If I take that as a skillset, how do I pull it on when I put on my uniform or when I put something on, it's like, okay, here's where I am. This is who I am for this period in time. And when I take it off, I'm no longer that right now I am transitioning into husband, wife, mom, dad, son, brother, friend, hanging out or whatever it might be.
Yeah. That's got to be tricky and also mentally taxing, and I think that's very problematic because I don't think a lot, I don't think a lot of people really know that, including the people that are doing this, you know, that are in your position, know that there is such a cognitive cost, a psychological cause to making that switch. It's not just leave it at home. If you're shoving it down, it's like eating Brussels sprouts. If you don't like those, right, you're, you're cramming it in there and it wants to pop back out and it's all you're devoting cognitive bandwidth, brain power to keeping it from popping out, and that's unhealthy because it's stressful for you. It's taxing for you.
It's wearing, it's wearing. I mean, I think that's where I look now at 45 exhausted most times. Right. If you actually, if I'm honest with myself and with people around me, it's like I'm just worn out.
Yeah, I can imagine. And you're not going to rest well if you're consistently working on made to, I don't want to, I'm trying not to talk last here. If you just keep on pushing something down, you're not going to have, let's say you spend 10% of your cognitive bandwidth trying to push it down. 90% of you is there. So being present is tough. Um, focusing on self care is like last priority cause you're just trying not to screw up the family party by being a weirdo or whatever. Right? There's all kinds of stuff that that happens as a result of that, that that is invisible and that's, that's the problem. That's what's unhealthy. It's invisible. It's, that's what makes it insidious. That's the word I'm looking for. It's insidious. You don't see it coming because you think everything's fine, everything's fine, everything's fine. And then you're just like, why the hell am I tired constantly?
How come I can't relax? And then it just, they throw a label on it like, Oh it's part of your PTSD or it's like residual trauma. And it's like, yeah, but the real truth is that you, you can't relax, you're not focused, you're constantly monitoring your surroundings even though you're in your own living room. Like that's super unhealthy. And I don't, I don't think maybe it doesn't affect everybody, but certainly people that have seen combat or conflict or people that are on this street every day, you know, like that type of stuff that doesn't just go away. And you even see it when, when a police officers and military or retired, there's, it just doesn't go away. And I think because as an evolutionary strategy, the people that survived to, to reproduce were the people that didn't shut that stuff down so easily or forget it. So. Right. They were constantly vigilant. I don't think some Roman soldier really necessarily retired and lived out the rest of his years. They probably were, I don't know, back then, dead at 30 max at or no.
Well, yeah, you lose all value. I mean, in a sense a truck goes away, you lose all value. And that's where I've really looked at it to say, and you know, you brought up an interesting point where there are a lot of labels that go with us, right? It's, Oh, that's just PTSD, or Oh, you must have done something or you must have seen something. It's like, no, it's just this, this constant inability to transition effectively to kind of settle myself and to turn it off. Right. To bring the volume switch down a little bit. Um, you know, that's been the interesting exploration for me. Now, understanding kind of the biological factors that go into play, uh, deep inside in the way we are trained and developed. And then of course, you know, childhood trauma and everything else that comes into play for us. We just aren't given the tool to ebb and flow in this life that we've chosen.
And yeah, it's more, it's more exhaustion. It's more, you know, self-driven stuff than it is any incident or seeing something or participating in something cause a greater population. You know, you've got chose to put on a uniform. I chose to go to combat or I chose to run in that burning building or I choose to save lives. I choose to do these things and going back to kind of where we started, it's like when you, when you call me a hero or when you elevate me, it almost dismisses what I do in a way. Does that make sense to you? I mean, what do you think about that?
Um, can you clarify that a little? I need to make sure I know what you're, yeah,
so, so for instance, you know, we talked about this internal struggle between like not wanting to be called a hero or not wanting to be acknowledged so much. You know, cause for me, I'm laying in bed hoping your house burns down or you know, I want to go to the next thing I want to call out on my SWAT team. I want to do these things. I want violence to occur out there in the world. And when you then call me a hero or you elevate me because of what I've chosen to do, that creates that separation right. Internally from kind of the external view of who I am. But in doing that, also, what I'm trying to struggle and balance with is like the acceptance of myself and myself in the, my place in society. It's, I feel like there's this unspoken expectation that says, you know, if we're a firefighter or a cop, you know, we're committed to service.
We're committed to the people around us, you know? Yeah, we're there to save you. Yeah, we're heroes. But internally, I don't think any of us feel that way at all and we don't know how to express stuff very well. I mean, we're, I had one of the guys on the show not too long ago that literally like at 16 you know, he started riding firetrucks 16 and they ran a house fire people inside trapped and burned up and the chief sat him down in the car, pulled out a six pack of beer and says, okay, this is how you're going to solve it. You know, and no wonder he's an alcoholic later in life. Right? Yeah. Dude, that's the world, man. That's the world we live in.
Yeah, that's a, that's problematic. If people are, and I'm sure that's the exception and not the rule, I hope it is. But if those are the tools that sort of the tools of the trade that you learn when you start the job or yeah, just hit the gym extra hard tomorrow, you know, like, okay, but that's a bandaid on a bullet hole. And that's very problematic because what happened, not just that it doesn't work, but then people think, man, you know, I am having a drink with the guys and burning off some steam. I am hitting the gym, I am going for a run, but I still feel kind of shitty. Something is wrong with me. And that's the dangerous part. Not like, Hey, this tool is not working. I gotta find something else. Because you know, this isn't working for everyone. Maybe we should research this. It's, this isn't working for me, but I serve shit. Don't want to be the guy that walks in and is like, I feel bad. Right. Maybe that's not the culture.
It's absolutely not the culture. I mean that's, and that's where I think we're finally, you know, we're just, I mean we are, you know, this is partly why it's interesting to have you on the show because in this, in the entrepreneur space, right? I mean it's like you and I hanging out at MMT in park city, just kind of taking a break, sitting out on the balcony, bullshitting, right? In this, in this flip side of the world, there's a lot of advancement, a lot of development, a lot of openness around self discovery and what's happening and emotion and freedom around that. And, and that's, that's becoming very much more mainstream than it used to be. But our audience, I mean, we're still antiquated. I mean, we're still in the dark ages when it comes to that stuff. Like we are just on the cusp of these conversations flowing out across the, across these communities. Cause it is, it's, it is, shut it down, shove it down, deal with it. Um, suck it up, buttercup. I mean, those are the, that's the, that's the training. That's the conversation. And I've said for years, you know, the only acceptable emotion in these worlds is anger, right? You can't be too happy. You can't cause then you're fucking off. You can't be sad because then you're weak. But you can be as angry as you want to be. And I think that perpetuates. It's like it's a self perpetuating cycle we're dealing with constantly.
Yeah. Th the anger is an issue. And I think a lot of guys just men in general have this as a default because we're not necessarily taught good emotional communication. And a lot of us are less wired for that in a way. And then lean on that and go, wow, where a guy, you know, and so I, I don't know about you, but my dad, his diff, he's a great guy by the way, just to clarify. But he's his default communication when he's frustrated a little bit sad, feeling a little bit stressed, feeling a little bit rushed, feeling like he is a little silly because he forgot something. He just goes and gets angry because he doesn't have the other channels. Right? Like he doesn't have the other modes. It's like he's got red and, and you're like, Hey, color this in blue. And he's like, uh, red. Right. He just can't do it. So there's fun dad. And then there's like angry dad and then there's normal dad, but there's not like sort of down today dad, there's just really short temper and shorter temper and that's no, that's sort of normal for him. His dad was the same way. All the guys in our family are the same way and I'm fighting that all the time.
Man. You just described me to a T really the majority of the time. Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, it's been difficult. I mean, I did the work with Elliot road kind of release the anger stuff, which really helps significant crazy, you know, the, on the hypnotherapy side. But it's, it's difficult. And for me, what I've noticed is it's really driven by this sense of anxiety and anxiety around not being good enough for everybody around me. Yeah, that's, that's problematic. But it's also thanks normal as well, if that makes sense. Yeah. Well, and that's, and that is, and that's kind of right. That's the purpose behind some of this show is to kind of normalize this, this conversation that says, okay, that's, yes, it's a problem. Yes. You know, it's an issue that needs attention and you're not abnormal. Right? You're not the only one feeling that way. And, and I like that you said that it's, it is, uh, there's a big man issue there around it cause it is, I mean we weren't really, we're taught to be, to create physical safety really well. We're not taught to create kind of emotional safety for the people around us at all. And a lot of ways
it's a good point. And additionally, I mean even in addition to that, not only are you not taught to create psychological safety, it's not even prioritized. You know, you're not even doing it for yourself, let alone for other people. It would be different if we were also self if we were centered and grounded and you know, felt good about ourselves and that it was just, Oh, we're just sort of selfish as guys. It's like, no, we're not even creating that for ourselves, let alone for other people. And you can't really create it for other people until you create it in yourself. You know, we, we think we're fooling everyone and our kids raising these kids and we're like, yeah, I just want my daughter to be confident. Yeah. I just want my son to be [inaudible] when they see your example and you think, Oh, I'm putting on a brave face.
Okay fine. But after like age seven, they can tell. Right. And then he spent 20 years being like, I'm faking it. It's like, no, your kids are like, yeah, my dad, you know, he doesn't really take care of himself. You know, he's always stressed out. We think we're putting on a brave face and it's just so obvious cause you know, the cracks show, especially when they're sitting around at the dinner table and you blow up because they mentioned they didn't finish their project and before they finish their sentence telling you that they got an extra week for it, you start talking about how they didn't get their work done, dammit. You know, and like they're just hold up dad, we got an extension. Oh, you know, it's like that kind of thing. The cracks start to show, or when we massively overreact to something that they've done and they realize that that isn't normal.
Or they see other people acting normal or they're just like, why is this the case with my dad? Oh, you know, mom says it's something from work. Like kids are smart. It's, there's, someone told me, uh, you have to be really careful when you have guns in the house, right? Because kids will get their hands on it and the retort is always, no, I have a gun safe. And it's, did you know the combination to any of your parents' stuff when you were a kid and the answers yeah. By age 11, 13, 15 years old. So the key isn't, don't let the kids have the combination that against safe. It's, by the time they're obviously going to have figured out what that is. They know how to use a gun safely. Right. That's the, that's how you keep them safe. Not, not by telling them, not by diluting yourself that they have no idea how to get in there. Cause you the same fricking safe code as you do on your iPhone. So when they candy crush, you're telling them the code, right? Like they, they're onto you buddy. You know,
I knew all my dad's stuff was, I'm, yeah. At a very young age. Let me ask you a question. What have been a couple of your favorite episodes this year that you've done? I mean there's, we're closing out 2019 kind of related to any of this stuff. What do you, what have you taken away from your experiences this year in all the shows that you've done?
Yeah, I've done some really interesting ones in the past year especially. There's one with Jack Barsky who was a undercover KGB spy who came to America at posing as an American and he later decided that he loved America so much he was just going to stay here. And he, he ended up never getting caught up until recently actually, well after the Soviet union had fallen. And so that's a really interesting story. It just kind of shows that if you ever feel like, Oh man, this country has gone to hell in a hand basket. You know, it's nice to see somebody from the outside who's essentially one of our sworn enemies, you know, coming in and going, actually this place is great for all these different reasons that I think a lot of people don't think about every day. Um, we had Admiral James DaVita's come on and talk about character that's a, he's an interesting guy because of course he's that, he was the NATO Supreme allied commander.
So that's kind of a big deal to have somebody come on and talk about that sort of stuff from straight from the horse's mouth, you know, had a lot of opportunity to do bad things and, and didn't, and uh, man, we had a guy from catch me if you can, uh, the inspiration from cashmere, if you can, that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. We had a Frank Abignail come on and discuss the psychology behind some of the, the cons and the imposter stuff that he was doing. And so the shows run a wide gamut. Even recently we had general Robert Spalding about how China is essentially looking to overtake America with technology, but also the spy, where that's going in some of the, and how the Chinese communist party really does have it out for us. And it's very well documented. It's not a secret. We're kind of the only ones that are sleeping on.
So we've done a lot of really great shows that show that both things are both going in the right direction but also need to be maintained, right? Like we need to pay attention to the direction that we take our society and our country and ourselves. Because all of those things are integral to maintaining democracy. Like we can't just work on self-development, but we also can't just be paranoid about everything around it. It's like we really have to work on the whole picture. That's really, really crucial to do. So, eh, don't we risk our, our whole, our whole way of being.
Yeah, I'm mad and I think that's what I really enjoy about your show. You know? And again, part of the, my mission, I feel like bring people into my world. You know, they may not, they may not listen to Jordan harbinger. They may not know you exist. Uh, cause it's kinda not in their bandwidth being able to bring resources and tools to the table for the men and women out there that are doing their jobs every day. You know, you've got some phenomenal stuff out there that I know would make a difference in their life.
Well, thank you very much. Yeah, I appreciate it. I'd love that people are listening to podcasts more now and if they're interested in this and maybe they'll be interested in the Jordan harbinger show and I'm on social media at Jordan harbinger on Twitter, Instagram, et cetera. So I'd love to hear from everybody. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate the opportunity. It's a lot of fun and talking with you is always fun.
Hey man. Yeah, we just need to hang out more often and clearly now. I owe you a nice dinner and I'm going to try to be in San Diego again while you're there, but, and I'll make sure that all the links are up on the show notes. Uh, that, uh, all the links to your a one year podcast, but then, uh, Jordan harbinger.com, uh, your links to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all the good stuff. Uh, and I know that you're, uh, I think sometimes we feel like people are untouchable or unreachable in the world. You know what I mean? And I want my listeners to know that I know you're a pretty responsive guy and you know, you offer a lot and you're really committed to, uh, bring in a conversation to the table in a variety of ways that helps solve problems everyday for people, you know, kind of the every day. That's what I really appreciate about what you do.
Well, thank you very much man. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to everybody and like I said, it's always fun to chat, so don't be a stranger.
