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Best of Ask The Chiefs · B Shifter

• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Hello everyone and welcome to the B-Shifter podcast, john Vance, here with you today on this special best of episode where we're going to feature not one, not two, but three questions from Ask the Chiefs.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: We'll have Terry Garrison and Nick Brunicini here shortly answering a couple of questions and then in the middle of all that, we'll have our resident ops chief, josh Blumen, to answer a question for Ask the Ops Chief.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: So these are taken from past episodes, kind of edited down.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: They're ones that are very popular Hopefully you haven't heard them before, so it'll be new to you or a good review and kind of an edited version of Ask the Chiefs today on the B Shifter podcast.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Let's see, today is August 26th.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: We're winding down with summer.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: That means here at B Shifter and Blue Card we are really in full gear planning for the 2024 Hazard Zone Conference.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: There are still seats available for that.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: We have about 130, 140 seats left for the general session October 3rd and 4th at the Sharonville Convention Center in Cincinnati, ohio.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: I do believe we had three people back out of the May Day workshop as well, so that means we have a couple of May Day spots open.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: So the biggest gathering for anybody ever addressing May Days is at this year's May Day workshop.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: So if you have time to get in on that, please go to hazardzonebccom and get registered for the 2024 Blue Card Hazard Zone Conference, the largest gathering of incident commanders in the country, brought to you by Blue Card and B-Shifter.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: We can't wait to see you this fall in Sharonville, ohio.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: So the other thing I wanted to get to we appreciate everyone that listens, that watches, that subscribes to the B Shifter podcast.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: We got back from FRI a couple of weeks ago in Dallas A lot of positive comments, also some constructive comments and some suggestions.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: We always appreciate that.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: But if you could do me a favor, just tell a friend.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: Word of mouth is the best way to grow this podcast and we certainly appreciate the thousands of subscribers that have made this a success here now for the last two and a half years.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: But we're always looking for more listeners and more people to join the B Shifter community.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Join the B Shifter community, so share our podcast and if you haven't already done so, please subscribe and feel free to leave a review.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: Five stars is nice, but whatever you can do, I understand.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: So let's get into it right now.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: The best of B Shifter podcast with Ask the Chiefs.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: Our first question comes from BW, and BW is asking how do we maintain our service as a highly motivated paramilitary service as the social pendulum swings, so far without offending the new generation.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: So here's somebody working with newer firefighters that you know the paramilitary might not make sense to.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: So what's the take on the paramilitary setup of the fire service?
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: First of all those younger generations.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: We got to fix them.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: What generation ever not said I don't know if I'm saying this right that the next generation is so different?
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: And then the next generation is always saying the one going out or the little bit more senior one, they're screwed up.
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: So it's always kind of been out there right that whole.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: And when does one generation start and another generation begin?
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: I could never figure that out.
• 4:39
  Speaker 2: Are we in the same generation because we have gray hair?
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: Let's talk about the work itself and then everything else relates to the work.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: So I think when we start talking about how we're organized and why we're kind of paramilitary, it has to do with the work.
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: I think we start there and have a conversation about that right yeah, well, and that just picking up with the work part of it is the leadership thing we're putting together is the work is the unifying force and that hasn't changed much.
• 5:10
  Speaker 3: It changes a little bit.
• 5:11
  Speaker 3: But we started off protecting the community against fire and then we added EMS in the 70s and then Hazmat and Tech Rescue and all the other stuff, so the customer service element kind of came into it in the 90s.
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: Well, it really did, because when we picked up EMS is you had people customers instead of, like acts of nature customers which nobody really gave a shit about.
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: You know, the fire is the fire, it's an eternal force of nature.
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: So in fact, alan Brudicini, the guy who wrote all that, said, I did not make any sense of being the fire chief and in control of this organization until there was a customer, until we hooked it up, of what we do for the community and the Mrs Smith piece of it he says because before that we didn't have a customer.
• 6:00
  Speaker 3: As we showed up and we put the fire out, that was a customer.
