Managing Chaos - Learning from firefighters how to handle any situation with calmness, clarity, and a proven process.

[MUSIC] In times of rapid acceleration, high pressure, and general uncertainty, the reality is clear. Professionals are struggling. They have become more mentally and emotionally exhausted, less curious, more stressed, and less giving. Adding to this is the complexity around solutions with the overabundance of protocols, supplements, and so-called performance hacks. The end result, as leaders are more distracted and have less mental agility, poorer performance, and struggle to be the belief builder and energy multiplier for their teams. We don't want to accept that. Our passion is to help professionals be more. These conversations help illuminate your thinking into sustainable human performance, learning real solutions to improve your energy, focus, and ultimately increase your impact. This is the TIGNUM Thought Cast. [MUSIC] Today's episode, Managing Chaos, learning from firefighters had to handle any situation with calmness, clarity, and a proven process. With special guest, Jeff Case. Jeff is a retired fire chief and performance specialist at TIGNUM. We hope you enjoy it. [MUSIC] Hello, everyone, and welcome to our bold roundtable. And today, we have, along with all of you, one of our TIGNUM Performance Specialists, Jeff Case. Jeff coaches many of our senior executives in their teams, but he has a very unique background. Having spent 35 years in the fire service, starting as a firefighter, promoting up all the way to the level of being the fire chief. And one of Jeff's assignments was deputy chief, where he led operations and was responsible for running the biggest fires and emergency incidents. In the city of Phoenix. But in addition to that, what makes Jeff's experience so special was he also developed the Virtual Incident Command Center or the VICC. At one of the local colleges where they trained fire ground commanders and business leaders from all over the country on how to effectively and safely manage emergency incidents. Now, in full disclosure, Jeff and I sat next to each other the first day of the fire academy on February 3rd, 1986. We were both part of class 86 one and we've been great friends ever since. And we spent many days and nights talking about leadership and some of the key lessons that we both took away. And we also took for granted that we felt could help so many TIGNUM clients and so many of the bold members. Deal better with chaos and be able to handle it with calmness, clarity and effectiveness. So welcome Jeff. And in true firefighter fashion, let's have a kitchen table chat. Hey Scott, good morning and it is amazing how many great conversations happened in the firehouse kitchen. For sure. So Jeff, maybe a great place to start today is just to have you share your own bold story. Kind of you're in your second or third maybe career. And how you got from the fire service and ended went through the fire service and ended up being a TIGNUM performance specialist. Yes, got it. What's interesting is I didn't always aspire to or even know what I wanted to be a firefighter. And I was actually attending Arizona State University. I was in the pre-med program there. My father was a doctor. My father-in-law was a doctor and I was taking pre-med courses and figured that was my path. And one of the courses I took was a pre-med internship course, which you rotate through different disciplines. And one of those was in the emergency room. And in that setting, I kept seeing firefighters come in bringing patients. And I didn't understand that connection. I had never been connected to or much of the fire service. It intrigued me that these firefighters were bringing in cardiac patients, trauma patients. And I just added nowhere, just something struck me. I'd always loved the combination of medical, but I also loved very physical work. And I had to know where I literally just started looking into this and call the friend of mine that was on the fire department that I knew from high school. And just asked him about it, went and did it right along. And the next thing, you know, I'm literally making this shift. And interesting conversation with my dad, who was actually a professor at the issue, is a PhD doctor. And letting him know I was making that transition was an interesting conversation at first, but he ended up being an absolute tremendous, important, loved it. So again, the start of my journey started switching my courses towards pursuing the fire service, kept working towards my degree at the same time. And then, next thing I know, I'm in the academy and sit next to Scott, which was crazy. But yeah, so you finished the academy, you go on probation, which, you know, it's a year long probation process. And I always tell people now that if you want to get in the fire service, I hope you're comfortable being uncomfortable, because it is literally that for your whole career. And so again, finished probation, works as a firefighter, then as a paramedic. I don't know that everybody knows, but American fire service, a huge part of what we do is medical response to everything you would see in an emergency room. And we deal with that in the field. So I went through paramedic training and then kind of advanced in my career to different positions. I was a company officer, which is a captain position, probably the funnest time in my career, where I got to manage the station and a crew. And I happened to work at the busiest fire station in Phoenix. At the time, I think we were the third busiest in the nation, which was crazy. So tons of just amazing, cool, interesting experiences there managing the crew and calls. And then promoted to battalion chief, like you mentioned as a responding battalion chief. And then as a shift commander, which is where I had this opportunity to kind of leave these larger incidences. You had mentioned Scott that the college experience. So throughout that time, early on, I started teaching at the college and then just kind of advance there to a faculty position and just loved that teaching aspect of teaching others to do what we do. And then got a chance to start the Vic, like you mentioned, this virtual incident command center, which turned out to be kind of a national trend towards how we train future and current firefighters to do better what they do. So yeah, I left Phoenix retired as a deputy chief and then went out to a city just borders Phoenix and was the fire chief there. So yeah, that's kind of a nutshell, how it progressed, kind of crazy. Totally, totally crazy. And in fact, we'll tap into many of the things that you kind of hit on. Even from a rehearsal and practice standpoint. But it's it's fascinating how you ended up. So how did you end up at Tignum? Well, and again, for me, whatever, wherever it clicked in initially, this concept of whether you I didn't call it personal readiness at the time, but this idea being at your best. Even visualizations stuff and all these things from a