Frank Leeb and Dena Ali (The First Responder Center for Excellence) - Episode 1044

I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the Behind the Shield podcast that is Transcend. Now for many of you listening, you are probably working the same brutal shifts that I did for 14 years.

Suffering from sleep deprivation, body composition challenges, mental health challenges, libido, hair loss, etc. Now when it comes to the world of hormone replacement and peptide therapy, what I have seen is a shift from doctors telling us that we were within normal limits, which was definitely incorrect all the way to the other way now where men's clinics are popping up left, right and center.

So I myself wanted to find a reputable company that would do an analysis of my physiology and then offer supplementations without ramming, for example, hormone replacement therapy down my throat. Now I came across Transcend because they have an altruistic arm and they were a big reason why the 7X project I was a part of was able to proceed because of their generous donations.

They also have the Transcend foundations where they are actually putting military and first responders through some of their therapies at no cost to the individual. So my own personal journey so far filled in the online form, went to Quest, got blood drawn and a few days later I'm talking to one of their wellness professionals as they guide me through my results and the supplementation that they suggest.

In my case specifically, because I transitioned out the fire service five years ago and been very diligent with my health, my testosterone was actually in a good place. So I went down the peptide route and some other supplements to try and maximize my physiology knowing full well the damage that 14 years of shift work has done. Now I also want to underline because I think this is very important that each of the therapies they offer, they will talk about the pros and cons.

So for example, a lot of first responders in shift work, our testosterone will be low, but sometimes nutrition, exercise and sleep can offset that on its own. So this company is not going to try and push you down a path, especially if it's one that you can't come back from. So whether it's libido, brain fog, inflammation, gut health, performance, sleep, this is definitely one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.

So to learn more, go to transcendcompany.com or listen to episode 808 of the Behind the Shield podcast with founder Ernie Colling. This episode is sponsored by TeamBuildr, yet another company that's doing great things for the first responder community. As a strength and conditioning coach myself, who also trains tactical athletes, dissemination of wellness information is one of the biggest challenges. Now, TeamBuildr is the premier strength and conditioning software for tactical athletes.

And there are several features that really impressed me. Firstly, there is a full exercise library. So you, the personal trainer, does not have to create that within your own department. Secondly, you can send out programming, but also individualize, which I love. So you blanket program for everyone. Now you can tweak based on someone's injury, someone's need to maybe drop some body composition rather than having to write a program for every single person on their own.

TeamBuildr also allows you to build custom questionnaires to collate health and wellness data. It integrates with wearables. And I think one of the most important things is obviously it tracks. To me, it's imperative that we as a profession start tracking our people from day one and then over the full span of their career, therefore catching potential wellness issues and injuries before they happen.

Now if you want to try TeamBuildr, they are offering you, the audience of the Behind the Shield podcast, a free 14 day trial to experience all of the features. And if you want to take a deeper dive into TeamBuildr, listen to episode 1032 with Melissa Mercado or go to teambuildr.com. And I'll spell that to you because it's not as you think. T-E-A-M-B-U-I-L-D-R.com. I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the Behind the Shield podcast and that is Rescue One CBD.

For any of you who have listened to this podcast for the last eight years, you will have heard my own personal journey from using prescription pills after a knee surgery to finding CBD and having incredible success with that. I then saw my son's wheezing diminish, my wife's anxiety and so many more kind of success stories. The problem is though, I've also seen the stigma and misunderstanding about this incredibly powerful plant medicine.

When it comes to workplace drug testing, it's THC that they are looking for. The concentration is higher in marijuana, but there is a small amount in most CBD products. And with John being a veteran firefighter paramedic himself, he was determined to find a product that was pure, that would ensure there was nothing in there that would put someone's career at risk. So he developed a three tier system.

The third party testing facility tests to parts per billion, which is the most minute amount I have ever heard of in all the time I've worked with CBD. The results of every batch are posted on their website so you can literally see the same results that they see from the batch that you are ordering. Secondly, they include workplace drug test kits in the order when you order it. So if you have any fears, you get to do it just to appease it, even though this is a pure and safe product.