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: So we were almost like a core or a cult that way.
• 6:07
  Speaker 3: So I think when you started delivering a full spectrum of service, that became a bigger deal.
• 6:12
  Speaker 3: But I agree with what you just said about the work drives it.
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: So it doesn't matter what generation you are and if you like this or that, you're doing the work and this is kind of the way we organize ourselves around the work and really the fire service is a lot like an apprenticeship.
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: That's what we were raised in.
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: One of the problems, I think now not problems, it's just one of the challenges is today's generation doesn't see themselves working for the same employer their whole life, like we did.
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: You and I worked for the Phoenix Fire Department for 25 to 30 years.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: That was it for us, and then you went off to other places, but that was in addition to what you'd already done.
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: I think that's more.
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: The model now is if you get somebody who goes 20 years in a fire department, that's saying something.
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: It's starting to look more like the cops did during our career, where the average retirement age for the police was 19 years of service and you didn't get a pension until 20.
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 7:12
  Speaker 3: So I think that becomes part of it.
• 7:15
  Speaker 3: But I think the way that people socially come together, especially, like you say, different generations, so you can have a 60-year-old leader and then a 20-year-old, some firefighter, coming in and they have to somehow make sense of the age difference Well, the work is the bridge that does that.
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and if you just look at the paramilitary part, so my name tag says firefighter, your name tag says fire captain, yours says battalion chief.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: Over it it's really no different if you just kind of look at it.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: It's no different than the way McDonald's is.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: That's an employee, that's a manager.
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: This guy may be a little higher up in the food chain.
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: Or you go to any kind of grocery store or any kind of department store type businesses.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: They have a paramilitary style, if you want to call it that organization.
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: So I think paramilitary sometimes gets used by us like it's somewhat different for us than it is from anybody else.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: But my wife, she was a banker for years and then she moved up into the organization and she had other people working for her and she had a boss and it was laid out real similar to the fire department, just a different type of job.
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: That also happens in the fire service because we have a decentralized workforce, right.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: So whenever you have a decentralized workforce you have employees that are not at headquarters.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: How do you get information to them?
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: How do they get information back to you?
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: A lot of that is done through a communication chain that matches that paramilitary organization.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: You've got to use that communication chain.
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: You know, and I think paramilitary you said it we're not the military Now, we're public safety and it looks a certain way, but we don't.
• 9:07
  Speaker 3: I think the paramilitary piece of it is that's as much as you're going to join and you're part of this Right.
• 9:16
  Speaker 3: This is like you're no longer a citizen.
• 9:20
  Speaker 3: You're part of a different organization that provides service to the community.
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: Nick, you made me think of something the military years ago, when I was 17 years old.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: The uniqueness of the military from the rest of the folks I talked to and the rest of the organization I just talked about is that there's no fraternity what's that word?
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: They use Fraternization between officers and the enlisted men.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: You know they have their own clubs and they go to different parties and that, and they are so much higher up for whatever reason, and maybe they have to have that because they're hazard zone in the way they work.
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: But for us, you know, we have a single level entry program.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: I've always liked that about the fire service and when I'm out and I'm talking to people and they say, yeah, I want to be a firefighter, the good news about being a firefighter is you start as a firefighter like the rest of us did, and you can move up in your organization as much as you want to.
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: If you want to stay a firefighter for 20 years we've known guys that have done that and did a really good job with it 30 years right.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: If you want to move to captain or you want to move to chief.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: But a firefighter can end up being a fire chief if that's what they want to do and they kind of position themselves to do that.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: That's not as easy in the military to do.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: That, you know.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: You got to kind of go.
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: It does happen.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: But you got to go through different schoolings and then you come out and once again you can't fraternize with the people below you, which is different from the fire service.
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and you got the uniform uniform.
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: But we don't salute all the other stuff.
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: We're not the army.
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: We go home at the end of the shift also.
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: So you know, I don't know, maybe it's paramilitary because we shop and cook and we can eat together.