recovery standpoint seem to resonate with me. And so we remember doing Tignum thoughts and Tignum ideas early on in the fire service. And I think progressed even to the point where when I was a chief officer, I get to actually implement some of those programs and implement Tignum type principles didn't know they were that. But and then you Scott, you know, leading the fire service and I'd love to hear that story too, but just a little bit. At that point realized that there was an opportunity to continue doing this after I left the fire service and to work with Tignum. So it was kind of a natural transition to take those principles that we learned in the fire service about sustainable human performance and apply it to the corporate world. So I am really curious got what led you because I know your career in the fire service, but what prompted you to to make this move to take them how that happened. Yeah, well, I was a human performance specialist before getting in the fire department. So kind of similar to you, I was a strength in conditioning coach and I was going to university in Maryland and someone said, you know, you should go get your EMT become a EMT because a lot of what the fire department does is goes on medical calls. It wasn't actually about even the fire department is about being a good performance specialist. And when I was getting my EMT, I stumbled upon the fire service and fell in love with it. And so throughout my whole career, I was always passionate about high performance. And by the time I became a chief, you know, I was looking at all of our fellow leaders in the department. And I saw some great examples like you who are doing a great, but there were so many under performers. And so I started writing a book and creating a presentation called igniting personal excellence. And I actually delivered it at the firefighter health safety and performance conference in 2004 and I recently even saw the CD. I still have the CD of that presentation, which is hilarious. And I was paralleling what it took to be excellent in the fire services of leader to what it takes for a fire to happen. So we call it the fire tetrahedron. So that means it takes four things for a fire to happen. You need fuel. So we get that from the food we eat and how it impacts our ability to perform. It takes oxygen and we get that from exercise because it trains our cardio respiratory and muscular systems to be able to do more work by using more oxygen. And then it takes heat and we get that from our purpose, our passion, our meaning. And then of course, it takes chain reaction, which is what brings it all together. And we get that from so many other things ranging from our recovery, our sleep, our relationships, our ability to make meaningful human connections. And as I was starting to think about retiring because I knew the fire chief, Bruno at the time and he was a person that I loved and admired so much was he was getting ready to retire. I started thinking, what else may I want to do next if I were to leave the fire service and I'd gotten my master's degree in performance psychology and exercise physiology. And I started interviewing business leaders and I would ask them what their job was like. And they would always say something like basically I just put out fires all day. and I would get super. were excited. I would get that excited look and I'd say, oh my God, like we're like brothers, right? Like what training do you have to put out fires? And then they would get this cold stare. And they would look at me and I realized this was a part of the job they were not prepared for and that they hated. And so that's when I realized there could be something to offer here. Then, of course, just a whole nother story, but certain, dipitously, I met Yogi and Tignum became what it is today. And so, you know, it's definitely not based on the fire service, but it's based on so many human performance strategies in this concept of personal readiness. And so actually, you know, it's it's a good place to kind of start our chat. So Jeff, maybe I'll ask you, in the fire service, people would probably expect that we're called to help people on their worst day. I mean, no one picks up the phone and says, I'm going to call 911 when everything's going great and they just want to share good news. So whether it's a fire or a medical emergency, a traffic accident or any other number of the types of emergencies that we responded to, we're always brought into someone else's chaos. So I'd love to know, how did you start your shift to be able to deal with that chaos? Oh, man, it's such an interesting, as you ask it, I'm just reflecting back at, you know, you learn it from role models, you learn kind of how to get yourself right. And I grew up just like you playing sports. So you're always kind of in that preparatory kind of process, but it was different here because what I learned and realized had this recognition early on is that I have no idea what I'm going to be called on to do that day. And so again, through good role models and maybe just my own past training and thought process, I would literally start the night before. It was, and that we didn't do it perfectly, but I had four kids, I had a family, I was teaching, but you try to make sure you're well recovered coming into that shift and then I was well hydrated. All those little things you do as an athlete, but also now preparatory to walk into what, you know, who knows what I'm an encounter from the time I walk in the station. So it started there. I would, we had taken them, you know, talk about having a home to work transition, I didn't call it that, but there was literally, as I was driving, this ability to kind of think, okay, am I in the right mindset? You know, am I ready to deal with whatever? Have I, you know, am I competent in my skills and, you know, reviewing the parametek training? All these things would go through my mind. And again, even when I was as a captain, I remember vividly driving to work one day. I had this old beat up truck that had no radio, so I just had quiet time and I thought, wow, I can make decisions today that could affect the lives of both citizens, but also my fellow firefighters. And it was just this be careful, be good at what you do. So it started in that transition, but then really when you get there, it's about being in the right mindset. And we have routines that are really important to us, how we prepare our equipment, how we, you know, check everything. And if we skip any of those, what we're taught and what I learned early on is that it not to be overly dramatic, but that could literally be life or death. If the equipment wasn't ready, it wasn't the right state, your personal protective gear, like your breathing apparatus, those could literally be things that could result in a loss of life for you or others. So that routine of what you got there, not walking in the station, sitting down and chatting, you'd see people and it was kind of this conversation that happened around the fire