Hey brother, I really appreciate you joining us today. All right,
that wraps up our show and matter of fact, the last show of 2019, happy new year again, Jordan harbinger. Brother. Thank you for giving us your time coming on this show. Uh, educating me and us giving us your thoughts and your insights and really a summary of everything that you've been able to accomplish over this last year. I appreciate it so, so much. I hope everybody had a great 2019 or at least you're still here. You asked me 20 that year. 15 was a pretty much a shit show in a lot of ways, but a lot of great things came out of it and I'm looking forward to an entire new year to really blow this thing up. So a couple of little things. One, we're going to continue with the Tuesday, Thursday podcast episodes starting in 2020 for the month of January. We're going to be dealing with the operational pillar.
Number two, mental acuity has some great guests lined up throughout the month. Really some phenomenal episodes, some great tools and lessons and things to learn and practical application. Please do me a favor, keep sending me your notes, your feedback, your thoughts on what we're doing and how we're doing it and if it's working for you or not. The last big thing is I need your support and keeping this show up and running, keeping things moving and giving back to you. A lot of you have asked for more, for more depth, for training, for etc. And we've got to figure out how to do that. So I put together your a hundred day operational challenge. It's available at mindsetradio.com or you can go to mindsetradio.com/opyourlife. That's Opie your life. It's a go nation basis because this podcast is a part of the operation mindset foundation. So there's some options to do that. And if for right now, for some reason you want to take on the program and you just can't swing that donation, send me an email and we'll talk about it.
I'm really looking forward to bringing people into that program. We're going to begin January 15th as a group and after that you'll be able to sign up any point in time and it'll run for you and not a problem. So that'll be up in live starting January 15th make sure you get in, register early so that we can know who's coming in. Get some things set up. It's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be a freaking ball Buster, but I promise you at the end of the a hundred days there is gold at the end of that rainbow. So I look forward to you joining me. Thanks for listening. As always, do me a favor, share this podcast out. Share it with those your work, those you love, those you like and hell. Even though she can't stand, maybe they'll shift some contacts for them.
So thanks for giving me a great year, your time, your attention, your listening and your feedback. I greatly appreciate it. Thanks to all the sponsors and stepped out this year and really supported us. Roofers, Elliot Rose at the prime mind app, chief Miller apparel and all the others that just showed support across the board. I greatly appreciate it. I'm looking forward to having the conversation in the new year with you. Bring us some new guests, new tools, new techniques, and some real practical application routes from stop again, don't forget to swing by out mindset.com check out the foundation in 2020 we're going to be out on the road quite a bit, teaching a lot of the programming that's out there. So if you want to bring something to your department, pop in, fill out the grant app, and let's get this. I already started, so it's all there and available for you. Let's really elevate the conversation of how we perform at the top of our game, mentally, physically, and emotionally in all aspects of our life for 2020 that's the mission. I hope you'll join me for it. That's it. Have a great safe new year and we will talk to you soon.
Today is a good day! We are joined by one hilarious guy who helps us understand how we can take moments of absolute frustration and turn them into something funny. It's time we all learn how to lighten the f*ck up!
Today we go a little bit deeper into the how and why behind breathwork, what it can do for you and how it can keep you operational.
All right. Welcome back to mindset radio. I'm your host Jeff Banman. Today I'm sitting in route force training headquarters across from a man, this good looking dude, Colby. Now, uh, I've gotten to know Colby now, whatever, like last six months on and off and then really a whole lot more since we've relocated here to the Denver area and you know, so this month what we're dealing with and what we're really focusing on is emotional stability and then the gateways to that and then kind of the features and functions, if you will, around that right from leadership to personal stuff. And I stopped by and asked Colby day, I said, listen, I know like Colby is super into breathwork super and a lot of stuff. Absolutely radical human being, but I know he's working on this whole breathwork package right this second. And I had this thought of thinking, wow, okay, this is breathwork to me.
And you've heard me talk about this several times. It's really the gateway to recovery and the recovery is the gateway to stability and to emotional stability in a lot of ways. I'm not just kind of clearing the mind, but really regulating the system. And if you'll listen to last Thursday's episode when we went through all the traits and trends of emotional intelligence, you know, right. Self-regulation is a big component to that. And so Colby dude, thanks for hanging out with me today. My pleasure. Thank you so much. Um, I tuned in and listened to Phillip's episode. That was like I were talking before the show here. Um, for you guys tuning in, if you haven't touched on that, um, I think probably the best episode you've done, um, of the five or six I've listened to, but absolute pleasure, man. And having you here at brute-force HQ in Denver, seeing you relocate the family, grow this business, and still be a fantastic leader.
I'm just humbled to be on the podcast, man. Dude, I'm trying, man. It's a, um, you know, I need some breath work. Yeah, well it is. I mean, and I think that's the list. And those were the comments we get. I think the, the, that, that thing I wanted to create in this podcast was that this was a real no-bullshit conversation, not about selling things or this or that, but bringing people to this community that they may not be exposed to kind of an informal course of their lives. And then techniques and aspects and learnings and the things that go into one, why do I do what I do? But then primarily how do I stay operational and in my world, operational is the ability to deal with everything I deal with and come home and actually have a complete life. Right? And you know, we talk about it for our worlds, it's a 24, seven gig.
It's an all the time deal. It's not go to the office, punch a clock, go to the gym, go home, have dinner. I mean, it's, if I'm a firefighter, I'm, I'm on 24, seven mentally, physically, emotionally. I'm kind of on police officers. Same thing that service members clearly, right? This is kind of a, uh, a no stop environment. And so, you know, I know from my own work and the things I've done, you know, the gateway to regulation internally, right? Central nervous system, regulation, all those things. That's breath work. And then it's the chain of events. If I can regulate my, my central nervous system, now I'm starting to actually, then I can deal with my emotional state. And once I deal with my emotions, then I can deal with my, yeah. A,
you know, a high negative energy, anxiety, stress, fear, uh, fear is probably a big one, especially in this community. Oh yeah. Um, if you're in that state and you're in that place of mind, your emotion is like, you know, running the show, right? You're not thinking logically, you're not thinking logically. And so breathwork, at least what I've found, and there's, there's, you know, when you think of breath work, first of all, let me just preface this entire conversation. Um, in doing my research, I uncovered, I mean, literally dozens of definitions of math work. So here's mine. Breathwork is a structured daily practice with the, uh, intention of influencing mechanics. So talking about actual anatomy, how we breathe physiology, how our body exchanges OTU and CO2 and state, our frame of mind. And so breath work is simply, at least in my context for the context of what I teach a structured daily practice with the intention of influencing those three areas.
I love that. And so you can go down like the spiritual rabbit hole and then phase two, you know, there's some different styles out there. Well then we know some people that this is like the non woo woo stuff. It's the fucking works like hands down, especially in populations with a chronic stress, chronic ongoing, never ending and seeing some of the shit that you guys see. I've got a good buddy. Um, I do jujitsu with Dave. He's a Westminster PD and um, you know, he was my, probably one of my best friends in high school. Happy go lucky dude. I'm always the life of the party. And uh, we lost touch for a few years and recently caught up with him and we're talking about like, what's it like being a cop? I can't relate. I'm a personal trainer. I'm a coach. I help people in the gym.
And he's like, man, it's cool. You know, it's, you know, you ever watch cops. It's kind of like that. I'm like, okay, but really what's it like? Like what's some of the hard shit? And he shared some stories that, um, that were heavy, you know, and it's like, and he realized pretty quickly the importance of like managing his emotional state, not just numbing blocking out, but also like processing and working through some of those things. And so breath work really is a fantastic way to be able to regulate your state. I mean, in a matter of seconds. Totally potent thing. Yep.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's been interesting, you know, out of the, when you look at, you know, tomorrow primary courses that I've taught forever and then, you know, some of flowed out of there, but it's the operation mindset side. And then the, of course, the art of recovery and what I discovered years ago was understanding that being existing in a state of being recoverable was the gateway to really performing in any situation, any circumstance. Right. My ability to inaction, settle and move, opens up, my cognitive aperture opens up, my awareness, opens up my decision making capability. Right. So, you know, to me, recovery isn't like end of the day. Now I got to check out, sit back and recover from this 12 hour, 24 hour, 48 hour shift I just did through recovery is like an all the time constant deal. And the cool thing I love about breathwork is it's always available and always with you once you learn a couple of simple strategy yep.
And have the awareness that you're like, Oh shit. I'm like having that thing again. Totally. I feel the anxiety. Some people have the feeling like a physical sensation in the throat, in the stomach, heaviness in the chest and shortness of breath. Yep. Totally. Like the one, um, having the awareness that you're actually having, you know, you need, uh, you need to shift, need to shift, right. Upregulate downregulate whatever it looks like. Man, it's just so potent and so powerful. And it's funny, I was on, um, um, social media that, or Dana saw a good friend of mine and he was doing a, some silly CrossFit workouts, a thousand step-ups for time. He's a firefighter because he had his full fire gear on oxygen tank, everything. And he's not actually, oxygen is not normal. They're just normal. Like, Oh, what's the difference? Well, I mean you wouldn't let a breeze straight.
Okay. All right. So it is the same. It's the same. It just gone through compressed fucking, sorry. Good to make that correction. What's it called? It's just air and air tank. Air pack. Right. So he's wearing his air pack one day or, and he's got his heart rate, you know, jacked up through the roof. Just doing this for awhile. And I'm like, his name's Matt, Matt Chan. I'm like, man, what's like, what's up with this? You know, what are you doing? And he's just getting ready specificity for, I mean, do this, what firefighters do, you guys are carrying around a bunch of heavy shit. It's like hot as fuck. Right? And one of the things that he has been implementing is um, a strategy just called nasal breathing. Super simple, just breathing in and out through the nose. And so what we're finding is when you can shift out of, um, mouth breathing, that should be a gear reserve for extremely high output.
So I'm talking like full on sprint assault bike, you know, last 30 seconds of effort when your body really, you just need to open up the Vince so to speak and flooded with oxygen. You can only sustain that 30 seconds a minute. Interesting. So talking about breath work, one of the, I guess unintended benefits without really think about it is learning this gear system and your output, you can regulate your energy expenditure through your breathing. The point I share the story of Matt doing this is he's like, you know, I was just experimenting doing nasal breathing only this entire time. He had to pull his pace back considerably. However, the rate of perceived exertion is much lower, the recovery is much quicker and we can dive into nasal breathing and stuff like that later. But it's a very simple strategy right on the fly. If you ever find yourself in a stressful interaction
[inaudible]
just take a breath in and out through the nose. Um, the longer the exhale, the exhale rather should be twice the length of an inhale. Okay.
[inaudible]
that slow pause not only gives your brain a minute to like catch up, right? Cause you're bringing your focus internally. But what you're actually doing with that extended exhale is you are switching on your parasympathetic nervous system, which you are. It's this, it's this constant balance. It's this constant game. You, you're looking at it on a graph. It's like I'm a concept oscillation of up and down, up and down, up and down. Stressor comes in. The recovery that needs to happen is just as equal. And so when we can take that nasal breath real slow, two, three seconds in, um, for six seconds out, that just kind of puts us back to our baseline. You know, it's interesting because I did a interview with Andy Clark. She's out of Canada. Um, she's got an actual, uh, genetic disorder that triggers her central nervous system that dysregulates her and puts her in a high stress state.
Her son has it. Yeah. So she had to figure out, I mean, she was a shit show basically a lot of her life. She still admits it and you know, and uh, and one of the things she said in her research is you understood especially like even doing nasal breathing and triggering and just focusing effort on the left nostril. Like it's the closest point to the bagel nerve. Yeah. Right. So it actually then stimulates the vagal nerve, which then begins to, you know, start to help regulate heart rate variability, opens up the fashion around the heart. You know what I mean? It starts to run that chain. So I, I'm sitting here going, yeah, duh. Oh, totally man. Like nasal breathing, man. It's just like, it's easy. It's easily accessible, right? It's just something that if we can just have the awareness, like I'm not talking about a 1% improvement, I'm not talking about like a little tweak.
Like, I don't know. What's a small thing that guys can do better in their day to day life? Like a tiny little fix. I don't know. Now he put me on the spot. Now I've got to think of, so nasal breathing is like a 25 50% improvement. We're talking like in rates of perceived exertion or magnitude. Yeah. It's like, and it's such a simple thing, like it's mind blowing that more people are aware of this. And so that's one of the reasons I'm able to come in and teach this stuff here at the gym and teach with my clients. And the benefits are immediate, immediate, immediate. And so having this gear system where you can learn your pacing in your training, in live situations, you, what this means is you can, instead of going from zero to a hundred in a split second, like, sure, the thing can happen, whatever, but your reaction could be like zero to 50.
You're calm, you're logical, you're precise as opposed to what the fuck is happening. Right? And so I'll watch, um, uh, active self protection. Have you ever heard of this YouTube channel? This guy breaks down. Um, uh, shooting engagements from closer to cameras. Um, and it's just so wild. It happens so fast, so fast. Right. I've never had happen. I've never experienced, I hope I never do and I'm grateful for those of you who, um, you know, are serving and helping. Um, but, and I like to think, man, if I was in this situation, what would I do? I don't know. I'd probably fucking run away. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not the one who has to go bust in the door and get the bad guy. Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so just breathwork as a whole, as a way to control your state. Right. Big picture. Like, I can't relate to this, but like getting geared up for a fucking squat call these guys do it. Yeah.