• 11:06
  Speaker 3: I mean, there's similarities, but it's still occupational at the end of the day.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: There's some departments out there, though, that still line up with the Class A uniform hats when the chief comes in, and they are doing like military stuff, standing at attention.
• 11:23
  Speaker 3: We were too busy going on calls and being a fire department to do any of that nonsense.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: Now I got to tell you when I was in Houston they did that I would try to sneak in fire stations.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: I was there for five years and three and a half four of those years I lived without my wife there.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: She stayed here in the valley so I had a lot of time in the evenings and on the weekends I'd stay out of trouble.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: I'm not a fire buff, but what I would do is on a Saturday or Sunday I'd go visit a fire station, and I remember one fire station.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: We'd never had a chief here in our entire history of this fire station.
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: So I'd walk in there like I'm wearing civilian clothes and I was like who's the old guy?
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: And I go on the fire chief.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: Well, that got out.
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: And then when I would start to visit they would they're so respectful the Houston firefighters.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: They weren't doing this out of meanness or unkindness, but that was their history and I couldn't get them to stop it while I was there.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: But they would call chief in the station and they would all come down from whatever they were doing and I'm sure a lot of them were doing really important things, cooking right and they would come down and they would line up at attention and then I would go down and shake their hand and every time I did that I felt I would say you're a rest chairman running for office.
• 12:33
  Speaker 4: I'll be here all day.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: But they were being respectful.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: It was something that they were doing to, I think, make me feel more comfortable.
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: I told them every time please don't do that, chief, you're not going to get us to stop doing that.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: You go in the station, you sit down.
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: You talk to them.
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: Three station you sit down, you talk to them.
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: Three of them sneak out and they go out and they wash my car every time.
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: Well, we had a guy tell us this week we're doing our training and one of the guys came up to me and we were talking about you know, uh, I don't know how we got on the subject, but he said that he had actually had a chief officer tell him uh, maybe you were, the guys were standing there just said I don't care about you, I only care about you from the neck down.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you heard that.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I heard him say that.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: That was inappropriate.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: So, in other words, I don't care what you think, I don't care how you feel, I don't care nothing about your family, I just want you to do your job.
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: And those kind of leaders hopefully are starting to be, hopefully they're being phased out and we don't see a lot of that and we don't see a lot of that.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: But that's not leadership, that's control.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: You know, any prison guard could act like that.
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: But I think the paramilitary part is our organization is designed around the rank of the people that fill it out.
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: So you have a fire chief, you have assistant chiefs, you have deputy chiefs and that's the way you divide it up to manage and operate the fire department supervision and service delivery.
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: So that's the part that makes sense to me.
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: So you know, one of the things we've talked about is it's like in blue card is when you're doing like the tactical level is staffed by a variety of individuals across the whole of the fire service, anywhere from the secretaries, from the training academy to assistant chiefs of operations, middle managers.
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: We'll fill in the tactical level at the incident scene.
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: Well, one of the things, especially in like urban fire departments, where you have rank, where you have lieutenants and captains and battalion chiefs, well, tactical level bosses in those systems are typically the chiefs because they supervise captains.
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: So we've arranged that to the way the fire department runs because you have so many strategic level officers, tactical level, and then a bunch of task level responders that show up that are supervised by company officers, show up there to supervise my company officers.
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: So that lends itself very well to filling out the responsibility positions within an incident org chart at the scene of a fire.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: Let's say no, and you said it.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: So the task level back to the work.
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: The task level of the people have that direct connection to the customer.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: Right, brunicini would tip that upside down.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: So that's the top level of the organization.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: Customer is, this is our focus.
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: They're the sun and we shine we, they shine on us and we reflect off them.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: So the top level, if you want to turn that upside down, if you want somebody who likes to think of it this way, they're the bottom level.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: Doesn't matter, as long as you treat them nice and they connect the customer, and then the supervisor supports them in a very formal kind of way, you know, and a very informal kind of way.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: And we talk about autocratic and democratic.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: You know, if you have a supervisor who is autocratic around a fire station too much, that's where you get wrong.