truck, but we were all checking our equipment, checking our gear, making sure we were ready for whatever the world might throw at us. And so that was this routine that fortunately I got taught very early on and made it that absolute, you know, consistent thing for me every single day that I did those things. And so it's just that it's a little bit of personal readiness from a nutrition recovery standpoint. It's a mindset and that's making sure you have a routine that gets you ready for the process. It's going to, who knows what's going to unfold that day. Yeah, it's always interesting that I noticed early on, guys that didn't do that, they got lazy. So we were all taught that and quickly, you know, you go on one call and you see someone who's unprepared and you see the chaos in their brain. And that was one of the, I think, biggest influences when we created the start of day routines, a take them and building that into our tools was because I realized it wasn't that they didn't know how important it was. They just didn't do it and they didn't think like you just described, I'm responsible for everyone else on this truck and the citizens. And so, you know, knowing and doing are always two different things, which I think can also be really, really important. They get casual with it. Yeah, so I'm curious, you know, you get prepared for the calls and you're ready to go. And then a call comes. How did you learn to control your emotions and call yourself, you know, especially we get woken up in the middle of the night and people don't think about that. You get woken up in the middle of the night and your heart's racing out of chest. How did you learn or what did you do to stop that when your heart was beating out of your chest? Yeah, no one prepares you. I don't remember getting prepared for that wake-up call it 1 a.m. And having never experienced that prior to getting into fire service where you go to sleep and you wake up in the middle of the night, that was difficult. When you said that, the first thing that came to my mind was in my at my first station. And this was literally the second shift that I worked. My first shift, we'd had several medical calls, but I didn't even get up after midnight, that first shift is kind of like, wow, this is nice. We slept through the night. If this is how it's going to be, I'm going to this will be great. My second shift, we had a fairly busy day, went to about around 10 30. And you know how when you wake up, your deepest sleep is those first two hours. So I woke up at 1 o'clock in the morning and it was dispatched for a fire. And I had not had a fire up to that point, just all medical calls. So stark, you know, alarms wake you up in the middle of the night, what's going on? I felt so disoriented. We're rushing out to the truck because it's a structure fire. I'm listening to this, what sounded like this loud noise to me. I couldn't even really make sense of what I was hearing from the dispatch. And there's an urgency to it. We get on the truck. And I, I started noticing right away, I am really amped up right now. And then my captain reached through the little window here in these old fire trucks back then and said, hey, this is a working fire. And so my heart rate got more elevated. And my level of, you know, kind of excitement, but also fear, literally kicked in. And as we're rolling down the street, I look over at my senior firefighter, and he's just as calm as could be. He's just sitting there almost like we're driving to, you know, a social event. And I'm getting amped up because the captain's letting us know, hey, this is working fire. Several reports were going to be laying in, which means that's a term that means I'm going to have the first assignment when we get there. And so I was completely ramped up way out of where I should have been. And we arrive on the scene. There's, you know, smoke in the area because smell it. We can see flames. I get out, do my assignment, work forward, get into the position now where I'm up with the rest of the crew. We're working this fire. And Scott, I'm not kidding. I, and I was an athlete. I trained. I was probably the best shape in my life because they just come out of the academy. I felt so exhausted a couple minutes into this fire. I thought there is no way I can do this for 30 years, no way. And I'm looking around and all these other firefighters are just working. They're just going about like, and these are older guys and gals and long story short as I realized early on from that experience right there that I've got to do something to control my emotional state while I'm responding. Because I literally spent everything before we even got to the scene. I see your firefighter was role-playing it. He was demonstrating. He didn't really teach me it, but he showed how comfortable and calm he was. So from there, I just learned to call myself down, take some breaths. I didn't know about breathing control, but I'd recognize that it helped. Start to visualize how I'm going to perform when I get there. So it was really that one first experience that drove home to me the importance of it's not a sprint sometimes. It's a hard process that I have to be in the right optimal state for. Yeah, I think those experiences also were probably a lot of the motivation to how I and I think also you wanted to bring that into the academy to train new firefighters on how to do it from the beginning of their career because it was when we got on the job, it was really left to you to learn on your own. But no one had systemized it or there was no science behind it. And I remember one of the things that I learned was how important that four to five minute response was to calming yourself down and getting ready. And in many times, many ways that also was probably the leading precursor to where we developed home to work transitions, work to home transitions, meeting to meeting transitions was I so realized that one of the worst calls I ever had was someone banging at the door at the station and handing me their baby who wasn't breathing and me realizing, oh crap, I didn't get a chance to prepare for this. I was really looking dinner. And suddenly my heart was beating through and I got to calm down and I got to get ready and that's how we developed what to do when you're overwhelmed. This idea of immediately recognizing your breathing calming yourself down, recognizing what is the situation in front of me which we'll get to in a second. What are my choices right now? What's my first step of action? Choose that, move towards that, be solution oriented, constantly checking with your breathing, calm yourself down, lower your shoulders, body posture. And so I think a lot of these things, we learned the hard way and then we learned there were science behind it and we started bringing that to others, which I think is so important. That's kind of prompted me when you said that, what we did in the academy, it was kind of unique. I got to follow you at the training academy. You were the division chief there and I came in after, which I'll be honest was a little intimidating because I knew how you ran things. But you had started something at the academy. Academy along those lines where you were introducing concepts of visualization and kind of mental aspects of performance for firefighters. And I got to come in and then take that and build on that. But I'm curious what what prompted you to even think that because it was never even talked about in the training Academy experience that we had or the others had. Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I thought about what we do with athletes and how the best athletes have the best mindsets and having been a wrestler and struggled with my mindset tremendously and not realize that everyone else was also struggling but it kind of in a bravado way no one talked about it. And then here we were in the fire service that same kind of bravado where some people were good at it and to be honest I was decent. I was good at it. You know, you knew me in the Academy and everywhere wasn't like I had struggled with performance but I recognized that we wrote a lot of people off because we said there were mentally weak but they were just mentally untrained. So, you know, going into their first fire they have a bag over their head to simulate zero visibility and their tentative and people are like, oh, that person has claustrophobia. No, they don't. They're a human. They can't see. They need to be trained how to develop the skills to calm themselves down and to use other senses. Same when if you remember, you know, we would have firefighters climb 100 foot ladder in the windiest day and then hang from a belt upside down. Yeah, and you're like, couldn't we have taught this on a 24 foot ladder and then gradually increase the risk and the fear response and then teach them how to adapt to each situation along the way until the worst situations they could be common but people at the time weren't. And so that's where you know met Gary Mack and he was a sports psychologist for I think the Seattle Mariners and he wanted to bring and he could bring some of his training and skills to the fire service but I realize this isn't going to resonate with firefighters like it's great storytelling. And so I want I learned how to adapt it to us and then that's kind of what you took over and continue to expand on. Yeah, amazing because basically professional athletes prepare a certain way we're like low paid professional athletes and so the mental aspects performance certainly resonated. So yeah, it was fun to develop that we even developed a course called mental aspects of performance for firefighters. Yeah, I mean it's still started that. It's still fast. I mean, even today athletes are just starting to travel with performance psychologists and it's becoming not taboo to do that it's not a sign of weakness and in business I find every day that many of the executives we coach are still now starting to realize oh my god it's my mindset when I get my mindset right I multiply my impact and that's I think been the bread and butter of what we do a Tigma why it's so important. So what I'd love to do Jeff is I know you were also running emergency since but we also talked about you were teaching others. So let's go through a fire and look at some of the key things that you would do as a fire ground commander as a first responder even to help our members learn kind of a system to how to manage chaos better so take me from a dispatch through maybe to arriving on scene and kind of a couple critical things that you would do. Cool yeah what's interesting about that is that you mentioned the virtual incident commands and are these are things that I'll explain to you that we started to train firefires to do prior to actually doing it for real in the simulated mode but it starts with the dispatch because you get information I talked about that first call where I couldn't even listen to that dispatch I was so. I you know heightened in my level of response so we taught people to pay attention to what they're saying that was the starting point they're going to give you information that will set the tone for what you're responding to and you can start to kind of think in your mind what do what what will anticipate seeing you don't know for sure till you get there you never do. And it's never what you thought but it's close so that was the starting point and then when we get there were taught a critical skill of size up and we call it size up which is basically a very fast deliver consideration of what we call critical fire ground factors so for us there was a series of things I won't go through all of them but there's a things that we consider very quickly. In immediate like we're talking seconds of looking at a structure and deciding what are the most critical elements I have to deal with so once they consider those critical factors that size up led to a strategy based on risk and we would literally declare our strategy is either offensive or defensive but you had to determine that based on the level of risk and how much we were willing to risk as firefighters to save lives and that's our job is to risk our lives to save lives and save property so we established a level of risk. From there we form what's called an instant action plan so that instant action plan is literally how we're going to approach this problem and how structured and the actual skills and procedures and process of we're going to put in place and so you as the arriving first person would literally declare these things describe the incident what you want to done by giving assignments to responding crews and to your own crew. That would play out to the point where now you're in action mode you're putting that plan in place and it changes it's you know we always have fire the fire ground is like organized chaos you know what we're talking about today a little bit and so the key is organized we had a system in place a system that allowed a structure and steps and sequences and I also talked about how we're communicating this we had an order to our communication we actually call it the order model very simple is that I would repeat or I would say what I needed done and I would repeat the order. I needed done and the person who received that and declare it by saying I copied you you want me to do this this and this so it was this repeating back for clarification and to concern make sure we knew it. We would then go through this review and revision process constantly updating the plan and and that's the system that kind of we put in motion even to the point where we had benchmarks and we had to complete and we declared those things and we would ask for reports from companies by giving what's called a can report. Sounds very simple but it was conditions actions and needs I needed them to tell me because I may not see where they are others may not know what conditions they're dealing with what actions are taking and if they have any needs and as the incident commander I would be