Dozens and dozens. I mean, if you think about it, right? I mean, we exist in this world where we're, we're hanging out, right where we are generally, there's two conditions. Yeah. There's duly Joan, are you like, yeah, I mean, I think so. While you're, you know, so let's talk about it from the fire service or from the law enforcement perspective. You know, our day you show up, you're doing your shift, you do your checks, you do whatever. Maybe you're doing training, maybe you're doing PT, you're doing whatever. You might be having lunch. I mean, you might be having breakfast, you might be sitting around smoking and joking. You might just be chilling out and you're laughing at something. And then out of nowhere, eh, man, you know, everybody responded for a house fire, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so you have an instant rise, right? You have an instant chemical dump reaction body begins to move into action. You move towards the firetruck quickly. You know what I mean? You used to run and haul ass and knock each other down and beat the shit out of each other. But now I think there it's still may happen, you know? And then you get an a, you got to get your gear on. You're getting set up. You got to go through everything. But knowing that it's live. Yeah. Versus a drill. Well, yeah. And then you're in it and then it's real deal. And then you know, you've got streams of communication coming in. Like you an officer going from grabbing a cup of coffee in the morning cause he finally had a break between all the kind of mundane, you know, go check the welfare somebody or go settle somebody down.
Call to you know, armed robbery, suspect with a gun, active shooting in a school, shots fired officer down. Like all the like man, life change on a dime. And you know what I've always tried to say is I need the tools to put myself into condition. I need to be and for this moment and the next right. And to me this is one of these key things, but I want to drill a point before we kind of get into a technique and a few other things. The gateway to the gateway is recognition, right? It is a level of awareness that says my body, I'm going for the ride. So tightening the chest, difficulty breathing, you know, fitness, stomach, right? Headache, flushing, you know there's, you have to find what your indicator is. And what I found over life is, man, it's different for you as it is for me is everybody else.
You can't say this is the indicator. You have to be aware and not to see that I'm dysregulated, that I'm coming out of pocket. He used to tell people all the time, you know, if you go to the engine getting a firetruck, get your gear on and your struggle, like buckle your seatbelt or put your air pack on. Like if you're fumbling with that. Yeah, exactly. You're fumbling with that. You're out of the zone. You're creeping out of that zone because that is something you do regularly without thinking. So autonomic response. Now you've done it a million at times in your life, you should not have any difficulty doing that. And if you do that should be at like something, a glaring indicator that your, something's in there that you're dysregulated, that you need to regulate. And so that's why I want to, I want to make sure that we're, we're attacking that as step one. It's like self regulation and you know, you know it, whoever you are, you know when you're dysregulated. And like, listen, there's no judgment. No, don't judge yourself. No.
That turns into this downward spiral. Literally just there it is, but it's like, here's the thing, man. Society at large, we do a really good job of making heroes out of the service, out of firefighters, out of police and for good reason. What they do are heroic acts. I listened to your episode where you talked about, please don't call me here. No, yeah, but here's the deal. You're human. You have these same psychological things, the same physiological response, same emotional traits and no matter how much training, like you cannot beat the stress response out of a person. You can inoculate a person to handle more and more and more. However, the, you know that's going to come on the tail end too. Like there's a equal and opposite reaction. I had somebody tell me once out of a class they, they pulled me aside and they're like, you know, I don't, I don't have a fight or flight response. I just
said point gun to his head right away. Okay, all right, let's talk. And you know what I mean? Like, but some people, you know, they, they get numb to things over time or they don't think they have sick, but it's there, it is always there. Yeah, totally. So I didn't mean to interrupt you. I don't want to just like know, have the awareness. Yeah. Right. No. That like, Oh shit. Okay. Like I, this is a moment, this is like one of those pivot points inside of me to be on a peak now action, right. Awareness and now that's got to lead to it. Of course. Ultimately having that awareness is going to allow you to instantly shift into like go mode. Like okay, yeah, cool. I know how to do this. Confident. It's called a high positive. Right. As opposed to like a high negative anxiety, fear, anger.
It's like flow, focus, energy, boom. Yeah, totally man. So all right, so let's, let's kind of talk through then some of the like the immediate techniques, you know, um, I'm going to an incident or you know, I'm walking into a village, right. I'm trying to like, like there's a moment where I have an opportunity even in you know, pre incident, pre action, pre, you know, fireground pre call, you know, pre communication, pre, you know, most times hopefully, you know, maybe pre gunfight unless I walked into an ambush and then I'm just kinda fucked. Um, you know, but then it's on. Uh, but there's, there's, there's these subtle moments that give me an opportunity to regulate, right? So if I'm responding to an incident, that response is an opportunity to regulate before I show up. So what are, you know, so nasal breathing, I, I like, I like it and you know, what you basically said was, you know, two, three seconds in and then basically double out just a long extended exhale, long extended exhale.
Yeah. It's going to be very beneficial to downshift to downregulate it to like bring you back to base. Right. Um, something important to note too, that like with mechanics and breathing, it's a skill. It sounds so silly. I know every time I say this I'm like, ah, breathing. It's a scale. I sounds so fucking potential, dude. It's like, it's like seeing your front side post. You have to train the system to do that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You don't have to, there, there is not a, that has to be, you have to be disciplined. You have to be on it, you have to be a little more, you know, over focused at first before it becomes a natural course of action. So yeah. So the reason this is important is, so we've got our, our autonomic nervous system, which by and large is unconscious. It's our respiration, our heartbreak, our digestion, all these different things. And we really can't control however. So a stressor comes in, something happens, we see it or we hear it or we feel it through our senses. Right. And that's our brain it.
So depending on the intensity of the trigger and our perception of it. Yeah. There's some really cool research that shows not only cause what might stress you out might make me twice as freaked out. Totally. Right. I ain't walked into a part of building. Sorry. That's, that's my jam, bro. So how you perceive this stressor. And I actually think that's where most of the adaptation happens in this, these fields is like they are, they are learning to perceive these in a way that kind of down-regulates the stress response. So there's that psychological component. So then what happens is, uh, the sympathetic nervous system just goes, boom, activates and we need it. That's what keeps us alive. That's what gives us energy to fight, to survive, to run away, to do whatever. Breathwork allows us to shift between those two on demand. We can upregulate like, and that's what one of the thing that's really important.
Um, I'll use with some of my clients who suffer from anxiety. Um, bear with me here on this analogy, but for their entire life, they're like, man, this whole like this whole breathing thing isn't really working. I try to calm down and I just can't calm down. I'm like, have you ever tried to like ramp up? Have you ever tried to like just embrace it and go with the feeling? And they're like, no, sure shit. We try it. They're like, dude, this is fucking life changing. My anxiety gone. So what they were doing was fighting this response and trying to like downplay it when really it's just like, nah, just let it go. And then it was trying to tell them other things. So in this context, if I'm riding in that fire truck or in the police car, whatever, I'm trying to remain calm.
I'm trying to read. Cool. But I'm also like, I could start upregulating a little bit like, all right, I need to be alert, I need to be ready to go. So when we're talking about breathing, we're talking about mechanics. Number one, it's a skill. It's something that you should practice daily. I would suggest part of your morning routine. Um, you know, when you can, and honestly, honestly, it doesn't matter when I've just had the best results with my clients, having them do it in the morning, higher adherence, a better energy for the day. It's usually a calm time where you're not interrupted by kids, sculptors, family, whatever. So morning seems to be the best. Uh, the morning protocol that I like to take people through, um, is a, uh, I'll explain the, the setup. It's a one, one to one cadence, right? Which each of those numbers refers to the inhale hold.
Exhale, hold one, one to one. Now in order to individualize those numbers, you're going to want to do something called the CO2 tolerance test. There's some really cool research that's showing that our level of CO2 tolerance, the more tolerant we are to CO2, the less emotionally reactive we are. So bear with me for a like this is really fucking cool. I'm dr Andrew Huberman, university of Stanford is doing some studies on this right now. What he's showing is the less sensitive you are, um, to CO2. So you have to build up is what happens when we're our metabolism's running and we're our breath. Um, the less sensitive we are to that, the, sorry, the more sensitive we are to that, the more reactive we are emotionally interesting. So anxiety. Yeah, a very strong stress response. Um, uh, getting emotionally triggered by other people. All of this is actually tied to that.
You should heard a conversation before this. Exactly. Um, all of this is actually tied to our level of CO2 tolerance breath. We're, here's where this gets really fucking cool, especially for this industry. So when you invited me on and I was like, fuck yeah, this is so cool. When you can expand your tolerance to CO2, your perception of stressors, your reaction, and your, and this is actually measurable data. The HRV, it goes down, your reactivity goes lower, you become an inoculated distress. Interesting. Through breath work, it's out. It's very potent. So I shared that to say like, this shit is very, very valuable and it's not some hippy dippy new world thing like [inaudible]
not necessarily the extreme when Wim Hoff, you know, go dump yourself in one, one, one method. Yeah. I mean I, you know, breathwork, that's all I, you know, in a generic way. Cause I get questions all the time, so I'm glad we're doing this. Uh, cause I always look at somebody like one, it's very individualized. The, your, the way you regulate in your breath work, how long you breathe, how far, you know, all that stuff can be trained, but you've got to find your individual flow with it. You know? And breathwork is kinda like, you know, assholes. Everybody's got one. And you know, some of them suck. Uh, you know, but it's, you know, there's a lot out there, so, okay. So when we're talking about like, let's do a morning setup, let's talk two things real quick too, you know, so let's talk about a morning set up and what that looks like. And I wanna reiterate some of what you just said and then like what, what are the tools I could use, you know, cause right now somebody could be listening to this and literally as soon as we're done,
go to be going putting it in action. Yeah. Right. And being like, okay, those guys are full of shit. Or Holy cow, that really work. I try this. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So that's what I love about this show because these are things, I mean, seriously, somebody who's going to use this in the next, it's 10 hours. Yeah, absolutely. And listen, if you do, I want to hear about this. You can find me on my website. [inaudible] dot com Jeff will have a LinkedIn and it, he's not going to lean on that. Colby neff.com in case you don't always get it. But so morning, morning, morning set up. Real simple. I would suggest you start with at least five minutes. Okay? Right? Five minutes. Find a comfortable, safe environment, a place where you can close your eyes and not feel like somebody's watching you. There's like this psychological emotional thing where you don't want to be judged first time you do it right.
Find a safe space, okay, hate that word. But find a safe space, right where you can be comfortable. You can do it sitting down, you can do it lying down. Um, I don't suggest doing a standing up. You can't if you want to, but find a comfortable spot. And so the first thing we're going to do is actually test your CO2 tolerance. There's for breaths in the CO2 tolerance test. Um, so we're going to do is go ahead and close the mouth and you can do this right now as we're doing this, you're driving, maybe stop cause you hit a timer, but it's real simple. You're going to take a kind of two or three nasal breaths in, in and out at your normal pace. On the fourth breath, you're going to inhale fully through the nose. So maximum inhale through the nose, fill the lungs as full as you can.
You're going to start your stopwatch and you are going to exhale as slowly as you can. Cool. That's your CO2 tolerance test. If you score a 20 seconds or lower, you really need this very bad. That's a very low score. It indicates poor pulmonary capacity and indicates poor aerobic fitness and it indicates high emotional reactivity. Um, about 20 to 30 seconds is average for most if you can score upwards of like a 50 to 62nd that indicates like advanced or um, above average levels of aerobic fitness, pulmonary capacity and reactivity to stress. Some guys can get upwards to 90 seconds, but those guys, when we're talking about elite level free divers who literally train this hours a day, every day. So in this context, I would say a really good benchmark is to shoot for 60 seconds, right? 62nd test. And um, it sounds silly. It's like, yeah, I could, I can do that until you try it and you're like, Oh fuck, I have 15 cents.
What's around? Let me tell you, there's a lot of shit in this community that's like, Oh, I could do that. And then we try it and then we're like, yeah, okay, maybe I can't do that. Totally. And so with the morning routine, you're just gonna want to do, you're going to want to find some protocol. It doesn't matter what it is. I'll give you a couple today. It doesn't matter what it is, but something that's going to leave you feeling what you want it to feel, which is if you want to feel awake, you want to feel focused. There's, you can find a protocol that will do that for you. Okay. What usually works most times in my experience is a one one to one. So we're going to extend this out. It'd be like a five second inhale, five second hold ten second exhale, five second hold.
Okay. And you do that for 10 to 15 cycles? Minimum. Okay. Have to really start to drive some of the adaptation. So that would be like a typical morning breathing session. Um, one of my personal favorites is, um, when you're switching tasks, this is what I did before coming in. It's just something when you want to like put some closure to this previous thing and also kind of perk up and get ready for your next activity, whatever that is. Um, excuse me. That would be transitions. Transition moments of recovery you talked about. Oh yeah. Good times will transitions, man. This is my personal favorite task switching and transitions. Nope, this is my personal favorite is where we fail miserably. Really? Oh yeah, yeah. Transitions are huge man. And if you have the awareness, they're everywhere, everywhere, all day, all the time. That protocol is real simple.
It's a one to one and there is no exhale hold. So it's like three rounds of like seven in the 14. Hold seven out. You do that three times and then you're going to go 15 really deep aggressive breaths in through the mouth or through the nose. If you want to get a really upregulating effect all through the mouth, like you'll feel the Aussie, it will feel very different. If you just go through the notes, it's going to be a pretty mild effect. Okay. Everybody's different. Everybody's, this is what I feel. But, and then after those 15 it's called super ventilation
[inaudible]
big, deep breaths like that. After those 15 you're going to exhale, hold as long as you can. Hmm. 30 45 seconds. So do that two times. Do that. Two times. Your brain is just like fucking on fire. You feel great, interesting task switch. So that's how you kind of work in the morning routine. Um, that transition, man, it takes, it takes five minutes, right? We're talking about 10 minutes of your day with like unlimited upset. Yeah. So what is the, what's a good,
you know, what's a good kind of like, I like to call inaction or in flow technique, right? So if I'm driving a fire truck or I'm the engine officer and firing it back or on the law enforcement officer, you know, screaming down the road and you know, I'm managing a lot, right? Managing traffic, I'm receiving information, I'm trying to decipher stuff I'm having to communicate out. Do not sound like an ass on the radio. And when I do that, um, how could I leverage some of this stuff kind of in those moments. You know, I like the, I really can see kind of some of the nasal breathwork. Does it, should I just start that?