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: I got my own plate, I decide what's on TV, I decide what we're going to eat dinner.
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: A fire station should be a democracy a little bit.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: To the point of now, the fire captain sets the schedule based on what his boss says hey, we're going to go training next week or we're going to train this day.
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: In fact, in Glendale it Wednesday was always EMS training, so every day had pretty much some sort of scheduled training and the captain needs to make sure that they show up to that.
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: But everybody's got their what we say it's rank and responsibility, right responsibility right, 12 hour work cycles and have some aircraft dropping agent on the problem.
• 16:39
  Speaker 3: So you'll be there a week or two.
• 16:42
  Speaker 3: That's where the ops section comes in.
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: You're talking about hundreds of people in the incident operation.
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: Now that's what that system was designed for.
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: And then they would walk it back and say, oh no, no, no, it's scalable.
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: You don't have to have 138 management positions, you can only have two or three.
• 17:02
  Speaker 3: So we just use the ones we like ops and this one over here and this one.
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: It's confusing unnecessarily.
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: You look at it, you're strategic.
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: The most strategic officers that I worked with during my career in the fire service in a command post.
• 17:20
  Speaker 3: The most efficient number was five.
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: So you got five people in a strategic command post.
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: There was never in my 29 years we never used an ops section.
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: I mean it's because the IC did it.
• 17:33
  Speaker 3: In fact, an ops section goes kind of against the four and five because you start off with the IC.
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: You transfer it from a mobile one to one in a strategic position.
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: The one in a strategic position starts to build a command team of an IC, a support officer and a senior advisor.
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: Really, the only sections positions I ever used was logistics and safety in the thing, because I worked for a municipal fire department that had all these resources and you managed them yourself.
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: They didn't have to come from other states and places like that to a big forest fire somewhere.
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: So I think Josh is right.
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: It's just a confusing thing.
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: It's like this option we can use.
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: Well, no, if you work for an urban fire department, you're never going to use an ops section.
• 18:20
  Speaker 3: It's something that doesn't happen that often.
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: It's more reserved for a NIMS type one or two incident op, a big thing that's going to take weeks into months to handle in hundreds and hundreds of firefighters, weeks into months to handle in hundreds and hundreds of firefighters, john, I think sometimes that they throw that out there because they just don't know what to do with somebody sometimes too.
• 18:46
  Speaker 4: So you know, in our system if we made Division One, we would just send another person to be the support officer or really to do that safety role, embedded safety piece.
• 18:50
  Speaker 4: So you'd have two people in Division One.
• 18:52
  Speaker 4: Or if you had Alpha and Charlie, then you would have two people in Division I.
• 18:54
  Speaker 4: Or if you had Alpha and Charlie, then you would have two people in Alpha and two people in Charlie.
• 18:57
  Speaker 4: So I think there's just, you know, a component piece missing with you know training, or what do you really do?
• 19:04
  Speaker 4: And when somebody shows up they just say I'm going to make you ops because I don't know what to do with you.
• 19:08
  Speaker 4: I think Nick hit on a little bit with the whole safety thing.
• 19:11
  Speaker 4: Same thing Somebody shows up, I want to make you safety, and then we know what happens with that over all of our careers.
• 19:19
  Speaker 4: You know, depending on the person, that it becomes a freelance position and they just do whatever they want.
• 19:22
  Speaker 4: Or in some cases they just start embedding or saying things on the radio that really I don't need to know about, or if I do need to know about it even better yet, then I'll just leave you in that sector division and pair you up with somebody and you can just work there and be that support piece for you know, charlie side or whatever.
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: They had three ring binders in the command van for all the sections, positions, and what it was is, when they could, they could take any of these staff deputies and they could plug them into the command post and then they give them a three-ring binder that had a bullet list of the duties of that position and so, like it was almost like you had them in order.
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: Okay, the first one I'm going to give you is logistics.
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: That's the first one we're going to use and then we're going to do whatever comes after that, and then ops would be the last one, because that's the last thing we would ever put a section behind.