responsible or whoever the incident commander would hear she would be responsible for getting those needs and addressing those concerns so that was the setup to and then we kind of continue on to you know recovery stuff as well to I'm not sure how far you're going to go on that but yeah. Yeah so let me let me pull to part a little bit because I know for many of our members many of the people we work with when they face chaos there is this always this inclination to jump to action first and what I love that you described was no no no the first unit arriving has to do the size up and I know we had to. You account for the seven sides of the fire you know the front the left side the back the right side the inside above the fire below the fire and you literally on a sheet kept track of what do I know and what do I don't know we did a 360 around the building we always try to get as much information as fast as we could before we committed to action and people don't realize how important that is and then like you mentioned the size up constantly gets. Reviewed and revised because the situation changes and in fact we've both seen horrible firefighter injuries and maybe even deaths where we forgot to do another size up and we were acting upon what we first saw and we didn't update the whole process. But also this communication model you describe where everyone is alerted to what we see so they can say I see something different or even arriving crews that haven't arrived yet or responding crews can say I'm starting to see what you're dealing with now I can start to anticipate what you're probably going to need me to do. And I think that was really important. Totally in fact I remember when we implemented that basically every 10 minutes 10 minutes being kind of a critical thing because we only have so much air on our back you have to read the alarm room would ask the incident commander are you still in the offensive mode and offensive strategy and you would have to repeat yes we are still in the offensive strategy and that was such a queue in your brain and everyone on the fire service knew what that meant and when you switch to. A different strategy you actually sounded an alarm to get everyone's attention is that we are shifting our strategy from offensive to defensive and at that moment everyone had to not only get out of the building but they had to let us all know I am out I've accounted for my crew members and they would give you the numbers you know all four people we call it a personal accountability report a par and so. Maybe we should jump in a little how did you take care of your team members or when you're a battalion chief and deputy chief the crews how did you take care of them to make sure they could do the job safely. Yeah that's a great question well first of all even what you just described right there is if I'm the company officer where like I mentioned I was a captain on a really busy fire truck with lots of crazy calls if I didn't do those things you just described we just described together very well that could put my crew at risk so being competent being skilled and even practicing my trade long before the actual call that's why we do a lot of simulation type training to anticipate what we might encounter. That is one of the most important things that Eisenhower's a commander could do or as a company officer could do is to put my crew in the right positions, to give them the right assignments, to give them the training prior to that call to be competent and skilled. But it also happened to do, I had a lot to do with how we managed the station. So we as a company officer, a captain, even as a battalion chief, we would be responsible for the shifts kind of how it progressed. Making sure we were hydrating, making sure that we won't over doing our on duty training, making sure that we had all done those little morning routines that I made sure that was an important part of our so that we were competently ready. But then even describing that day that I drove in and my beat up truck and said, wow, if I make bad decisions today I could put them at risk. So just an ongoing awareness that my decisions and choices affect my crew and their families. But what's interesting, you talk about throughout the shift, we had this thing called an AOR button which is available on radio, that we on our computer terminal truck, we got to push that and when we push that it meant we're ready for the next call. So for me part of my job was to make sure are we ready? If we just handle the critical medical call, a pediatric drowning or anything that would, I had to sit back and assess the readiness of my crew. If we're leaving a fire ground, do I need to go back and do some recovery, some hydration, some nutrition? My crew's just beat. That was my job to make sure they're ready. So knowing, you know, when do you push the AOR button? When do you actually say I'm available ready in a ready state to do the next? Who knows what it will be? Call. And so that accountability of my crew, that awareness and then building in almost like as a mentor to your crew, this idea that hey guys, take care of yourself. You're wellness. We weren't always great in the fire service about how we exercise and ate and those things. But fortunately for you and me, when we came in, that shifted. And we got to be kind of developers of that new mindset where nutrition is important. What we eat at the station, new sod, dramatic change in what people were eating at the stations and and our focus on, if you get this chance in the afternoon to take a quick, you know, 15, 20-minute power nap or longer, because you don't know when the next calls in the account that you're going to be up all night, that was important to make that okay to do. Almost like to say it's okay to recover. It's okay to get some downtime and that's not only a nice thing, it's a critical thing. Yeah, it's so important. I'd love that you just pointed out a leader's role is not just to run people into fires and then develop a strategy and all that. It's equally as important that you are training them and building their belief, but you're also making sure they recover so that they can go home at the best. I know we used to always say, "My most important job is that every firefighter on my crew goes home as good as they came in in the morning." And that's really hard to do when you're running calls all night and dealing with all the emergencies. I want to ask you a question, Jeff, about complacency. So you, I know you went on a lot of really challenging calls we both did, but you also got a lot of false alarms. Cauls that didn't turn out to be as critical as they sounded at first. Yeah. How did you deal with complacency and whether it was your crews, your crew, yourself? How did you avoid that? It's such an interesting human nature thing, right? With repetition or even with confidence as we do certain things, we get to the point where we say, "I've got this." And we can get casual with it. And you mentioned the fact that those