Yeah. Just man, it's going to come from awareness and training. Yeah. Right. Speaking of transitions, the way that I teach my clients to make breath work or like better mechanics, part of their day is to when you, when you transition from office to office, car to, um, headquarters, whatever, home to work, use that time to nasal breathe and just be aware of it. Like, okay, I'm going to, I'm transitioning and walking from the parking lot into the store. I'm leaving the restaurant and going back to my car. Take that time. And just nasal breathe. Yeah. That's like layer one, layer two. Once you feel comfortable with that would be like, okay, as you're warming up for your workout, nasal breathe. Yeah. Try that and then tell me it's not hard. I'd try that. Doing like a nasal breathing only conditioning session would be like the next level full on nasal breathing. Right? And then you're really gonna find your gears. You're going to have these moments of panic where you're like, I actually don't have enough oxygen right now. And then you got to slow down your respiration and you're taking control of your physiology in that moment. So the lowest hanging fruit man is like, just like make nasal breathing kind of. You don't have to do it all day, every day, but make it your norm. Especially in stressful situations.
Yeah. You know, I started to do that and when we talked about, uh, with Andy, I'm going to reference back because this is relevant, right? So a different side of it when she talked about, you know, the fact that we don't, you know, we exercise our sympathetic response constantly in this world, right? We're constantly heightened and you know, in that place and we're not exercising the rest and digest or not exercising. We're not teaching the body to regulate. We're teaching the body stressed to be stressed. So it's no wonder when we go home, we can't regulate when we walk through switch. Can't go there to the door or no, are you kidding me? That's a perfect opportunity. They're totally,
we're what we're talking about. That really hit home for me because I'll have days like where I get inside and I'm just like still at work and like, I'm like not being a good dad. I'm not being a good husband when that way man breathing. Like if you could like park around the house or like somewhere you can park in your garage. Right. Just to chill out for a few minutes. Open up an app. I recommend. It's called breathe plus. Um, another one is called state S. T. a. T E breech plus is customizable. You can put in your own state is like their own defined protocols. They're both fantastic. Yep. You could just fire that up, right? Real simple. Three or four minutes. Do a little task, switch, transition, boom, leave work at home or sorry, just don't leave work at home, leave work at work, leave work at work and then come home and be engaged. And what you'll notice over a few exposures of doing this is like people are gonna notice other people are going to be like, something's changed. And here's the thing about it,
right? It actually gives you an opportunity. I don't, I mean I have a hard time sometimes, you know, leave, leave, work at the office or leave work at the station or leave work where air or you know, cause cause we really can't, you know, but here's the difference. You're walking in with if you can regulate, you know, we just talked Thursday about emotional intelligence and I, you know, and I shared how, you know, my own, my own state, my own emotional state has such an impact on everyone around me. Like a vibe, shitty or I'm heavy. You're on whatever dude. You know, I mean, and it jacks Morgan up through the roof, you know what I mean? And then it [inaudible] to start. And then it just triggers this huge downfall. Whereas if I've had a tough day and I can transition and regulate, do the breath work, I come in in a different way and then I know she's willing to hear whatever is going. Like she'll know maybe I'm, I didn't have the best day or it was a tough incident or a tough call. It was something, she'll know that. But by me being regulated and not caring, all, you know, all of it in there and being dysregulated, she's actually willing then to be like, Hey, what's going on? How are you? You know, what's up?
And then you're in a Headspace to where you're not feeling judged, not feeling like I'm doing something wrong or I'm all fucked up. Or you're like, you're in a head space where it's like, Hey, listen to me, it was shit today was today was bad. Yeah.
You know, and I don't want to talk about it or I want to share it with you, but I'm at least able to communicate in a whole different context. Then, you know, stumbling through the door, upset, irritated, frustrated and carrying all this extra stuff. So man, I,
I don't tell you man, I just had my second son, he's three months old and it's, I forgot the newborn stage. Like how this goes. I'm getting like you were just thinking I want 13 years. Yeah, you just did it again. I should have shot myself in the leg. Like all right. And I was like, so I still had like it's, it's fantastic and it's great. It's dude, there's moments
or like,
like these things are triggered from my son crying and screaming that I don't know how to fix. I'm like contracture, I do diaper. I tried feeding you. I don't know what the fuck you want. There are these moments where like I have to regulate like yeah you have no I don't, I have a very angry response, which is like punch things and Declan has taught me so much about cause they're all thing, ours is a bundle of energy. Yeah. That's it. And that's all they feel is whatever your total and then it gets even worse. Right. They feel that energy. Oh yeah. Right. It's like then you're, and then you're spun out of the awareness of like, Whoa, I need a better solution. Like I can't just get pissed. This can't be my strategy because this is going to end up not good. Yeah. Everybody in my family. Yeah. Yeah. Cause then you're not any violate kind of the [inaudible]
idea of creating safety for those around you. Right. And uh, you know, that's where I, I hate that, that over time emotions have been labeled the way they have been labeled. You know, especially in our world is like this negative pH. You can't have emotions. Oh man. Yeah. I always say, and I said it on Thursday, the only, you only accept a little emotion in our communities. Anger, anger. Really? Oh yeah, you can, you can't be happy too long. You can be a little cut up, but then, but then you're fucking like, I'm an outsider asking them, why can't be sad? You know? Because sadness is assigned as a sign of weakness. You can't be too happy because then you're not being serious, you know? But dude, you can be as pissed off as you want to be pissed off. You can be as angry as you want to be because that's what the, that's what the collective emotion is, is because everybody feels that because everybody's pissed off everybody's cause that's the expression of this sensation.
They're experienced. They have an identify what that's, yeah, that's just the expression of it. Right. And, and it's gnarly. And so, you know, this is a, this is a different model of how we exist and um, and begin to see, Hey wait a minute. You know, I can be sad that that was actually sadness. Like how like that would be so hard to separate, like, I don't know man, like walking in and seeing a family murdered or like just seeing some heinous shits. Like how can you, like, I guess I understand why the reaction is the numbness. I get that. Yeah. It's just, it's fucked up that that's how the standard is, I guess. Yeah. And then, and then you got to go be pissed, you know, cause anger. And I will, I will ask you this as a trainer, because in my world, you know, even in the physicality of our world, even in the physical training of our world, the answer was always get angry at it.
You all lift heavier, get angry, draw that anger. So hit it harder, go faster. You know? So you're embedded with anger. Stressful is the, is the emotional connection to a higher level of performance, which is fucked up. You know what I mean? This, those are backwards relationship dude. Yeah. But that's the way it's been. Like have you, you've, you felt like rage, you felt rage was like, I'm talking, seeing red, like just fucking mad. Yes. You cannot tell me that's the best way to show up. Right? But it is, that's what the thinking is. Well, and then the problem is then, then we're launched into shame and were launched into sadness and were launched into judgement. And then we're launched. And, uh, I'm not who I want to be. Uh, uh, am I even making a difference? And then, and then the question is, am I even worthy?
Should I even be on this earth? You know, I mean it gets, dude, that's, that's what, that's what I want. That's the conversation. It's like this is where we are. And to me the problem is the communities want to want to pill it. You know, wanna want to go treat it through Medicaid, Medicaid, it, don't worry about it. We'll just medicate it or go drink more, you know, or whatever. And, and, and what we've missed is listen, know, what don't we need to teach you to do is regulate your systems. What I need to do is encourage you to be aware of what's happening in that moment and then give you the, the biological tools breathwork. It's a biological tool that then enhances your natural, listen, we're smart people. We can kind of find the answer. You notice as a coach, you don't have the answer.
They do. You have to just unlock it. And so, you know, everybody gets it and is a technique to me. This is why I wanted you to come on this month because this is a gateway to this pillar of emotional stability, of emotional regulation of, you know what I like to call it, bringing calm to chaos. I can't stop the chaos and I can't control the chaos, but I sure as hell can be the one to show up to bring calm to the environment. Right. And, and then use that capacity. But I can't do that unless I have a tool that, that, that biologically regulates me. You know, the mind and body are,
yeah. Cause I mean like people are gonna pick that up. Like if you have high anxious energy. Sure, yeah, yeah. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. No, everything's good. No you're not. People can just look at your body language and know, you can see a leader who's calm, who's confident, who's collected. Hopefully you guys just thought of that person. Yeah, that's a great example, a great role model to have in your mind. But on the flip side, we can read body language very well. We can know when a person actually isn't calm and isn't regulated despite them saying, so dude, we're energetic beings. Absolutely. So that's where this conscious control of your autonomic nervous system comes into play. It's this really weird thing. It's, did I have this crazy thought, like we're born into these bodies and it, to me, it's like the greatest mystery in universe.
It's like, okay, so how do we really do this stuff? How do I regulate all these parts and pieces and joints and thoughts, right? It's this unknown mystery that we're still fucking learning about. And it's crazy and I love it, man. I mean, this has been such a journey of such a discovery of things. So, uh, so breathwork man, like you're talking about, you're talking about using it to access, um, emotional stability. So one thing that makes me think of like, breathwork has been used for thousands and thousands of years. It's used in shamonic rituals. It's used in Indian tribes, like all these different things. But here in 2019, 2020, what does that mean? If someone were to be using that to get too emotional to get to an emotionally stable place, how do you see breathwork fitting in and allowing that? Is it changing state to get to a place where you can like, reflect and think on some hard stuff? Is it like being able to regulate your state and your emotions? I, you know, my personal opinion is there is, there's a whole, the whole,
you know, breadth is the only biological function, physiological function we can control. It's the gateway, right? And, um, for years we spent a lot of world in any, on the aspects of psychology and thought that was the answer. And I'm a big believer that the answer really lies in our biological makeup, you know, in balancing the internal systems that then create access to what we need to see, uncover, unpack, deal with, talk about or whatever it is. And so, you know, to me, breathwork and there, you know, like there's a ton of options out there, but I watched it. I mean, I watch it on the range when we do the meditation shoots, right? The deep core. Uh, what do they tell you to do when you're shooting? What's the cue? I remember, I remember when I was learning how to shoot. I'm, and I'm a fucking rookie, but I remember something like, you're not, are you exhaling as you pull the trigger?
Do you know this? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it definitely varies. So there's, there's the exhale, the pause, you know, the slight hold at a, at the bottom, half the breath or two thirds. But that varies depending upon weapon in style and who and everything else. Right? There's a lot of times to just make this connection. So already practicing breath work. Oh, totally. Oh yeah. If you're a shooter or a shooter, I mean most guys, most guys, no matter what, they're on the exhale. Yes. Right? And it is a release not only in breath, but of energy, right? I am settling myself because like I say, you know, shootings easy. All you ever have to do is press through that trigger without disturbing the front sites under any conditions imaginable. Right? It's that easy. That's all you have to do. Doesn't matter. Shit's blowing up or bullets are coming back at you.
All you have to do is be able to press through that trigger and not disturb the front sights. That's it. That's the only thing, you know? Yeah. But that requires you to be stable and regulated in order to achieve that. And so, yeah, I mean, breathwork shows up. Listen, this community, you're not, you're not ignorant to breathwork. It's there. It's subtle. For years it's been slang or you know, an approach or this or that. And then over the last probably 10 years been inundated with all the techniques, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And so that's why I asked you to come on the show, because I know if you've, if you taken on a technique, it's not bullshit, right? So I'm going to validate that I trust you and what you're giving to the audience is an actual tangible tool because there's some shit out there that like it'd be great if I'm climbing Mount Everest and cool and you know, sounds great, but it's unobtainable.
Right. And that's where I look at it. You know, I, I believe that the, the breathwork, whatever it looks like for you, in order to be successful with it, you have to have a level of awareness. If I create a level of awareness in you as to your state, then I've got access to do all kinds of things, right? So if I'm aware that I need to breathe, okay, then I can be aware of what my sensation is, what emotions that triggering, what thoughts that's bringing up and then what courses of actions I'm most likely to take at this point in time. So it's a gateway, right? It's a, it's a gateway drug. I did say it's an opportunity. That's why it's important to me because we're unfortunately we're focusing on the end results of not doing breath work, of not regulating, of not being aware, which you know, then starts this downfall chain of events up.
Not good, not good, not fucking good. And to know, no today. I don't know Terry, I don't know. It's 27 maybe. Yeah, it is. And it's grown across fire service and law enforcement unity. It really is. I mean it is a, it is a serious issue. This is an outsider. What a guys on the inside, people on the inside, what are they saying? Think about that. What's like the, what's like the consensus it berries. There isn't one because you've got, you still have a large community that ignores it, you know, there's that largely kind of what happens that bad. Yeah. And then you, and then you just have a, you don't have a safe space to say it. I mean, I didn't say it for years, but you were feeling it dude. I've had thoughts of suicide in my head for, since I was a kid and then enhanced by everything else I've done.
I felt like I told Phil, you know, I, I have felt like a failure in one aspect or another of my life virtually every day. Yeah. I mean, and then it, then that leads to why do I even need to be here and what is my purpose and is it even worth it? Am I causing more harm by being here than not? I mean, dude, it's a, that's why I talk about, you know, intervention versus prevention. All we do is intervention. If the thought has come into your head, you, there's, there needs to be an intervention, not just the act. That's the current model. That's what you're saying. No, that's the current model is where you're going to pretend it doesn't exist and then teach you some prevention measure and have some person who has no correlation to your world. It doesn't make sense of this weird context because then, okay, so I've gone through this preventative training, which you can't, this is so crazy, dude.
Hey guys, don't think it was [inaudible]. Yeah, yeah, you can't, I mean like what, that doesn't make any sense. Well and then call the person who's not going to understand what your life is about and then deal with, it's like one wife facilitated a conversation between ops, medical services, all the sites at the agency and some of the operators. And we had them all in a room and collected when we were teaching a program and they were there. And you know, the biggest thing that came out was they had the opportunity to go, we're not here to take your guns away. We're actually here to keep you doing crazy shit around the world. You know? And my response was they, it's like garbage. If you don't take your garbage out, what's going to happen? And it's going to stink and be nasty and it's gonna fuck everything up.