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: But josh said it, you're just making work for somebody that showed up to the scene and you don't need them to do the work.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: It's we don't.
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: We don't build the incident organization based off our uh department, uh flow chart.
• 20:32
  Speaker 3: You base it off the incident needs.
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: So if it's a house fire that requires four companies total, it doesn't make an ounce of sense to me that you would make an operations section for that.
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: It screws it up, it doesn't make it any more effective or efficient.
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: It slows the whole thing down, creates too much redundancy.
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: Nobody knows what they're doing.
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: So when you run well hell, you go through Blue Card and run through the cert lab with the SIMS.
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: There's no ops stuff.
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: I mean you're getting in my whole career.
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: I mean we would have incidents that would last four or five days sometimes, you know.
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: So it's a long duration thing.
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: We never used an ops person, it's just.
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: It was something we just never got into the habit of and I'm not aware of any department that ever has used it the way it was designed to outside of a NIMS 1, 2, or 3 incident.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: That was a very mature explanation of what operations does, because I believe the last time we were in a class and someone asked about this, you just shrieked at them and had to leave and compose yourself.
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I had a seizure halfway through my answer and you know the guy answered asking him the question was smarter.
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: I think he was a certified civil engineer and you're like how big is your department?
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, we normally have like five or six companies on the scene.
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: You're like how big is your department?
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, we normally have like five or six companies on the scene.
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: You're like no don't, don't do that.
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: It doesn't make any sense.
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: It's almost like, okay, I'm going to go, I'm going to buy a fire truck for EMS calls, let's make them all crash rigs.
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: No, that's not what it's for.
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: It's for airplane crashes, it's not for going on E.
• 22:12
  Speaker 4: I think if those organizations that are doing that, or having confusion with it, I think if they really said why are we doing this?
• 22:19
  Speaker 4: And sat down and tried to write on a piece of paper, why do we put ops in place, I don't know that they'd come up with an answer.
• 22:25
  Speaker 3: No, they'd say, because the National Fire Academy said so 10 years ago.
• 22:28
  Speaker 3: That's what we should be doing.
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we should use an ops section, but we should never use an incident strategy.
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: Well, no, the people that have figured out how to do structural firefighting should have a voice in it.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: I have a question for the chiefs Meditation slash.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: Mindfulness is a hot topic in the first responder community for mental health.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: What are your thoughts on its effectiveness?
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: Do you use it personally and, in your opinion, are there benefits for improving incident commander performance not just mental health recovery, but resilience?
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: Meditation and mindfulness.
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: I think that's a good thing.
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: When I retired, I got hooked into yoga, for whatever reason, very quickly.
• 23:17
  Speaker 3: So me and another friend of mine who had retired were discussing you know what to do to stay in shape X, y and Z and so, growing up in the fire service and you know kind of the traditional roles that we filled, it was more of like whiskey and football would describe kind of our pastime and activities, whereas really at this point in my life, I think that's somewhat toxic.
• 23:47
  Speaker 3: You know it's not good for your brain either one of those activities.
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: So you should really experience some moderation with that kind of stuff.
• 23:55
  Speaker 3: And what I find is, as far as this question goes and just kind of your own mental health, that worked better for me was yoga, and cannabis really were a better way to move forward, and so I think I'm in better health today than I was in 2009 when I retired.
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: I feel, better and a lot of that is just kind of it's your mental outlook is also a big piece of it.
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: So, between that and working on that and sleeping, getting eight hours of sleep and drinking plenty of fluids all the silly bullshit we used to tell people on EMS calls sleep eight hours, drink plenty of fluids.
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: It was the best advice we could have given anybody, right, I mean, it's really kind of the key to life, and so I'm kind of following my advice now.
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: And to answer his question, yes, and I think it will make you a better ic, because it makes you a better person.
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: You're a little more patient, you're a little more uh, I don't know mature in in the way you deal with pressures and issues that come up during the day.