non-emergency or less critical calls, that happened a lot to us with medical calls where we'd go on a difficulty breathing or a fall injury or even a cardio event, which sounds like a big 911 deal to somebody. But for us, it was very, very comfortable. And I'll share a very quick story. This one, I mean, this was a dramatic impact change for me on this idea of complacency is we were dispatched to a pediatric event. It was a three-year-old kid that had supposedly ingested some lighter fluid. What we got there, it was around lunchtime. In fact, we were just sitting down to eat lunch and fork in the hand and didn't get to eat. And we got dispatched as call. So I'm already in the wrong mindset. Dang, I'm hungry. And we get there to this house and it was a three-year-old kid. We got there. The kid was playing around the room, playing with toys, running around, seemed completely normal. And the mom's like, "I'm sorry to call. I don't know what's going on, but I had this lighter fluid on the counter. It was in my child's mouth. It was like an old tube thing or a container. I don't know if he got any of it, but I just thought you guys could check him out. I was immediately Scott in the scale down mode. No big deal. Kids running around is fine. We looked in his mouth. Didn't look like any burns. I brushed it off to the mom. I said, "Hey, you know, if you want, we could take him in, but he looks like he's okay." And long story short, as we, she signed a release, we left, literally pulled into the station before I could even park the truck. The lights came on again to the same address. And that feeling in my gut to this day, I still feel. And it was now a kid with seizing. So we go to this call. I just right back out the front door and this kid we transport him. He's not doing great. He's having a seizure. And we were able to manage him, get him to the hospital and right care, right treatment, everything. But for days, I literally called the hospital. How's the kid doing? He did okay. But what I didn't know is that lighter fluid is toxic to the brain. And I learned so much about complacency and about airing on the side of caution. So from medical calls to not letting your guard down, don't minimize, you know, top my cruisely importance of realizing, hey, we can't, we can't approach these simple situations as if they're simple because we don't know what they're going to be when we get there. And so it was changing the mindset. It was approaching as, you know, let's start with the more severe thing this could be and work our way back from there. And so it was literally a mindset we had to create. Yeah. I also know we implemented near miss training. So we used to ignore near misses because we would say, oh, nothing happened. That was a win. Good job. And then we started to realize, if you really look at the near misses where we could have been in really bad trouble or patient could have been something else. But you didn't assess for that. That you then started to realize, whoa, we're always right on that edge. And that helped us, I think, stay, you know, really alert and to realize, let's not get complacent. I also think that's something we have to role model and remind each other because we see it with people even with their personal readiness. We see them go into meetings and go, that doesn't really matter. I'll just show up. And this idea that, no, your personal readiness might be the game changer here. So I love that story. So this is probably a great chance because you and I will go on forever. And I know this, this will happen. But Joe, I'm going to turn it over to you because I know our members are probably asking some great questions. I'd love to see what you have for us. Yeah, absolutely. Some great questions coming in. Wow. What a story, Jeff. Thanks for sharing that. The first two questions are actually kind of have stuff to do. They're actually about overwhelmed. The first one from Deb says, I'm struck by your reflections on what you do when you're overwhelmed. The cognitive strategies are super helpful. Do you have any ideas for what to do when you need a little more? What about stimulating the vagus nerve? And there's another question that says, have you ever had a situation that just totally overwhelmed you? Wow. Yeah. Well, you want me to take this, Scott? Sure. Yeah. It's interesting. You know, as you get more advanced in your career, you did get very calm. And I would, at those times where you look back at my firefighters who were very seasoned and they would, it's almost like they're asleep all the way until we hit the emergency break on the scene. I hate wake up, okay, let's go. So there's times where, you know, actually doing the opposite of the breathing to calm yourself, say, hey, let's go this. And I can create that urgency with my tone as a company officer. I can say, hey, guys, this is a big deal or this is the information I'm getting on the screen or hey, to one of my firefighters, it's time. Make sure you're ready for this or can you look up our drug profiles on this real quick? Several things to kind of elevate the level of focus and clarity and intentionality that we approach that situation with. So I could literally create that urgency for lack of a better word. But the second part of that question, as soon as you said, Joe, I flashed back to that same station. We got dispatched again, 1 a.m. I don't know why these calls always come at 1 a.m. when we're just getting some sleep and but we got dispatched to a structure fire and actually came in as apartment fires with explosion and victims. So immediately everybody's elevated. We rushed to the truck. We get ready. We actually had a poll at our station, the old fire polls. And so we didn't always use it. We used it on this kind of call. So you're going from 0 to 60. And so we get on the truck and my computer is just blank and blank and which means there's lots of information coming in and it's close. It's literally less than a minute away. I knew that. New the apartment complex. So we pull out of the station. I'm telling my crew. This is big deal. Lots of victims. And it said natural gas explosion. So all the elements that would get your your heart rate up. We pull out of the station and already just looking down the street. I see flames. So I know it's a big fire. I pull up on the scene of this thing. And as I mentioned, I'm a paramedic. So there's that mindset I have to. But now I'm going to be the incident commander and run this thing. There is literally three to four people walking towards the fire truck. Like night of the living dead with skin dripping off of them burned. And I'm now having crews stage waiting for their assignments. I'm giving my crew assignments. We have to fight the fire and deal with the patients. I'm trying to prioritize what we do first. So I'm telling you I was overwhelmed. Literally I'd try to do it. trying to prioritize, trying to keep on top of everything, calm these people down the need help. And that's the one that comes to my mind, Joe, as