Thirdly, they've just finished a year long study with the University of Maryland and Arcadia University and firefighters from all over the country sent in their urine samples and not a single person failed a drug test. So you have three different tiers of trust with this particular product. Now they have different flavors for their CBD. For anyone that's had it that's just the CBD oil, it does not taste good. So they found a way of making it more palatable.

They have a sleep remedy that has terpenes in, again, completely safe. That one's called out of service. And then topical CBD, obviously for aches and pains on the outside. Now on top of all that, Rescue One is offering you, the listener of the Behind the Shield podcast, 15% off your order if you use the code BTS, as in behind the shield. And you can find all of their products.

You can find all of the testing and understand why this truly is a product that you can trust by going to rescue1cbd.com. And you can listen to my conversation with John on episode 1011 of the Behind the Shield podcast. Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome back onto the show, Frank Lieb and Dina Ali. Now Frank and Dina have both been on the show individually.

So this time I brought them on together and we discuss a host of topics. The First Responder Center for Excellence, Firefighter Fitness, Dina's book, Hope Out of Darkness, their Fire Service Mental Wellness and Suicide Prevention Symposium, and so much more. Now, before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment. Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating.

Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find. And this is a free library of well over 1000 episodes now. So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them. With that being said, I welcome back onto the show Frank Lieb and Dina Ali.

Enjoy. Frank and Dina, I want to start by saying firstly, thank you so much for coming on the Behind the Shield podcast. Secondly, because Dina is stranded mid flight at the moment, so she's in Dallas. Have I got that right? Right outside of Dallas at the colony. Beautiful. So the brotherhood and sisterhood I just learned right before we jumped on, you had to sit in Dallas for a while. So Dallas has actually picked you up and you're sitting in one of their stations as we speak. It's awesome.

I missed my flight by two minutes and the next one out was nine hours. So I texted a friend of mine at the colony fire department, Chief Garrett Rice, and he said I'll be there in 20 minutes. Yeah, that to me is why we do what we do because the fire service is a beautiful thing and it is a calling and getting it back on track to that real community element I think is so important. Yeah, initially I was super bummed that I lost the entire day.

And then it just quickly transitioned to what a great experience today has been. I got to see some good friends. Chief Thompson here is nationally known for his work. And so I've got to spend the day here sitting down. We just talked about the project he's working on. So it's amazing. And I think Chief Leib says this a lot, like we're the lucky ones.

And you think about that on a day like today, like who else in the world can end up stranded in a city that they've never been in their life and end up totally taken care of? Absolutely. I actually went to St. Pete. My wife is doing recertification for her optician. She's about to be an optometrist, but she's keeping that up. And so one of my friends had become a St. Pete firefighter not too long ago. The most amazing experience. I felt like I was back in Anaheim. I sat with them for four hours.

We started with lunch and then ended with another like three hours of bullshit and firehouse jokes and it was phenomenal. So yeah. Well Chief, where are we finding you today? We are the lucky ones. So I'm not in Texas, but I do have my Texas coffee mug just for Dina and for the colony and Scott Thompson. Great people in that department. And like how cool is that? Right?

I just, the inclusive hospitality of the fire service that you could be stranded in an airport, make a phone call and somebody comes and picks you up. Like it's, we are truly the lucky ones. Where am I? I'm in cold, snowy New York. I've spent a lot of time in some warm climates recently. So I'm still cold. I'm wearing my sweatshirt. Although I love this sweatshirt. It's my Pacific Northwest Fire Conference sweatshirt that I absolutely love. It instantly became my favorite sweatshirt.

And you think about like all the great conferences around the country. This is certainly one of them. Dina and I both spoke there, but yeah, I'm home for another week or so and then I'll be on the road a little bit, but it's good to be home. Well you're traditionally known for some pretty cold weather, even seasonally. What has been the impact of this polar vortex that we're all seeing? Well, so the impact has been taking a look at what's going on down south.