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: It's funny because the way you just described that and we talked about country music that is a Hank Williams Jr song.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: Certainly All my karate friends are settled down and doing more iced tea and cornbread instead of the hard stuff.
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: But, yeah, I think it's absolutely important and you know so.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: For me it's probably more spiritual.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: That's just kind of the way I am in my life.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: But yeah, I, I think you have to have a if you don't have a quiet place to go to.
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: Wherever you, however, you get there and you hear that noise all the time, and I think that's you know, when I watch um tv nowadays, even if I'm not really watching, I watch something that's just, I'm not even paying attention.
• 25:45
  Speaker 3: It's more like background noise it's like the fire stations that we worked in.
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: There was always three tvs, four radios, but pa is going and nobody paid any attention to any other.
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: I no.
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: I think that's where my ears are ringing today, Constantly.
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: Sometimes they would get bored and they'd just go and blow the sirens for the hell of it.
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: I think it's awesome that somebody would write this question about the meditation, the mindfulness, because it really is important and we don't think about it.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: Mindfulness, because it really is important and we don't think about it.
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: Bruno actually had a lot of comments about that years ago when he started talking about wellness.
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: Right, he wanted that to be included in our wellness program, where at the time you know being a knucklehead that I was when I heard wellness, first thing I thought of, oh, I'm going to have to do more push-ups and increase my bench or box steps or whatever.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: But he was talking about total wellness, you know, the physical wellness and the mental wellness.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: So yeah in fact, he brought in people over our career.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: Some of them were successful and they connected with firefighters, and some of them weren't successful, didn't connect with firefighters.
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a big piece of it.
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: When we started our careers, our idea of mindfulness and fitness were different.
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: Back then it was more built around resilience and there's nothing that can hurt me.
• 27:10
  Speaker 3: I can go in and battle all these demons and do all this nonsense.
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: I can bench press 400 pounds.
• 27:18
  Speaker 3: I can do X, y and Z and as you start getting older and accumulate more experiences, I came to find out I thought you know, there's not a lot of difference like in a firefighter's capability of doing their job, between being able to bench press 250 pounds and 500 pounds.
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: You do about the same thing.
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: So one of them is just you're just getting stronger to get stronger.
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: In fact, I saw a thing.
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: They were talking about a quarterback, the Eagles quarterback, and how much he could squat.
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: It was during a football game and Troy Aikman's commentator, who was the Cowboys Hall of Fame quarterback, and he's like why does he do that?
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: He's thinking he's a quarterback.
• 27:58
  Speaker 3: And then, like, five plays later, this guy runs through 11 people and scores it.
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: That's why he does it.
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: Is he's he's collecting brain trauma right now.
• 28:07
  Speaker 3: Right, that's what it's happening to him.
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: So I think that's the other thing is, when you retire is you kind of think okay, I'm retired and now I want to be as healthy as I can as long as I can.
• 28:19
  Speaker 3: So that was the other piece of it.
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: Is I retired and I thought, well, I'm not in the greatest shape of the world, so maybe I can work on that.
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: So part of the yoga thing is that's got me into fitness again, and so I think that's part of it.
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: Is you do a little something physical every day to get your blood going and moving and I've noticed I feel a lot healthier now because of that.
• 28:39
  Speaker 3: I blighter, I got my joints don't ache as much I, and I think that adds a little more gratitude to your life.
• 28:46
  Speaker 3: When you go to bed at night, so you sleep a little better, you think, no, you know, but life isn't as bullshit as everybody says it is.
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: You turn the tv on and that's what they're screaming at.
• 28:55
  Speaker 3: You think, no, you're you.
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: People don't live in the same zip code.
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: I do, evidently my wife and I, for the first time and probably I don't know as long as I can remember watch the evening news last night she got home and it's like well, let's watch the evening news mbc or cbs, I don't remember who it was were you surprised that?
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: uh, walter cronkite was no longer entering?
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: it yeah and we watched it for about the first 10 uh issue, the first 10 minutes for the, the two shootings, the shooting, the run over the uh, the girl in the park that got killed here.