Yeah, you have to take the garbage out. But the problem is there's a big, there's a big gap and there's a big lack of trust in that community because there's a huge pool of people that don't know. You know, cause I always said, it's like if I go see somebody and actually said what, what was going on, you know, the psych would have PTSD by the time I left the room. Right? Right. So why would I even remotely share myself with you? Right. So it's a big challenge and, but I draw back, but I look back at it and there is a course of action to dealing with that. And it, it comes in self-regulation. It comes in opening of a pathway to be able to feel what you need to feel. Say what you need to say. Experience. We shouldn't do that first sentence. Feel what you need to feel big time. Like that's gotta be it. That's the hardest thing, right? Yeah. We don't want to feel those things. They're uncomfortable. They don't feel. And then there, and then if I let that over fold den, am I being weak? Right? Am I going to be incapable of then doing it again?
Right. Am I going to be, uh, unable to handle the next thing?
[inaudible] and
I think it makes you more capable of due to does my asity infinitely larger. It's like a few of those feelings and have those experiences and learn from them. Yeah. I mean it's like after I did my work with Elliot Roe who was on, I was on season one. I asked him on a podcast afterwards when we did the, I had no therapy session and, and got rid of anger, got rid of this, release, this anger, this whole thing. Um, my first thought was Huck, I'd been a bad ass without all that shit. Like if I could go back 20 years and start over without anger, without that aggressive child embedded point of exactly what it is. Oh yeah. Three, seven, eight years we learn. Oh yeah. Early, early like yeah. Like already, you know, one, two, three months. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so, and we created in our offspring because we are that way, you know what I mean?
Cause that's the energy they're used to cause they don't think, Oh, dad's angry or they're just learning the energy connection. And if the energy connection is anger, that's what they know. That's what becomes familiar in the elephant. Right. So that's what they're going to look for and that's what they're going to come off of. And that's what we grow up with. And you know, yeah. I've learned over time and everything that I've done that the more I've released tude if I really wish I could just transport myself back 25, 30 years ago. Yeah. Cause it's like in the, in the state of BIM. Cause I'd go back and be like, fuck, I wouldn't have clowns without anything. I don't give a shit. You know what I mean? And not getting up, not give a shit in the sense of like don't care, but like there's no need for an impact. I can execute, I can do this, I can do that because it's, it's in proper context and I've set myself up to do this and be successful around it. Doesn't mean it wouldn't weigh on me. I'm still human being, but I have the tools to be able to dump it fast. That's the thing is like, and how I'm understanding this, this situation is that a lot of these folks in positions
in their day to day job, the thing that they chose to do, to provide for their families and to serve, um, they might see, do or experience things that makes them feel shameful, makes them feel angry, makes them feel like the world is just totally fucked. And if you carry those feelings, like it's no wonder like, that would not be a good place to exist. You know?
Yeah. I'm at and I'm gonna, I'm going to give a note like a side note. So if you do this breath work technique, understand when you regulate the system properly, you may have a release, like you may just start crying, not add anything. And you know, one of the techniques we use have on the range and doing some of the meditation work is if you start to feel that, uh, you know, I'm going up, I'm going to go relax the jaw, open the mouth, open it wide completely, just allow the breath to leave the body, don't force it. And nine times out of 10, you'll just start crying and it's okay. That's if you're in a safe space, like you said, you can ask and it's not, it's, it's not a sadness. It's, it's the body offloading, right? That's all it is. You know, guys, I've had seal team guys on the cushion on the range just dump and they're not sad.
They're not crying at something. There you are finally allowing, you're walking you that. Yeah, you're, you're, you're popping that, you're popping the bow of man. You're, you're letting the freaking pressure release off and, and there's going to be, and you are, you may laugh uncontrollably. You know what I mean? There, there, there will be this emotional release. So if you do this and start feeling this, cause I was thinking about it and I'm like, shit, if we're doing, so if you're doing the work, there may come a point where your body begins to regulate to a spot where you're the English. Like, wait, what's happening is this, don't resist. Assertion yeah, don't resist it. Relax the jaw. Let the breath go and let it and just let it be what it's going to be. So man, this past,
this past April, um, I did a men's retreat, um, new warrior training adventure. You heard of this one now you were telling me about it. So the mankind project is a nonprofit. Yup. Um, religion agnostic, sex orientation. Agnos, gay dude, straight dudes, black, white, Mexican, all men, all males, biological males. Um, and I don't, I'm not gonna share the full experience because if you, if this is something you want to do, I want you to experience it and have no bias from what I, from what I share. But, um, I will say that not only are we lacking a Rite of passage into manhood in America, that's like a really big thing where it's like, when do I become a man and what age is it? 18, I don't know. I can go to Warren. I kill people. Does that mean, but I can't drink.
Like it's a very weird thing, right? Societies and tribes, all of our ancestors had this Rite of passage from this moment forward, you're now a man, behave like it. However, we don't have that. And so there's a lot of really weird shit, especially in like an alpha like agro culture that is police, fire, military. Um, I was able to experience levels of emotion, of sadness, of happiness and of connection with other males that I didn't know it was possible in a non-sexual way. Yeah, totally right. So let me just preface this. This is not some weird thing like that. No judgment. But, um, bro, it was life changing to go through this experience with other men who like, you know, uh, who were experiencing the same feelings of shame and self doubt and anxiety that I was feeling and they were like super successful businessmen. Millionaires, right. Uh, maybe. See, yo guys, dude, it's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. And I'm just like, Holy shit.
Do we get a long way to go? We've got a lot to learn. I mean, we have got a lot to learn about ourselves and about our communities and so see, I dude, well, let's do this. Let's wrap up today's conversation. We'll come back for another one because I think that'll be, we're definitely worth wild. Uh, I'm going to make sure you're linked up on the site with all the show notes. Um, will you do me a favor? Will you send me a writeup on just some simple, what we discussed, just those steps so I can drop them into the show notes. So there'll be available for you online, uh, at mindset radio.com. You'll see this episode up with, uh, with Colby. Uh, check-in, grab the show notes, we'll make some downloadable PDFs or something for you so you can grab those. You've got some actionable, uh, kind of step by step processes. Do this things. I'd love to hear your comments and make sure you hop into the Facebook group mindset radio, uh, off our Facebook page. Go ahead.
You know what I'll do, man. Um, so typically my breathwork challenge is 50 bucks. I'm going to put together a coupon code where it's free only for listeners of the show. Wow. Coupon code mindset. Go to my website on the navigation, you'll see breathwork challenge. This introduces, it's four weeks of content, teaches everything that I've learned as well as helps you implement it into a daily practice. When you're checking out, just enter code mindset and I'll just wave the entire fee. Wow. That's, it's that powerful dudes like [inaudible].
We literally have no excuse to not do this. That's pretty rad. So I, you better, I better see a flood. I mean there's, you know, I virtually, I'm going to watch the numbers on the show and then I'm going to check with Colby, and if you're not taking advantage of that, I'm going to boot you from ever listening to this show ever again. Don't shame them, bro. No, no. But I will shame you. So, uh, so yeah, man. Cool. Well then all of that stuff will be linked up, linked over to Kobe's website, a little bit more about him. Uh, what to do, you know, how to, how to connect with him, follow his ugly butt on, uh, on all the social media stuff. Uh, there's always value streaming out of this guy. So thanks for listening. That's going to be your show. We're going to wrap this up. We'll see again, I think Thursday. Yeah, on Thursday.
In this bonus episode we dive a little deeper and take a "practical skills" look at the four critical emotional intelligence capabilities as well as the five pillars of emotional intelligence.
Jeff Banman: This is going to be a fun episode this week. I've got Benjamin Martin with me. He's a captain in what we will term as a pretty large Metro fire department there in the Virginia area, not Northern Virginia where I grew up, but the lower half of Virginia. Uh, and you know, I getting to know Benjamin reading some of his other stuff in the past, you know, and man, I know you like, like engine company work and I'll forgive that you know right now, but, uh, uh, we'll have some banter about that. But listen, you know, Benjamin is been a pretty, uh, kind of a rising star in some of the areas, was a really unique look at leadership, emotional intelligence, organizational culture. Uh, you know, I listened to you speak here last October, uh, at firehouse expo talking about toxic leadership. Uh, you've had articles across fire engineering, fire rescue, uh, fire department training network, uh, and a bunch of others. And I know now, uh, in conjuncture your full time job, you're also running, uh, embrace the resistance. So let's actually start there cause I think that'll give us a good baseline. And understanding why today's conversation gets to be important. So, Benjamin, thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate it. And you know, give me some, give me some background on why embrace the resistance and what are you resisting?
Benjamin Martin: Well, thanks for having me on Jeff. I've been looking forward to this for a long time, so hopefully we'll, we'll give them something entertaining and informational. So when we talk about it and embrace the resistance, it's really a journey that started 18 years ago. I was a volunteer and I was asked to be a duty officer, which was basically the equivalent of a frontline supervisor. And for me it was, you've been here the longest, which I think at the time had been a year. So a volunteering and I had the seniority and uh, that was it. Like I went in and I worked with people and I barked at them and they barked back and whether it was effective or not, like I don't even know. Looking back now, I don't particularly. It was, but uh, like, so then you freeze that for another eight years and I get hired by a professional department and I decide that let's not make that mistake again.
Benjamin Martin: Let's take some time to develop. But I'm the type a go getter guy. Thank you. You know, and I had some early experiences in my department where I was just working for some terrible, terrible leaders, uh, not human beings, great people, good hearts, just not same boat, same boat. They were never prepared to lead people. And if you think that's not important, then you're probably are way early on in your leadership journey or you're way late. Uh, which is I hope where we can get you in this conversation with kitchen, looking at what you could be doing right now. So, uh, I made it eight years and I worked for good leaders and I worked for bad and then I got promoted and I don't know why. I don't know whether it was because I considered myself a well-read and into the job. So I knew admin stuff.
Benjamin Martin: But I also knew ops and I love pulling hose as much as I do coaching and just building people up. So I really thought that with my energy and with what I knew and my passion is training that it would just fall in and it was just click and it did for about a year. And what I found was, uh, we had a, a senior firefighter that I worked with. He got promoted six months after I got there and then they sent us another senior firefighter and then he got promoted three months later and then it was a spoon, like what's the secret sauce over here at this station? So they sent someone that, uh, affectionately called George now and that's not his real name and his name changes as I traveled throughout the country. But George is the one I usually settle on. And George was a firefighter that was senior to me and George was in a bad spot.
Benjamin Martin: He was going through some stuff that involved a domestic realignment and he was having some issues with accountability for his actions. There were some kids in the mix and young Lieutenant Martin at the time too, had a one-year-old and a pretty steady rock solid marriage. Tried to be empathetic to this gentleman. And that worked for maybe a few months and then it didn't. And when I say it didn't, it was oil and water, it wasn't anything close to mixing. And I realized, and then over the next four months when I finally got to a point where I watched him break down and just cry, that I was probably the most ineffective leader I had ever seen. And I always used to joke about all the people I complained about, but I wouldn't want to work for me back then. Looking back, it was, it was bad. And so, uh, I obviously got in the rumor mill, I got a lot of resistance from folks, even folks that I trusted, you know, I would go with them with things.
Benjamin Martin: And you know, this situation with George wasn't one side and it was very complicated. You know, leadership is, you know, just not black and white at all. And I was trying, I always had it. I always had his best intentions at heart, but I really struggled and communicating with him, I just couldn't seem to get on the same page as him because I had the expectations of a leader of a player and he was looking for the minimum and maybe even below that a little bit. And uh, I forget who said it. This isn't novel, but I love it and I try to let it, you'll know a good leader because they'll understand what it takes to lead someone from where they are instead of where you want them to be and the ability to go from where you are currently to where they are and spend time with them and build them up and encourage them and forgive them when they screw off and be humble about your success and acknowledge that you will have failure coming and walk with them.
Benjamin Martin: That journey, like that's a true for me, leader, follower, dynamic. And I don't see a lot of that and I didn't, I didn't deliver that to George. I just didn't. Um, and more so, you know, we're going to talk about today. Uh, it got to a point where George, where he was getting affirmation and confirmation that he was doing the right thing by fighting me from people, even other leaders, even people in my chain of command. And by the time all the facts come out and you've got, you know, basically dereliction of duty and subordination and not checking truck shop, not wearing his uniform, downloading copyrighted, uh, pornography on the station, wifi, just like ludicrous thing. Uh, and he stayed resolute to the whole thing of like, you can't touch me. You can't touch me. You can't touch me. And then when I finally was able to get him on paper, he still never technically got a writeup because of the events that happened where he broke down and I was like, Oh crap.
Benjamin Martin: Like we know this guy doesn't need to be fired. He doesn't even need it to lose money. He just needs to be loved a little bit. Like, let's get them in a safe place. Let's figure out who the people are that can help him. And I wasn't, I wasn't that guy. And we realized that. And I actually left that team, that place that I wanted to be because it wasn't fair to move him and let him catch the rumor mill, you know, a why of you are only gonna move after six months. And I took that one across the chin and I watched people that knew me and knew my heart just turn a blind eye and a cold shoulder to me. I watched people as I reached out, tell me one thing to my face and then turned around and stabbed me in the back and it was lonely and it's led to depression and weight gain. And now fast forward a year and I'm in counseling myself and my own marriage and I'm like say what an arrogant piece of crap.
Benjamin Martin: Like, like I had it together, which I obviously didn't. And it was at some point during that year where I was dealing with the rumor mail. Um, and I was working, trying to redeem myself and I was trying to get where home was the priority instead of work. Cause I was way in over my head at work and committed to too many things and I was flowing a handline teaching recruits, uh, about nozzle reaction and I set it down and turn it off and turn it off and then set it down and the said, so basically the only time you experienced this reaction is when it's flowing and yeah. And he's like, okay, so just don't flow it like joking. And I'm like, well yeah, I guess, but that doesn't make for a terribly effective fire attack. And I was like, you know, that's the same damn thing for leadership really. When you think about it. Like anytime I've set something in motion, it's reasonable to predict that there's going to be some kind of counter reaction. Unfortunately the fire service as a whole on its culture has gotten to this. Like there's only so much value that I can have. And if this guy has a little bit of that, then I can't have that. And so they try to take it like character assassination and gossip and rumormongering and just nasty things.