All the pictures of snow, like they don't know what to do. I'm like, I don't build a snowman. That's what you should do. Enjoy it. You may never see snow in your life again. Seeing snow in New Orleans and Pensacola and on the beach and seeing people shoveling snow in shorts. It's just a couple of snowmen that I've seen, but they're not built for it. Snow's not for the weak, that's for sure.

I've texted a couple of people that to break their chops a little bit, but it'll be gone before they know it. It'll be back to the beach and the sand. But for here, we have a week where we won't see it above 32. I'm able to take my granddaughter who just turned three out snow sledding, which she absolutely loved. So it's all right. It's all good. I was hoping we were going to get some here. I saw the videos of Pensacola.

Even driving to Jiu-Jitsu today, there were cars with giant slabs of snow and ice falling off on the freeway. So it was just north of us. But we had it when my son was really young. It must have been about 15 years ago now in Ocala. We only had enough to make it like a three inch snowman. So I had to give him Q-tip arms just to try and animate him a little bit. But yeah, I haven't seen snow in Florida since. And I was hoping last night it was going to happen, but we were just too far south.

And what's really cool is that some of these areas, they got six to 10 inches of snow. That's plenty of snow. You could build a fort. You could build a snow family. My goodness, with that much snow. So get out and enjoy it. And I see many, many people have. So Heat Miser allowed the south, allowed South Town to get snow. I mean, sharing a clip of that with some people too, with the mayor of South Town singing that it's going to snow in South Town because they got it. I mean, think about it.

It could be another generation before you get that. So stay off the road, stay home, listen to the podcast instead. Absolutely. All right. So for both of you, Dina, you were my guest on episode 77. So I didn't realize it was that long ago. We're talking probably six and a half years ago. And then Frank, it was 708, which is a little bit more recent. So let's start with you. You were FDNY last time we spoke. Talk to me about your transition now.

And I'd love to even hear your personal experience as we know that transition, that kind of loss of tribe, loss of purpose can be jarring for many of our men and women. You've gone into a path that you're still helping this community. So how was that transition for you and what made you even pull the trigger in the first place? Yeah. Well, first off, so you think about Dina was on your podcast six and a half years ago.

You think about how long she's been at this, trying to make a difference and doing what she's been doing and how long you've been at this. So kudos to both of you for the long-term dedication that you've had for firefighters. Because this topic is only finally starting to get some of the traction and the recognition that it needs. So six and a half years ago, the audience that was listening to these topics was unfortunately very small.

And that has changed and in a great part, thanks to both of you. So just hearing that it was six years ago, and I'm very recent on your show, I appreciate what you guys, both of you bring to the table and that long-term knowing that unfortunately it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. We wish it was a sprint, right? Where we could say this is what we should be doing and we would do it and things would be better.

Anyway, so I retired June 27th of last year and I did 31 years, 247 days I think it was, but who's counting? And so before I retired, I actually took the position of the managing director of the First Responder Center for Excellence. His timing is everything. And I'd been working with them for the past just about six years in advisory capacity on their cancer advisory and doing some consultant work for them on occasion.

So it was a natural fit, especially when the current managing director was going to be leaving and then number two was going to be leaving going to the NFFF. So it just, I had the most experience with the First Responder Center for Excellence and then took that position. As far as the transition out of the FDNY, so here's the bottom line, right? So I can live to be 150 years old and I'll never go to enough fires to satisfy my appetite to go to fires. I absolutely love going to fires.

I love being the nozzle firefighter. I love being the force bluntary firefighter. I love being the chief. I love being the first two chief. I love being the interior chief as operations. I love all of that. But firefighting is a young person's job. And I joke around sometimes that eventually you promote yourself out of a good job. But somebody has to, right? Somebody has to continue to promote for the betterment of the organization. And I felt it was my time to do that. And I did it.

And as a staff chief in the FDNY, I also like to say your age in dog years. And you should only do it for a limited amount of time. I always knew at some point I wanted to get out while I was still relatively young and relatively healthy. I probably left a little bit earlier than I was planning on because of some of the political environment in New York City. But I'm not one to really look back. I look forward.