far as an incident where I had to take that breath. I had to kind of shift my focus and realize, I'm the right person to do this. I can handle this. A little bit of quick self-talk, you know, you got this. And then start making assignments. Start following the system. We have a system for this. There's a process. I can size this up. I can make assignments. And it may seem overwhelming at first, but it's going to be OK. And it was. We also had a firefighter that was burned on that. She got close to the fire. The line wasn't charged yet, which means we get water to it. And there was so much fire and heat. So now I'm getting that information. We have a firefighter who's injured. It was just every element was coupled on top of each other. So that was the one that stands out. And Deb also asked about the Vegas nerve, Joe. So let me jump on that part of it. So for those of you that don't know, the Vegas nerve is part of the autonomic nervous system, which means you don't have to think about it. It happens automatically. And it is the parasympathetic, which is the relaxation, the calming nerve. And this is the side that you want to go to when you want to calm yourself down. And so there are a couple techniques that you can use to get more vagal stimulation. But I would argue the first one is the mindset that Jeff discussed, changing your self-talk, so that you're not in chaos. I'm overwhelmed. But he started to change his inner dialogue to one that he knew he was in control and he had it. The second part of it is, if you have practiced a relaxed state-- this is where meditation and some of the breathing techniques and breathing practices become so important-- if you've practiced that relaxed state, your brain knows where you're trying to go to. So it knows what you're trying to create-- super important. The third part is the type of breathing. When we get alarmed and overwhelmed, we shift to chest and neck breathing. So we use a lot of other muscles that are not calming. And they're very sympathetic or fight or flight related. So shifting your breathing into your abdomen, where you take not only deeper, longer, slower breaths, but a really long, slow exhalation. When we're in a fire, we're wearing a mask. So you can hear and feel your breathing. And you also, by the way, can hear and feel everyone else's breathing. So you know who's not relaxed and you know who's calm. And so that's one of the things that I learned really early is how to shift my breathing into my diaphragm, my abdomen, and to calm myself down. We also did it to conserve air. Which-- because if you're not breathing as hard and as fast, you're not using up all your air, like Jeff shared in his first story. And so those types of things are phenomenal. And then of course, your body language-- dropping your shoulders, telling yourself to relax or calm down, doing that breathing. Even in the heat of the moment, changes your entire mindset and your thinking. So hopefully that answers the question. Yeah, it's got to start just to jump in. What it was really amazing is that's the stuff Scott put into play. That you put into play at the training academy. Those things hadn't been taught to recruits to, hey, even in the training situation, take a deep breath. You're sitting in the truck. You're about to do an evolution for evaluation, which could literally mean you're getting through the academy or not and apply that same breathing technique right now. Visualize how you want this to go. So that was so cool about what you put in the training academy. And what I got to build on both of the academy and the later of the VICC is that idea that we can prepare ourselves physically and mentally to be at our best. That's great. There are two questions here from AB and Ross. Was there ever a point when you were presenting or trying to implement these bold new ideas to improve training? But you're fighting against the old system and ideas. And we're getting rejection after rejection. How did you deal with that? And how long did they take to really get adopted? And how can we make change in our teams if we expect resistance? I'm kind of laughing, Joe, because it was so apparent in the fire service. Everything we just talked about with what Scott started, and I continued the training academy, met with resistance. This is-- we're not training-- we're training firefighters. This tough mentality. We don't need all this soft skill stuff. We don't need to talk about visualization and mental aspects performance. Or even early on, there was resistance with regards to recovery. How important recovery is. Hey, just we're tough, man. We can just keep going. Don't pull me out of the fire. So I cannot think of anything that was transformational that didn't meet resistance. But the good thing about us is we had a great role model. Scott mentioned our fire chief, Alan Berticini Bruno, we call them. We're such a role model for this, that challenge the status quo. It's not-- it's OK to do things better and to learn. So the answer is it was slow in changing. I bought a bunch of books called The Mind Gym, from that Gary Mack that Scott had mentioned. When I left the training academy, after-- I put this whole program or built on what Scott had built, and had this whole amazing component to training academy in place about all these Mind Gym books. 10 years later, I went to the academy. I was in totally different role in the secretary. I said, hey, do you want those books? I'm like, what books? The Mind Gym books. I go, you guys didn't use those? And so it was a constant process of reinforcing what works, showing outcome-based. This works because this change happens. And we see this output and this result. But it's never fast. It's never easy. And I met that tremendously frequently as a fire chief later in my career, too. Yeah, funny story. I had lunch one time with Bruno. And I was complaining about trying to put some of these mental performance training things into the academy and how much resistance I was getting. And as Bruno would do, he would get this huge grin and he had this really thick mustache. So he goes, chief pelton, you want me to show you the marks on my back from all the changes I tried to make. And he pretended like he was going to pull a shirt up. And I started laughing. And he was his way of saying, hey, Scott, just be persistent. Be consistent. Keep explaining. Keep letting people experience it. And change will happen. And I remember being on a call with a young firefighter because like you, Jeff, I always had probationary firefighters on my engine and pulling up on an apartment fire on the second story of an apartment. And he was freaking out. Like, we got to work a fire. We got to work a fire. And I literally, before we even went in, we were the first unit on the scene. Stop, take a breath, and remember, the public called 911 and we're 911. There is no 911, too. We got this, OK? So we're going to go in the door. We're going to make a right. We're going to search for victims. We're going to find the seed