Jeff Banman: And I had to hide somebody. Yeah, I had somebody to go a couple months ago, you know, and I can't remember if the fire service or law enforcement, it's across the board, military fire service across the board, any of ours and out of services we are great at one thing and that is eating our own and we want to just devour our own people and it's absurd and you know, it sucks that it's still going. I feel like it's getting better, but man, it's still like so prevalent. It just, it's tough. Yeah.
Benjamin Martin: Yeah. And just a sidebar here before I've finished that thought, if I can even remember, it was like what you and I are talking about, if not hugs and kisses, we treat each other with kid gloves all the time and we don't, you know, get raw and get real with people and tell them where they need to improve and even demonstrate that by letting people make fun of us. That's not at all what I'm proposing, but there's a difference in my mind between busting somebody's chops and taking them in the balls. I should talk about. It's like dad versus a haymaker. When you jabbed somebody that's friendly, that kid, you know, that's, that's playground stuff. But when you try to land a haymaker on somebody, especially when they don't even know they're boxing with you, that's bullshit. Right? And then a lot of times leaders get in positions where they feel threatened, they feel challenged, and so they throw haymakers.
Benjamin Martin: Uh, and then people on the other side of that respond by throwing more haymakers. And if there's one thing about the fire service, we love to run and tell our peers what's happened to try to build support and get our version of events out there first. And if you're in a formal leadership position, you're really hamstrung in that race because you can't, it's their privacy. So you sit there and you take it and you hear things about yourself and you're like, that's a, that's not true. See, that's certainly not true about who I am. See that never happened. And it's like cow, like day. How do you, how do you even start to get to the root of these things? And you can't. And so in that moment flown that hand on, I made a decision, I was like, listen, you know I'm gonna, I'm going to do everything I can to get better as a leader using George as kind of a near miss.
Benjamin Martin: And then it's in my heart to travel and speak to anybody that'll hear me about this message, hoping that they never ever make the same mistake. And there were other things happening concurrent, which we could talk about where I took a disc assessment, which is basically like a behavior tool, you know about personality traits and dominance and influence themselves and the woman, God, I remember this woman, Jeff from HR looking at me and I knew her. We had a relationship. She had been my coach for about six months and she's looking at this thing and I'm like, just say it. And she's like, ah. And I'm like, Nancy, aK can't like whatever it is. Say it. I need to hear it. And she's like, you ever been accused of being arrogant? And I'm like, yes, all the time. They're clearly wrong. Move on now.
Benjamin Martin: I'm just kidding. No. Tell me about that. Like, tell me about this, this arrogance phase. And so we went through and, and I thought about it and it basically was, you know, overconfident, arrogance lacks empathy and it's like, wow, I didn't think I was coming across that way. I'm a fun guy. Like I was a bartender for years. I played rugby. Like I love socials. Like I'll, I have friends, I have relationships. Like why am I so ineffective at work and this, and about the same time that that disassembled assessment was happening, that I got that feedback. I went up to Lieutenant and I didn't get it. And, uh, I was, uh, I guess I had enough of a relationship with one of the guys on the interview panel that after they made the promotions and then three months later they made more and I got in that round, he was able to talk to me and he goes, you ever has anybody ever tells you that you're arrogant and, or, or her confident?
Benjamin Martin: I'm like, Sue, are you kidding me? And he basically, I almost felt like Nancy had emailed him the notes from the district assessment because he was going for batim and so I called Nancy up and I'm like, tell me more. And that's when my journey down, this emotional intelligence piece started, which was like, and I'll fight this to the death. Great leaders are not just made, but they die and they're reborn and they, they start over from scratch and then they learn and they, and they get better that way. It's just, there's no pinnacle success where you stay there and you certainly don't arrive knowing everything. And to think that is just ludicrous. Which takes me back to the volunteer thing. Why didn't anybody ever like, Hey, what do you like? What do you think about leadership? What do you think a good leader is? What do you think a bad leader is? What would make somebody feel good about you? What would make somebody not trust you? And just to even have that conversation would have been a good platform of, well maybe I don't have all the answers, which is a leadership. You're clearly not going to have all those answers. I'm getting to a place where you can be humble about it.
Jeff Banman: You're spot on man. I mean, I think that that even, you know, my first massive touch, you know, with like Swift kick in the balls, uh, you are completely failing as a leader, you know, came. And then on the flip side of it, the first book I read is Daniel Goleman's 6,000 leadership. Uh, you know, what she takes and brilliantly lays out, you know, a deep seated understanding of emotional intelligence as it relates to, you know, very distinct styles of leadership that have to be applied in the right time with the right individual, right in the right context. Like there's so many components to it. And, you know, I, you know, I, I tell this story a bunch and because I'm listening to it and he's talking about like the commanding style of leadership and you know, I had just grown up in the fire service, gone in the military, came back from the fire service fire service culture changed, was not doing great with the shifts in the culture if you will say that, you know, late nineties, uh, changes, they're different.
Jeff Banman: Uh, we're touchy feely for when I grew up and the expectations that I had, you know, for people. And, and it literally, you know, he was talking about, you know, all the great things about being in that commanding solid leadership. And I'm like, yes, yes, yes, we're going to turn around, we're going to try back from my house. We're going gonna make sure everybody listens to this. And they started talking about like all the consequences and all the negativity and all the crap that comes on. You exhaust your people and exhaust. And I was like, shit, he is totally right. And I totally screwed their thought. Yeah, man. I mean it's, I think you're right when you say leaders aren't, aren't even, you know, they're definitely not born. They don't even necessarily grow into it. They may grow into it a little bit and then they fail and fall on their face and then they pick themselves up and they keep going. So it is a moving target, you know, perpetually you will never arrive at a destination where you can look around and be like, okay, I got it. Because everything around you is changing constantly.
Benjamin Martin: Yeah. I can tell you that I think the best leaders, when I look back, and this was what I'm trying to model myself, is when you work for someone who's on their leadership journey and is introspective of that journey and willing to share what they're feeling and thinking about it, right? So that's not even confident, but they're just that secure that they don't have all the answers and they're willing to let people look in, you know, to see what's on the other side of them, including all the, I don't know, I don't know what to do in this situation. Let's try to figure it out together. That's where people buy in. But presenting yourself as arrived and pretending just because your vehicles cross now that you have everything that you need to be successful and everything they need to be successful, it, it just doesn't happen that way.
Benjamin Martin: Um, and saying like, you know, I know there's people listening that are like, Oh, this is crap and this is what I would tell people. Have you ever had a moment where you're having an argument with someone and you realize they're right and you're still not relieved that you know the correct answer, right? The feeling isn't enlightenment. It's resentment that this individual has the correct answer and whether they're your boss or your wife or your husband or, or whatever, it's just so counterintuitive. Like if we're trying to get the right things so we can move forward and, and be successful and experienced success as a group, then I should be happy that this guy or girl has the answer. And all I can think about is discounts. If we can know it all or this guy's an asshole. Of course he has the right answer. And that's the kind of unpredictability that, that people, because even you may never even know as a leader that they're thinking that like I was before the disc assessment had no idea. So yeah, I mean just this introspection and self awareness and social awareness is way, way, way more important than I think. Anything else out there that's been written about leadership? Well that's just my opinion.
Jeff Banman: Yeah man. No I cause listen, it's a, you know, it's uh, there are so many pieces to this when you begin to, you know, break things down in one, you know, we have this idea of ourself and you know, last week I was telling you in the last week you had bill McKernan on and we really kind of talked about identity and just this very challenging conversation to be a part of. It was phenomenal and challenging all at the same time. But you know, we have perception of self and then there is the perception of who we are from the outside and rarely do those ever really match up. Right. I mean, I internally, I see myself who is, you know, who I am, where my intention lies, you know, I mean even with my wife I will like, like I will screw up. I didn't mean to you, I didn't intend to, but I still did.
Jeff Banman: You know what I mean? And that's then that triggers for me this shame and guilt and Oh, I'm such a fuck up arm, such a screw up or whatever it might be. Right. And so this internal battle triggers and it's kind of designed around what body didn't intend to hurt you or say that or be mean. You know, that wasn't like at my core, but she can't see that. And it's the same thing in the firehouse. Like we can't see inside each other as to how we feel or what's going on. And yeah, you're right. It's not about giving you a hug. I'm happy to kick you in the ass and move you down the road. But at the same time, I think the biggest thing I've learned in youth, you feed back to this, I try to now, I kind of look at everybody like a five, six or seven year old.
Speaker 3: And
Jeff Banman: when they're kind of acting out, when there's some behavior out of the norm, it's like, okay, what's going on here? Because you're a little kid is showing up and you know, you, you feel unsafe, you feel unheard. You know what I mean? There's something causing this, this reaction, you know, cause I was, the more I've gone even deeper and deeper and deeper into some other areas, man, I, I really see that we're all kind of, you know, six year olds running around in grown up bodies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we are, because we don't feel great about ourselves. We don't feel safe in the environment. We don't feel safe to communicate things or say things, you know? Now we're scared we're going to be judged. I mean, there's all kinds of behavioral patterns that come out when sometimes all we need are like, you know, a little Jeff just needs a hug. You know what I mean? Like a little George pulled George just needed somebody to freaking, you know, needed it, needed to crawl up on dad's lap somewhere and feel safe for a minute. Cause he's unsafe at home. He's unsafe in the firehouse, he's unsafe in his own career. He's unsafe and his own decisions, like he's just completely unsafe everywhere.
Benjamin Martin: Yeah. And a lot of times people, no go, sorry, go ahead Jeff.
Jeff Banman: No, I was going to say, and, and, and you know, and he's looking around and like nobody's providing it. You know what I mean? So go
Benjamin Martin: right. Yeah. So a lot of leaders, and I don't know whether this was because we grew up under Maslow's needs or, or what it is, but we focus a lot on physical safety, right? So they're turning men and women to the firehouse from the fire scene and then getting them home. Uh, and that's how we're wired biologically. What is rumbling in the Bush? Is they're going to eat me or do I need to run away from it? Can I punch it in the face and survive? But that's not what threatens people. On a day to day basis at all. Um, if you've read anything, uh, David rock, uh, I think you and I have agreed eight days of the neuroscientist and he talks about that five times a second. The brain is scanning for threats in, uh, social domains, which are status, any press, a status, any threat to certainty, autonomy, relatedness or fairness.
Benjamin Martin: And it's a scarf model for short, but most of the time, our subconscious, and if it's extreme, our conscious, but at least our subconscious is hijacked scanning for these things. When you're asking someone to show up completely to work and tune out the fact that they're going through a divorce or that their son has an appointment with the pediatric oncologist on Monday and then say, I still need 100% of you. It's like, no, ma, you got 50%, you can have 50% of my a game today. And you're like, Oh, well, no, I told you 100% no, that's less. And so that's when you get into this idea of having empathy and you know, recognizing how someone could feel in that moment of uncertainty about their son's life or I'm certainly about their marriage and then no matter what they're doing, they're completely helpless, at least in the cancer scenario. So there's no autonomy. Nothing they do makes it any better. It's completely reactive and that kind of stuff. It's just, it's like a backpack of rocks that people are walking around with. And we joke about how heavy arts here is. People are walking around with life circumstances that are way heavier on them
Jeff Banman: way. Yeah.
Benjamin Martin: Yeah. I love this stuff. Keep, keep going. Sorry.
Jeff Banman: Nah dude. Keep going. Keep rocking and rolling. Now this is part of the show man. We just get into conversation and we just go interrupt each other, cut each other off. Jump in. This is, this is the way this show works, so just go, don't worry about it.
Benjamin Martin: You know, I wish, I wish what I talked about with sexier so I could have pack rooms and it's just not, it's never going to be fire attack. But I've tried to train people to anticipate people's reactions the way we would fire behavior, right? And just pulling it off and giving them chances to van and safe places and not allowing themselves to get in where they shouldn't be. And really approaching it from that fire service angle. Some sets, what we know, but what we're talking about here, like there's always a go or no go with a person or go and no go yet. And whether you have that conversation with them, whether you give them this thing that could potentially crush them, this feedback, uh, whether it's a friend who's struggling with alcoholism or whether it's a, you know, buddy who's got a wife, who's cheating on him.
Benjamin Martin: Like at what point do you have this conversation and how do you have this conversation? And there's so much thought that needs to go into that rather than just having a knee jerk reaction. And that's why a lot of times you get leaders when they feel challenged because I said so. It comes out, which is the utmost dumbest thing that you could ever say. And I know we're modeled after after the military, and that's very chain of command for you, but if you're not looking for feedback, you're going to lose your people at some point or another because of what's happening in their lives. And that's how I lost George as I was completely confident in the direction I was going, and I was not willing to consider how he was doing in that moment. And I pressed on and I dragged him with me through the mud because he couldn't walk because he had no strength to, and I deserve every bit of of the Slack that I get from that time with him because I did everything right by the organization or policy, and I did everything wrong by as just a human being.
Benjamin Martin: And I really wish I could have that back. I really do.
Jeff Banman: Well, you know, I, and I would challenge you to say it's good that you had it. Yes, I understand what you're saying. Yes, it would be great to have it back, but yes, you wouldn't be, you wouldn't have the introspection today having not had it. Like you know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't have that anchor to really understand. I mean, this is, this is where I boil down today and, and you know, most of the listening audience gets it. I mean this is, this is the deal. You, you know, either listen to the podcast or you don't, right. You either want to grow and develop yourself in your career and your home life in every aspect of your life or you don't. Right. And we've got plenty of cross fire service, military law enforcement community that are just very rigid in their beliefs, in their processes and where they sit and you know, as it should be.