I think that we've done amazing stuff with the First Responder Center for Excellence, before I became the managing director and now as the managing director. And we've brought on some people. We're trying to deepen our bench. And so we have a small bench, but we do have a deep bench. And one of the key acquisitions was to bring on Dina Alley to run our behavioral health programs. And as you pointed out earlier, how much she's already done in that area, it was really a no-brainer.

And coupled that with the fact that I had just read her book, I was very fortunate that she asked me to write the foreword for the book. So I had read the book before it was published, long before it was published. So what reading the book did for me was reinforce that I was choosing the right person to bring on to do this. And I absolutely did bring on the right person. As you pointed out, she's a rock star in what she does. So we're thrilled to have her. And I've brought on some other people.

So the transition has been from leaving the FDNY to the FRCE has really been okay for me because I've been involved. Now at times I'll see a big fire on the news and I'll be like, I would have been at that fire. And then I wish I could go to that, but I could walk into any firehouse and still sit at the kitchen table. You never leave the FDNY. It's ingrained in our culture that our retired members are always welcome, is always seated at the table for us.

And no matter what we do, I'm involved with different organizations within the FDNY. So when it comes to that, it's really all about missing the fires and even the runs with the brothers and sisters as a battalion chief, especially where I loved going out the door with my people and talking to them in between runs or at the kitchen table, just always being engaged and making sure that we were doing all we could to be better. So the transition has been relatively easy.

Do I want to still go to fires? Of course, I'll want to go to fires until I die. But you find different ways to give back and stay involved. I'll never fully retire from the fire service. I just love it too much. And I love the people that serve in our profession too much to ever leave it. I couldn't agree more. That's why I didn't even promote. I loved being first through the door. I think my final fire will probably be in the crematorium, so I'll get one more before I'm completely gone.

All right. Well, then, Dina, let's kind of bring you in. Let's get you up to speed as far as six and a half years to where we are now. We'll talk about the book in a little bit as well, of course. But as far as your career, the impact that you've been able to have on the mental health side, walk us through the last few. Yeah, look back. Amazing to think how much has happened. Six and a half years isn't a long time.

But even talking about your podcast, 900 episodes, it's been a long time in terms of the work that we've been doing, especially with mental health. I remember when we first spoke in 2018, I felt really confident with the work that I was doing and the messaging that I was delivering. But every year since then, I've realized that there's more and that there's more to share.

And a really neat thing about getting to work with Chief Leib at the First Responder Center for Excellence is one of his primary missions is finding people who can translate the research. And back in 2018, I was finding the research and I was so amazed by the research that was out there, yet the fire department was unaware of. So I kind of was able to get my foot in the door by just sharing some of the research that I had found.

But the greatest learning point in the last six years is not only translating the research, but then applying it. How do we introduce it to the field? Because it's really easy for Florida State University to conduct research on the fire service and offer recommendations, but they're not there doing the work. So some of the recommendations aren't really applicable. But yeah, I think when we first talked, I was a newer captain.

Now I'm a newer battalion chief and there's a lot of growth and perspective there. And with Chief Leib, he likes to build people up. So I'll build him back up before I turn it over. One of the coolest things about meeting him and getting to work with him was I was at FDIC just looking over class evaluations and this FDNY chief walks up to me who I would never go talk to because who am I? And he's like, hey, I'm Frank Leib. Are you Dean Alley? I've read some of your work.

I appreciate the work you're doing. And the fact that this guy from the FDNY who is well known and speaking in FDIC, kind of a big deal, is coming up to me telling me that he's read my work. That was huge to me. And I sat in a couple of his classes, read some of his articles and just realized what a good person he is. But one of my favorite things about him is he wasn't that person that was like all in your face, look at me. He was kind of behind the scenes making a difference.

So that's why I asked him to write my forward because I wanted my forward to have like characters to it. I didn't want it just to be, you know, some big name who may not know anything about the subject matter. I wanted it to be somebody that matters, who's also passionate about the subject matter. And at the time, I didn't realize I was interviewing for a job. So that turned out to be really cool. We'll stay with you for a second.