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: And it's like I looked out and I said, man, I'm tapping out on the news, I I'm going back to Andy Griffith on the MeTV channel.
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: I can't.
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: It was stressful just watching the news.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: I look over and I said, jeepers, I need to use some yoga right there.
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: Exactly, yeah, you could have watched basketball instead.
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: There's none of that.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: My department, like many others across the country, is dealing with rapid turnover and replacement in the firefighter positions.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: This is a multifaceted problem that stems from department hopping, job contentment, deficiencies in applications and shortage in fully certified applicants.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: However, we are continually hiring new probies, training them, just for them to leave or move on and then be replaced by a new one.
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: This has made a difficult company officer process because I am continually onboarding and training and trying to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of the new employees.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: I have prided myself being a servant leader in the past and have been able to find the deficiencies needed to be addressed in the new firefighters, but now that is getting more and more difficult.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: Are there any suggestions from the chiefs on how to best deal with this turnover and having a competent department and not burning me out in the same process from doing the same thing over and over again?
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: And it's exhausted in Exuma.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: He was writing this for vacation.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's funny.
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: I like that Exhausted, nice.
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: So, first thing, bruno used to say it and I believe it.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: In fact, when I was in Houston the last couple days, I talked to the fire chief in College Station and he's getting Houston firefighters leaving Houston going to College Station.
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: He couldn't be happier about that.
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: He's getting qualified firefighters.
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: But Bruno used to say it, people don't quit their job, they quit their boss.
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: So you know, if he has a department and anybody who has a department where people are leaving, first thing you have to do is probably do a little bit of a uh, I don't know if you, if an exit interview would work or could.
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: Maybe people aren't going to be honest, but at least you could ask after they're gone.
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: You know why did you leave, but, um, you know, you just wonder why people are leaving a department to go to another one.
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: For instance, in the city that I just worked in over here in the west side of town, we were getting firefighters from other cities, most recently from our largest city, and people were wanting to leave.
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: That one and this younger generation I want to call them that, I don't know what else you call them, but they're loyal to the job of being a firefighter.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: They're not really tied or connected to the actual city, and we've talked about this before.
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: But why are they leaving your city?
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: So we'll talk about that.
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: And then I think we probably ought to talk about his position as a company officer and what he's doing, because it sounds like what he's doing is very commendable.
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: He's trying to do the best he can do and he's trying to ask how he can continue to do that.
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: So there's probably a couple of things going on there, but we probably have maybe, if you don't mind, talking about the front end first.
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: What do you think?
• 32:55
  Speaker 4: Are they?
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: leaving, you know.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: So why do people leave?
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: We had to probably talk about that.
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: So people leave for money, right?
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: People leave for better money, sometimes better opportunities.
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: Sometimes people leave just because their the apartment they're working in right now is no longer geographically correct for them, for their spouse and their circumstances.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: People leave sometimes just because it's a shitty department.
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: They're tired of all the negative stuff that has taken place.
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: I think that's what you started with.
• 33:24
  Speaker 3: Is they leave their boss?
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: We worked in a place and I had this well most of my career where I knew the limits of where I was working, what I could do and what I couldn't do, because I had seen it with other people.
• 33:41
  Speaker 3: And so they well, you know, you, you did this and this and well, no, no, no, no, no, we don't need to talk about this, because Jimmy did eight times worse and nothing happened.
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: So, and you knew that, because it would only rise to a certain level before an adult would get in and like, modulate the whole thing and say, no, this is what we're going to do instead.
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: So it became a very good place to work because of that reason is it was about the work we did and everything that we did inside was somehow had to support that.
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: Well, that made it better, really, because it didn't become about the ego and ID of the ranking bosses, who made it worse, right?
• 34:32
  Speaker 3: So those people see, and they existed, they existed in that fire department and you thought I work for this guy and he's an asshole and I don't like him, but it doesn't matter because he can't do what he wants to do with us, right, because it's not allowed in the system due to the people that are actually leading it.