Jeff Banman: And you know, they'll figure it out one day or they won't. That's kind of where it comes down to. But what I believe fundamentally, like all of the labels we put on things, you know, leadership is not 10 things to do, right. It's not an act of doing to me is leadership is how you show up, right? It is a state of how you are being, not what you're doing in the context of leadership. And, and I've really over my time now across the fire service, a military agency doing business just across the board. Here's what I continually come back to. And this is really where I've sat. So this is how we're going to pack your next room. Uh, it is the ultimate human question and it was running all day all the time. And it is, am I safe? That is just the ultimate question.
Jeff Banman: And like you said, you know, we're so well developed in physical safety and creating physical safety for ourselves as AR, as across the service for our community, for our country, for our people around us, like work 20, 24, seven. It's our job, keep everybody safe and we've become great at that. Where we fail. That's a physical aspect where we can fail mostly miserably is creating an emotional level of safety for everyone around us at firehouse, at home, right? With the family, with the friends like this, this place where I can say, listen, I'm not doing great. Listen, I need some help. Listen, I'm struggling at home. Or Hey, I've gone back to drinking, or Hey, I'm thinking about killing myself. Like I'm really struggling here and we don't do that. That to me is now becoming a 21st century leader across the services is being the guy or the person or the woman, whoever it is, being the person that just generates a level of emotional safety around them, that people are willing to come speak and communicate. That to me is the secret sauce today.
Benjamin Martin: Yeah, and that's your, I mean, when you're talking about trust, that's all that is. It's just emotional security that, you know what? If I tell you something for if I follow you, it won't. By late any of the things we talked about, it won't violate my sense of status. It won't violate certainty about the work. It won't violate my autonomy, you know? And that's not to say that I get to do whatever it is I want to do. It just means I don't feel like you're not battling my opinion that you've considered me or you've heard me and yet I understand you've chosen to go a different way, but at least you authentically heard me. And if you've ever worked on a committee and submitted something and then the fire chief did whatever they wanted to do, that's a complete waste of time. And there's nothing like that hurts.
Benjamin Martin: That gut punch hurts as much as tripping and falling and skinning your knee. You know, it's the same pathways in the body, social pain and physical pain. But that's when you look at leadership leadership, for me, it's like a technology, right? It's no different than the gear that we have, right? But the problem is that we're carrying around 2020 gear where we can go deeper and further and survive hotter temperatures than we ever have with advancements in technology, like thermal imaging, with all this crazy training about re COVs and whether in the Pfizer's campus, there's another conversation, but you've got all this investment in that. But the leadership theory is still stuck in like late nineties right? We, you know, we're, we're still on this servant leadership mindset. And that's being generous. That's seen like I think the best departments are in this are in the servant leadership, but the majority of the fire service, we're still a little bit stuck back in theory ex, uh, leadership where like people are inherently lazy and I'm supposed to tell them what to do and the gap that's gonna come that, that I feel like, you know, I follow the statistics for people that are killing themselves in the fire service and law enforcement.
Benjamin Martin: And I'm not an expert on those. I just know that it's going one way and I think it's going off as fast as it is one, because we've got reporting thanks to people like Jeff Hill on firefighter behavioral health and you've got people that are advancing this peer support narrative. So we're talking about it more, which obviously is gonna make you find more instances of this. But I also think at the same time, that is in response of living in a world in which you're always expected to be on with technology and social media. And you've got so much pressure socially to have a lifestyle and for your wife and your kids that's competitive with what you're seeing on Instagram. And then we text each other instead of call, we email instead of visiting them in person and our physical relationships. Your period like I mean Thanksgiving is a perfect example.
Benjamin Martin: We just celebrated that, right? And I'm guilty of this too. I texted five of my closest friends instead of calling them because I was able to do that in five minutes instead of what would have taken me five hours. But Lord, help me if I find out six months from now that one of those phone calls, I would've found out my buddy's wife was leaving him and I could have talked with him about that. And like that's the piece we're missing. And because leadership's is technology and technology always improves in response to need. It's going to be a little bit, it's going to be you and I on the fringe talking about emotional intelligence and being authentic and humble and, and demonstrating humility. And there's going to be a core group of rock stars, air quotes, rock stars, like do whatever I say do it how I do it. You know, fuck you. If you don't like what I say. It's like, no man, that's, that's, that's crap. That's absolute crap and that's the best way to run somebody into the ground and ruin an organization. And when those jackasses promote high enough where they get the right audience that's promoted high enough, then that's what tanks organizations. And you do not have to look far to find legacy fire departments with toxic cultures because of that.
Jeff Banman: Yeah, I was the Jack. I was one of their jackasses, you know 20 [inaudible].
Benjamin Martin: Yeah, I was. I totally was.
Speaker 4: All right, we're going to take a quick break to let you know that this episode is brought to you in part by brute force training. When you're ready to be in the physical condition necessary to meet the rigors demands and expectations of your profession and check out the team over@bruteforcetraining.com and pick up their gear. I promise you, it will put you in the condition you need to be in for this moment. And the next you can use the discount code op mindset that's open mindset in the team will take a little bit off the top for ya. Now always remember, train accordingly. Now let's get back to the show.
Benjamin Martin: I totally was too. Um, but you're at least smart enough that to learn and value the mistakes you've made and leverage those so that others don't have to make that. Whereas most people are just either embarrassed or they're too proud to look back and it, you know, like in my instance, it would be all the fault lies with George. That's not true. George has some responsibility in that I as a leader, should automatically as a default be at 51% automatically and could go higher. But to think that George has all of that flames now, now there's, there's many, many, many, many things I now know that I could have done better, which is why we go around talking about these things.
Jeff Banman: Well, I man, I think, I think this is so I'm going to like banter with me on this one. I'm just going to idea coming to mind as we're talking. You know, it's interesting, right? Because we live in a world and I'm gonna, you know, fire service, law enforcement, military, and we have a very specific job to do. And in doing that job, we need to operate at an entire different level. Okay? And we do need to do things successfully. Like they know, compartmentalize the emotional content and separate ourselves from what's going on at home or you know, what's going on in the firehouse or you know, what's happening there. We have to, we have to understand how we kind of turn those channels down or close, you know, boxers, channels up for the time that we need to be fully present and in action, right?
Jeff Banman: To respond an emergency, to fight a fire, to make an arrest, to do X, Y, andZ to go to war, to do whatever. Right? And all of our existence is centered around those moments. And the reality is, we all know this. If we're honest, those moments are so brief in, Oh, what is it? I don't even know what the statistics is. Like how many, how many did you spend a 25 year career in the fire service? How many years did you spend actually on a heightened emergency scene? You know what I mean? Like they're required maybe to, you know, maybe five if you're in a bust ass department, right? I mean it's not that much comparatively, but all of our world is centered around those few moments in time. Like all the training, the culture of the conversation, you know, fuck that, settle down, shut up, do your job kind of stuff.
Jeff Banman: All settled for that one moment. And then we've left the 90% of the rest of our time to try to assimilate into those moments. Cause I mean I was awful dude. I in the firehouse, I'm mean on the fire ground. Great. No problem. And if firehouse total shit show what an asshole, you know, I mean I was a deck amongst Dick's. Like I ran the firehouse, like we were on fire 24 seven and exhausted the crap out of people. Right? And so yeah, but that's what you quote unquote do. That's how you do it. And so I think what's happening here is we're starting to chip away to be like, okay, listen, I need to, I'm going to fully, and this is where, this is why I call it an operational mindset, because it is the ability to execute the mission with absolute perfection and confidence and capability and everything you need to have in that moment in time.
Jeff Banman: And then transition mentally, emotionally, physically from that environment to the next. And the next may be back in the firehouse. The next may be, you know, I got to give my buddy a hug or whatever it is. And I've got to have that bandwidth and that capacity to maneuver. And so guy, you know, people that are out there that are, that, that don't think this is necessary, are living in a fraction of their career, not the entirety of it or a fraction of their marriage and not the entirety of it. That's just me calling myself out along with, well, pretty much everybody else listening.
Benjamin Martin: Yeah, no, I totally, so there's a couple of things if we can play this out that I'd like to talk about. So, um, I hear a compartmentalize talk about a lot and that's definitely something that I'm not sure if we can do. So I'm sitting here, I'm looking at the computer, which is running the program that you and I are talking on and I've got all the books that I've read in the background. I've got things on the wall, family pictures on the desk. Uh, but in the moment it's what is getting my attention, right? The computer, making sure that this conversation is happening and if there's anything that I want to reference having it up on here. But if you ask me the specifics about the book covers to my left or you know, what the brand of TV was in front of me or what dress my wife was wearing in the photo.
Benjamin Martin: Like that's not important necessarily in this moment. So I'm not going to be able to tell you and it doesn't have my full attention. And that's where I think we've got to focus. Here is where you want to call. You know, you may have something going on at home, what the call is, what gets your attention. It gets 100% of your attention. Even though we know science has shown us it's subconsciously we're being distracted, but all of our conscious minds has gotta be able to focus on this. I've heard guys tell me that they don't feel like if they talk with their family during the day, very good a firefighter because all of a sudden they're distracted by the thought of their family.
Jeff Banman: Would that be the worst thing you were saying you can do? The worst thing you can do on deployment is call home.
Benjamin Martin: Yeah, and so it's like, all right, well if that's true and your family distracts you, then don't let me see you on social media. Right? If your family is going to distract you from the mission, don't let me see you do anything in your 24 hour period that would distract you from the mission. And that includes playing on your phone, playing a video game at the station, watching TV, having a conversation that isn't about the mission, which is not life, it's, it's not reality. So what we're really admitting is that we can tune into out of the mission. It's just a lot about our ability to maintain focus and attention. And part of our problem is that we were manta sized. We way over romanticized leadership because of what we see in culture and movies. Like we're like you talked about, you're like, you're waiting for this one moment where you're like Braveheart and you're Mel Gibson and you're giving this speech and you're like, John, like I got juice.
Benjamin Martin: And the reality is you may you, you may get that, but probably more so where the goosebumps are going to come from is when you're able to have that one on one conversation in the parking lot of the food line. You went to get groceries where a guy breaks down on you and you have a safe place for him to land or whatever else it is that was occupying his attention. Like that's reaching a person. The other thing is just talking to them. Maybe they get the same feeling you get, but it's just like you and me. And they're like, we push them harder. We push them fast and like you're like, yeah. And they're like, no, no. [inaudible] but you're so focused, you know, just like on the computer, not paying attention to the color of the books. You have no idea that people have completely checked out around you and they're not, they're not buying into it at all.
Benjamin Martin: So like, yeah, there's gotta be a healthy way to process what you're saying cause that's obviously important. Um, and we want to get away from where we're compartmentalizing too much. But at the same time it's like, all right, well, I want to do everything I can to be, to get home to my kids. And I tell people that training is the answer to that, right? When I don't have to think about how to do fundamental skills, that leaves up more brain power to think creatively and figure out solutions to problems that will arise. You can't plan for everything. So that's the goal. Train the shit out of people so that they can focus on the right thing when they call comes in and then when they get back to the firehouse they can make the switch back to maybe they want to tuck their daughter in over family time or a FaceTime or call the wife and see how her day was or something.
Benjamin Martin: But I really failed like where I would go 24 hours, not talking to them and life just kept going on here. But the first steps I missed the first steps, the first words, Christmases, birthdays like. So it's like, all right, well I can make a decision to consciously not be a part of any of that if I'm at the firehouse or I can try to find a period where I can blend where I'm able to focus and not get distracted by them. And I think, Jeff, probably what I'm trying to say here is if you, if you can do this correctly, then your family life will be healthy and you will be in a healthier place and you'll be more emotionally stable and your leadership or even your followership will be more efficient and more effective. And then because it's all in balance, which really you probably won't ever happen because it's more imbalanced, you're not going to have all of the distractions you would with a divorce or with counseling or with a sick kid. And with any of those things. Um, it's just like span of control.
Jeff Banman: Well, we, it is like span of control and we forget that we live, especially in these environments. Like most, most normal people, those people out there, right? They get up in the morning, they go to work, they sit at their desks, they do whatever they come home. And I'm not saying they're not without challenge and now without issue, but heightened in our worlds is this understanding that we need to be transitional beings like transitional, like, and, and transitions are we, you know, we've, we book end our day, we get in the car, we go to work, we getting in the car, we go home, right? We've, we book in our shift or whatever it is, we book ended. But in the context of every day, we are constantly transitioning moment by moment, by moment I'm at the firehouse. I want a new mass call. I'm helping him old lady get back in her bed.
Jeff Banman: I'm, you know, pulling a kid out of a burning building. I'm cutting somebody out of a car who may or may not make it. I'm, you know, chasing somebody down the street. And then I'm counseling the domestic dispute and I'm, you know, helping the rape victim. Like, dude, that's, and by the way, that's Justin today, right? And, and yeah, exactly. And so, you know, what? We lose to me, what I think we lose sight of, and this is where things start to mound for us. We don't execute transitions well that's, you know, when we talk about emotional stability in the six pillars and, and mental acuity and emotional stability is the ability to transition rapidly. Right? To be able to say, okay cool. Done was a call. I what do I need to transition? Well I need to go for a walk around the block or I need to, you know, grab Ben and take him outside and scream cause I'm pissed off at whatever and then I can go home.
Jeff Banman: Right. And so what I'm able to do, and when I talk about compartmentalization, it is more a transitional segmentation. Things not like isolation, not shutting people down or locking things out. Yeah. Yeah. Cause if I'm going to call home, if I'm overseas and I'm calling home, I don't want to dumb what I just did into my family. So I set myself up, I feel like it, what I need for the next moment and I put myself in DOE in the condition I need to be in for that moment. Not, you know, cause my family doesn't need firemen or you know, cop or military per, do I need any of that? They just need lesbian dad. Right? So what, what condition do I need and what do I need right now? Like just simply asking yourself that question, what do I need right now to call home to be the best dad, her husband or whatever, or mother or wife or whatever it may be. What do I need and what do I need to help me be that? Uh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I, dude, I think,
Benjamin Martin: I think the difference, cause I've never served in the military, so I don't, my father was in the air force, so I have no authority to speak on this at all. So I'll, I'll very softly lay this up there. And then anybody's willing to slap it away. They can and they won't hurt my feelings. But when you're looking at the sacrifice of the men and women make that serve our country, where they go away for six months to a year to a year and a half. Like I could understand Jeff calling home, finding out his wife's cheating on him and then having another year on his stent and thinking about how distracted he would be with that. So we borrow from that with the fire service problem is I'm only gone for 24 hours or 48 hours or worst case scenario, I get forced hot over times and it's 72 hours but then I'm right back in their life.