of the fire. We're going to knock it down. We're going to be OK. And that guy went on to tell so many other people that story. And he role modeled that for other people. And that was an example of applying the strategies at the moment and letting other people experience it because then they would believe it. And that's kind of what you have to do when you're trying to lead serious change. Bruno had-- I mean, if we don't have time to go into it, he literally transformed the fire service with that type of an attitude, with that type of approach, changing how we view victims to customers. I mean, we can go on and on about what he changed from a safety standpoint. So yeah, it's work. And you set it perfectly. Stay the task. Stay the course. Yeah, that's great. We have another one here from JD. What is the first step I could take to start implementing a similar incident management system in my work? Wow. I would say if you went back to what we started with, well, even making sure you're personally ready. First of all, make sure that person already is component of you being at your best is ready because you never know what you're going to account when you walk in the door. And even not to create paranoia, but to approach your day as you're doing your home to work transition, say, you know what? I don't know what I'm an encounter today, but I'm ready for it. I've got tools, I've got strategies. And then when it comes in, when that dispatch, well, how could better work? It's not a dispatch for you. It's a phone call, whatever. But when that comes in, take that second to size it up. What's the information? What do I know? What do I don't know? What do I need to-- what information do I need to gather? What questions should I ask to get what we call a size up? So in business, it might be for you guys. It might be considering your critical business factors, not fire factors, but what are the critical components? Is it a fiscal thing? Is it a PR thing? Is it a HR thing? Is it whatever? It size that up and consider the critical factors. And from there, even assess the level of risk. Is this something I have to jump on immediately? Or do I have some discretionary time? OK, take a second to process. Or do I need to take action right now? When you have discretionary time, or it's not going to immediately dangerous to life or health, then take that time to continue to process. And then clearly communicate your plan. We talked about this communication model that we use. Where whoever I tell the plan to has to repeat it back to me. I don't know if we do that always in business. We're busy. Hey, I need you to do this. And I go, yeah, I got you. I'm on it. But do we really clarify to make sure that all the details were understood? So I mean, I could keep going down to that process. So the system is so, I guess, transferable to your world where you could then revise your plan, reevaluate what critical things do we need to accomplish, report back. We didn't really get into it. But we also, in the fire service, do what's called the post-incident critique. Where immediately after the fire, we'll start to gather information about how it went. And when you do it fresh, like, hey, tell us what you saw. Tell us what you think. did, what could you do better? There's immediate learnings. We both celebrate what we did well. You know, you don't minimize that. We say, "Nice job on this, but this worked well because you did A/B or C, but we could have done this better if we did DEF and go from there." So again, that process and maybe in your world to make sure you take care of your people, you know, make sure that the system is also about taking care of your people so they can continue to perform better in the midst of it. It's got anything else on that? I took care of it. No, I think it's fantastic. I think that's one of the reasons that we built the simulation that takes people through a fire ground incident and we help them transfer to their emergencies and their emergencies might be things like a production failure or operational disruption or supply chain interruption or HR crisis or PR crisis. So people don't realize they have their version of fires and what we've tried to do is, you know, tap into some of the research that shows that there was actually some interesting research that was done on police officers where they looked at this incredible arousal level, the Cortezone in adrenaline release they had when they put them even through simulations and they showed that as they practiced more and more and more that practice actually reduced their stress response and in business they don't do that, we don't do that at all. So the opportunity to actually practice that and then I'll just throw one last thing Joe and then we'll wrap it up. You know, the state of flow, what, you know, Mihai, Chik Samihai did so much research and I know there's a lot of people who have read his book, Flow. A lot of what Jeff and I have tried to describe is how do you in this high stress situation actually get into his own where you're performing it your best and not even overthinking but actually trusting yourself. And Mihai, Chik Samihai's research said you needed three things. One, you needed challenge greater than the norm. So that means you needed stress to get into this flow state. But number two, you needed the skill capable of dealing with this challenge and that skill came from the practice and the repetition that we got. But for many executives, it's also the skills of personal readiness. And then the third thing you needed was the ability to calm yourself in the moment. And Jeff and I have shared a lot about how to do that and some things that people need to learn and that in itself is a skill to practice something that we we do all the time. So, but I want to thank you Jeff for doing this and for coming in and for sharing your stories of great stories. And I want to let everyone know that our next session is going to be on May 3rd and we're going to be joined by an amazing woman. Her name is Don Jay Frazier and she's going to teach us how to be a better storyteller. It's going to be hard to beat Jeff. I know that because he told us some great stories, but she's going to actually teach us how do you make stories more impactful? And we're going to send to you guys before that event. We're going to actually send you a link to her TED Talk. And then you're going to see her in action. So you'll know like she's not bullshitting you like she's going to show you how to make a story inspiring and and make an impact. It'll probably make you cry. So, thank you everyone for joining us today and I can't wait to see you in the next bold sessions. Thank you Jeff. Thank you Scott. Thank you for listening to the TIGNUM Thoughtcast. If you've enjoyed this or any of our other thoughtcast episodes, please subscribe so you don't miss out on future releases. If you'd like to get in touch with TIGNUM, please email us at [email protected]. Until next time, be bold, be more, and keep ruling your impact.