• 34:51
  Speaker 3: Well, in other fire departments, the, those people didn't exist that modulated things, and so it was just the ego and the will.
• 35:00
  Speaker 3: And if you, what do they say?
• 35:02
  Speaker 3: With politics today, it's anything for my friends and for my enemies, the law.
• 35:07
  Speaker 3: So that was kind of the way people would run.
• 35:09
  Speaker 3: The fire department is okay if you're in with me, this is what you get to do, but if you're not part of the group, then this is, and what that question sounds a little bit like that, and you said it earlier is today the, the working environment, has changed in ways that don't necessarily connect to where we were in our lives.
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: So I have a bunch of like solutions for that that aren't valid, because this is Vance said it.
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: It's changed.
• 35:41
  Speaker 3: People go from job to job.
• 35:42
  Speaker 3: They quit quicker.
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: It's just.
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: Unemployment now is as low as it's ever been, probably since we've been alive pretty close to it, so you can get a job and now people are making more money.
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: The lower wages have gone up, so people have a lot more options with what they're going to do.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: All right, let's do a timeless tactical truth.
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: All right, the four of clubs.
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's my favorite club.
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: The four clubs.
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: That's my favorite club, the four clubs.
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: The name of the IMS game is helping internal and external humans be safe, successful and connected with their own empowered control.
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: Well, that might help this guy out a little bit.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: Actually, your own empowered control, what does that mean?
• 36:34
  Speaker 3: Like I said, self-actualization.
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: So that comes after competence.
• 36:36
  Speaker 3: You become a butterfly.
• 36:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you get better at what you can control.
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: First you've got to recognize what you can't control.
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: Right, all those knuckleheads above you if you think they're that, what can I control?
• 36:51
  Speaker 2: And I'm going to get better at what I do.
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: I'm going to get better.
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: If you're going to be an incident commander, commander, be the best insane commander you can be.
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: And the only way you can do that is through training, because you're not.
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: You know, you always talk about experience.
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: Well, eventually you may get the experience, but training is experience right yeah, that's the shortcut to it that's well and that's where Well, and that's where you learn, see, that's where people learn the limits and the consequences of things there.
• 37:23
  Speaker 3: So that thing where we have to almost die to take a lesson away Well, you can.
• 37:42
  Speaker 3: During the front end of our career, we had as many fatalities and training burns as regular burns because we made them just like regular fires, we made them as dangerous as we could.
• 37:46
  Speaker 3: So you thought, well, no, this makes no sense, we're practicing dying in fires.
• 37:47
  Speaker 3: Now is we need to recalculate this and practice being successful.
• 37:49
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, we say safety and everybody thinks, oh, there we go again.
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: And you think, oh, we make the.
• 37:54
  Speaker 3: We make the scene safer for the victims by eliminating the hazards.
• 37:58
  Speaker 3: Well, that's what we do for ourselves then too.
• 38:01
  Speaker 3: So the quicker we eliminate the hazards well, today's fire attack, offensive fire attack you can initiate from the outside of the building, so I can knock three quarters of the fire down before I ever get in the building makes it safer for everybody.
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: Well, you still hear, these old knuckleheads are generation I don't believe in this this isn't what I saw during my career.
• 38:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah well, captain Salty, you're getting your pants twice a day.
• 38:26
  Speaker 3: We should probably quit listening to you.
• 38:28
  Speaker 3: So give me the divining rod.
• 38:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, get a smoothbore Tank to pump, frank Tank to pump, frank Tank to pump.
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: It's just chaos and mayhem man, you can't run an airline that way I used to say.
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: They'd say you know the safety, safety.
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: You know, if the American Fire Service ran the airlines, it wouldn't be safe to be on the ground, even Because they are going to fall down somewhere.
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: Well, that does it for today's B Shifter podcast.
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: We want to thank Josh, Nick and Terry all for being here today on this best of episode.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: We'll be back next week with another B Shifter podcast.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much for being here.