Benjamin Martin: And so I think when you look at military service members coming home, and Jeff, you can speak to this like we're going to have the most problem. And I think it's transitioning back into the people's lives because it never stops happening while they were gone. And that's what it was from my mother, you know, with my father. And you know, I was too young to remember any of that. So thankfully that wasn't an issue. But I think, I think for the fire service, like the idea of compartmentalizing. And here's a story, if we have a moment, I'll, I'll, I'll tell you when I was a new, when I was a new Lieutenant, right, I had all the status pressure, like really wanting to come across as a, you know, a subject matter expert on everything. I'm also a paramedic, don't judge me for that. So I've got two hats to wear, you know, I've gotta be good at on the fireside, but also good on the paramedics and sob.
Benjamin Martin: And I'd been there maybe three months, still building relationships with everybody. Still hadn't caught a fire so nobody knows if I'm any good or bad anything. And we catch a pediatric shooting and I can remember driving and I didn't know the district that well. So I've got all this pressure about like I hope I'm going the right way. And the whole time I'm like, you know, looking at a four year old shot by his older brother or younger brother and it's like, ah crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. Like, just this gut wrenching feeling of like, shit, shit, shit, shit. Like, you know the big calls that can create that out. And I get there and I'm running up to the house and a police officer comes out and he's holding the kid in a, in a blanket and he goes, it's just a graze. And it's like, Ooh, right.
Benjamin Martin: Subject matter expert. He's telling me it's just the grace. Thank God DEFCON level five back down the level one, like we're good, can't cancel the air strike. We're good. So I started getting into patient assessment of it. The mom is a mess, right? She had had people breaking in to the house or a neighborhood houses. So she got a firearm out, tuck it under a sofa question, I think. And the youngest son found it who was like two or three and accidentally fired upon his, um, brother, who I think was four or five at the time. So, um, I mean you can imagine just like in the back of her mind, subconsciously, am I going to lose these kids? But at the forefront of her mind, is my child going to live? Right? So when the police officer says it's just a graze, everybody can collectively breathe a sigh.
Benjamin Martin: And I go in there and I recognize, I look over the kid, I peel the blanket back. If he's in a diaper and there's nothing, you know, there's nothing wrong that I can see. I look and it looks like a grave, like an almost like an abrasion. I'm like, are you sure he was even shot. Maybe this is a bug burn, whatever. And it's, it is, um, it's going in is like five, right? Or I guess what looks like wound to his inner thigh. So after like I took a, Paul says, profusions good kid, not even crying like, alright, is a healthy kid, let's go and ride on the hospital just to be on the safe side. Get you outta here. So I put mom on the back. I'm not even going lights and sirens to the hospital. And I look at her and she's just a wreck.
Benjamin Martin: And I think to myself, if this was my child and is my oldest, so ALA was like one at a time. If this was a loss, nothing could stop me from holding this child. And I'm like, I'm not going to be in the way of that man. Would you like to hold your stone? Yes, I would. Right. So I give her the sun, she sits on the stretcher with the son, we go to the uh, trauma hospital and we get over to pediatrics and I'm talking to the attending and then the freaking department head walks in and I'm telling her about what's going on. It's just a graze. And then I hear, well, what's this then? And like I hadn't even looked over there yet, but I could feel myself getting nauseous just knowing what was coming. And I look over, they had taken the diaper off and it's like, I know your listeners have already figured out the end of the story.
Benjamin Martin: They already knew this was coming, but I, I couldn't, I didn't, I left the type or on, I exposed everything else. Like it was a lower leg injury. There's no way that this child could shoot up this kid's leg and have an exit his button. But that's exactly what he did. And then all sudden details start coming back where the mom was like, be sure is filling up his diaper. He's seeing a lot. And I'm like, well shit, that was blood. Like it wasn't a lot of blood. It was just oozing blood. Thank God. But what if it had been so they did an X Ray and the kid who was an in and out, um, and I told, I told the department head, I was like, listen, I, I fucked up so bad here. I'm going to call the OMB. I'm going to own this.
Benjamin Martin: I'm going to use this as a lesson. You do whatever it is you need to do carte blanche and you're not going to get any resistance from me. No embracing the resistance on this one. Like, just do what you need to do. And she's like, well, I can see it in your face. You feel terrible and I trust that you'll follow up on this and I will, I will talk with your own team to make sure you have, and she's like, you'd go do what you need to do and we'll see where it falls out. So I came back to the station and I talked to the guys and they're like, Oh, we should have prompted you. And I'm like, well listen, like if I'm going to be successful here as a leader, I don't ever want you guys to feel afraid that you can't challenge Lieutenant.
Benjamin Martin: Like there's going to be critical moments. And I don't even think that this was a critical life threatening moment because it wasn't a flashover. It was a life threatening, but it had time to play out. I want you to challenge me. Please don't ever let this happen again. But I'm owning this like I don't hold any of you guys accountable. This is 100% Lieutenant Martins. Fuck off. And I'll own this. But just so you're aware, don't let this happen to you guys. Let's work together to have each other's back and let's not be so caught up in our egos that we're afraid to say something because we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings or that we're going to be resistant to it because we've got to maintain the ego. And so I got home and I was telling my wife about it and you know, she's Sam there in tears and I started doing some research in a corner costs role ambiguity, which you know, basically is you wear a lot of hats.
Benjamin Martin: So it wasn't just that I was wearing a hat of a firefighter or hat of an officer or hat of her medic. I was wearing a hat as a father, as a husband, you know, as a brother, like all these different roles in my life. And in that moment when I should've had the paramedic hat on, I took it off on it, put the father hat on and I thought about her needs more and I failed her child and her in the process. And what happens is when we put our, we allow ourselves to get in situations where we haven't had training and we haven't had at least a discussion on it, we get into role conflict where doing one role conflicts with the outcome of another role. And a lot of times you see this in buddy to pause where it's like, well, I want to be the guy's buddy, but it gotta be his boss.
Benjamin Martin: And you're not either you're just marginal at that. You think you're maybe winning because the guy's not actively shit talking to you. Maybe he has your back, but just because he's not, you know, confrontational to your face, you're like, yes, I'm winning as a leader. But that's not the case. And that's exactly like what we're talking about with this. What's getting your attention? You can say you can compartmentalize things that and leave it at home, but clearly you can't. That's not a, and it's not a bad thing. That's part of being human. That's part of our humanity. Like empathy is a core construct of our humanity and the more we express that, the better. And that I would argue, Jeff, that is why we would go into that fire because we want to that kid with their parents to give them a birthday, to give them an anniversary, like to see them get married one day.
Benjamin Martin: Like we'll take significant risks that are counter to our best interest because of our empathy. Our empathy is not, it doesn't not handicap us, it does not distract us. It empowers us as long as we're valuing the right thing. And it's pretty obvious when somebody is demonstrating powers and not doing the right things. But that's what type of leader I want to work for. That that has the ability to come in and in one minute basis silly, bad-ass, but the next minute be completely humble over a mistake they made or sharing the mistake they made with me 10 years ago to establish level footing with me because I want to feel related to them because that's another fundamental construct of safety is relatedness. That's the next level stuff. And that's the stuff that's not being taught. I'm not reason why we're going to have this gap and this, but you know, and every gap you get people like me and you that are like, we're not, there's a need.
Benjamin Martin: There's a technology that's not out there. So I'm going to, we're going to speak to it and literally build this, I don't want to say from scratch because we were studying research that's been done some, you know, sometimes the thirties but in the fire service it's all new and novel and you all, you, anybody listening here knows if it's new and novel in the fire service, it's the first to get, you know, an arrow swung at it. So like that's the hits were taken because we believe so passionately in it and like I've seen it, I've seen it affect my marriage and make it better. I've seen it at work and make my relationships better with people. And the reputation I have now is, so it's like one 80 from what I had seven years ago and it's all been about humility and learning and shared experiences. That's the only recipe that I've had any kind of success with. It's not ever been one class I took, well one moment I had. It's just a consistent showing up for people. And that's really what I think a leader needs to do.
Jeff Banman: Dude, I, I can't disagree with any of that. I mean, I think that's exactly, we are human and as humans we are emotional beings. You know what I mean? We feel, we sense, we connect, uh, aid is just part of our lives and we can't shove it down. We can't turn it off. It's not going to go away. I level when people are like, well I don't really have any empathy or I was born without empathy. I'm like, yeah, I know you aren't. Uh, you know, cause I've had those kind of, I've had people say that, you know what, I've had people say that about their partners or other people in the, in the, you know, in their work environment. Like they just, I, they don't have any empathy. They do, they don't know how to unlock it. And there's probably a huge wall of fear there around it.
Jeff Banman: So, yeah, man. I mean I think it's a, I think it's indicative on, on us as one, it's indicative on the leader today to step into this role period. You know, if you are, if you are in any of the services, uh, any, you know, if you, to people I hang out with across the platforms, the special operations guys, intelligence guys, the fire service guys, law enforcement across the board. Anybody who's been in a career for any length of time and has a sense of themselves, understands the value of this conversation of constantly looking at themselves, constantly develop things, you know, willingness to understand their people around them, you know, and really, and take action around it. Right? It's not just, Oh, cool, there's was a great podcast or, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What now are you doing with it? What are you, what steps are you taking?
Jeff Banman: You know, if you are a leader in the firehouse or you're, you know, a Sergeant in the law enforcement community or the Lieutenant or a captain or a chief, I don't know. You know what I mean? I've got chief officers that listen to this. It's like, how are you creating the environment for your people to really get all of this like through, through and through. And you know, that's not just, you know, let me go see Benjamin talk at firehouse expo. You know, it's like, how do I engage, how do I bring this conversation forward? I mean, I think that's, you know, you touched on the aspects of suicide in the rise around that stuff cause they ours. I mean, those are, that's why I created the operation mindset foundation because I'm a big believer, there's a big difference between prevention and intervention and 90% of what's done is intervention because the thought train has already started.
Jeff Banman: And I know I speak openly about years, even prior to the services, this constant conversation of I shouldn't be here. You know, maybe I should just go now. Um, and my own challenges then, you know, enhanced by the stupid life I chose to live. Uh, you know, it's crazy what's out there and you know, we've gotta be more real about it. We've got to be more in tune with it. We've got to be available, the people around us, because that, you know, that person sitting with you at the dinner table in the firehouse, like you said, needs every ounce of the same person that will run in and snatch that kid out of that burning building like 100%. And if you can't be in, especially, you know, I don't care, I don't care what your rank is or whether you showed up yesterday or whether you've been here for 20 years and you're a grouch.
Jeff Banman: That's the condition you have to live in now. Uh, because it's across the board, man, the game changed, like firing and getting shot at, it's a little bit more hay day. There's a lot more judgment from across the board. It's not just centered into law enforcement community, you know, or it's not just military stuff or whatever. I'll say it's across the board. Like you've gotta be ready for anything and everything and you're only gonna do that when the team is a whole, you know, is completely whole and able to perform in moment. So dude, I love it. We're going to have to schedule another time. And you know, have a whole nother conversation. Uh, anytime, anytime. I love talking to
Benjamin Martin: Jeff. I think you're doing great work and it's humbled to be a small part of it.
Jeff Banman: Well that's it dude. And we're gonna we're going to work together a little bit more in 2020, uh, through the operation Whiteside foundation and really developing and preparing guys, you know, people to step into harm's way and delivering the conversation early. Cause I think this needs to start like day one. This is the conversation. Yeah. This, this needs to be, I'll say this if you think you are an influencer in any of the services, you know, I, I feel like I served a little bit of that in my time in a couple of places. Like I was somebody people trusted or they listened to or they came to and talk to. If you're in that role, this is the conversation that needs to be had like this, you know, and I, and I was lucky I had some old school, gritty, gritty, gritty guys growing up that actually had these kinds of conversations with me.
Jeff Banman: You know, may not have been this formal, may not have been in these particular words. You know, cause now we're talking almost started years ago, but they had conversations like this with me and that's what I love about these programs cause all that's still embedded in, in a lot of this, this old school, you know, old school hard ass mentality is to me I think is actually a big falsehood. And maybe that's what you and I'll attack on the next time we get on. It's like this, this perception of what I should be versus you know, you talked to the Al Dutton retired battalion fire chief from DC fire department who we know went to deep, went to work for DC the year I was born. You know, telling me how this stuff is radically important to success. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we'll have to unpack that. All right man. So I'm going to make sure all the show notes are up. You and I are going to collaborate a little bit to recreate some of the conversation for everybody out there and get some key topics and some key learning points. So they've got them up there in the show notes. I'm going to make sure Benjamin's wonderful bio is up also in the show notes and a link to him at embrace the resistance but soon by checkout, embrace the resistance.com. Are you speaking anywhere? Anytime soon? You got anything coming up?
Benjamin Martin: So then uh, I got uh, I got a small gig in Indiana for a department and then I'll be at the big show in SEIC April. So hopefully it will, we'll see each other there.
Jeff Banman: Yeah, absolutely. So if you're going to FDIC, make sure you check out and Benjamin and get into his class cause it's, it is 100% worth it. I had a chance to sit in at, he spoke right before we prep the audience for them. We prepped the objective for me and in Nashville I did and then they all left and then you know, you can stick around five minutes and they left and I came up. So either you were really good or you're a really bad one or the other. What does the do? So I rather, well, thanks for coming on today.
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