One of the, you know, if you want to get me pissed off about, for example, the shifts, then just say, oh, I need to see the data first. Because I realized two things. Firstly, you're asking, for example, if we're talking 24 72, and I won't dive down that yet, but you're asking me, can you prove that a 56 hour workweek is better than a 42 hour week? We need to go to a lab for that.

But secondly, the absence of a lot of research when it comes to our wellness, there isn't a lot, the least that I saw. So what, you know, when you first took that deep dive, as far as actual pertinent to the fire service, what were you seeing early on? And have you seen a growth? Because if we waited for the research, in my opinion, we'd never fix anything because it's taking so long to actually collate pertinent data. No, 100%.

And before we got on the show, we were sharing about an article that Frank and I just wrote and a class that we're doing based on that. And the premise behind that is actually it's time to rethink our practices. And one of my favorite quotes, and it's kind of a quote when you look at the article is, you know, we're not going to cure this away.

And what we've learned for years and years and years looking at mental health, specifically within the fire service, everybody's looking at the individual and looking at how to get people to ask for help and get treatment and how to cure people. And what we realize is it's not about curing people. It's about communities and, you know, very early in the show, you had Sebastian Younger tried.

And he explained how, you know, these tribalized societies who see violence, who are exposed to violence, who are fighting day in and day out, their mental health is really good. And why is that? What's the difference? And a lot of it has to do with community and our basic level of love and caring for each other. You don't need a research paper to tell you to care about other people. Right.

And so for me, it's almost been full circle, you know, initially for anybody to listen to me, they wanted to know, OK, where's the research behind what I'm saying? What's the evidence that proves that what you're saying can be believed and trusted and implemented? It has to be evidence based. And it's fascinating. Like the full circle is, man, all the stuff that we're doing naturally is the stuff that takes care of us.

It's the stuff that keeps us keeps us healthy, keeps us connected, which gives us that purpose to continue moving forward. Absolutely. I was actually kind of thinking earlier today, imagine if people in Henry VIII times were like, well, I'm not going to grow wheat that way unless you show me studies. You know, for the longest time, there were no studies. We were just doing it and it was passed on and we knew it worked.

And I remember something that you said, actually, all those years ago, and I've brought it up a few times, if we actually really refound community the way it's supposed to be, we wouldn't even need peer support anymore. And I agree because we are peer support. That is what it actually is. It is a station full of people that give a shit about each other.

And that same brotherhood and sisterhood you're experiencing now sitting in another department station in the middle of the country is what we need to hang on to and refine because this, you know, whether it's on a national scale or within a department, this divisiveness and this breakdown of communication through cell phones and all the other factors that I'm sure will kind of extrapolate, this is the enemy to mental health, you know, without even mentioning sleep deprivation.

Completely and one of the messages that I've been spreading more lately is I would love to put peer support out of business. Peer support was a beautiful idea, and the beginning of my research, every solution surrounded social support and the need for community and the value of community. And continuously, that was the solution.

And peer support was even more effective because you were looking at people who had similar experiences, and those people could actually help, you know, show a path for others struggling. But what I've seen since then is that every department has implemented peer support.

We found the experts, we've certified them, we've given them certifications, and now what's happening is when somebody shows up at their firehouse and they're going through a divorce or, you know, they've had a major loss and they come in and they're struggling, nobody feels that they should be able to talk to them unless they have that certification. So now we've drawn a line between people and the support that was always inherent in our profession.

So one of the things I always say now is I would love to put peer support, you know, formalized peer support out of business because this is what we all need to be doing. What we teach in the two-day class is nothing specialized. You're not certified. We give you a certificate of attendance because everybody needs a certificate to upload to Target Solutions. But it's not a certification.

It is literally learning active listening, learning about resources and helping to connect people to those resources. Absolutely. Well, Frank, let's turn it over to you. So what were you seeing? Why did this article need to be written? Yeah, so first, I want to comment on a couple of things. I'm like, I'm writing these things down because I'm like, I don't want to forget it. But you guys were talking about that we need research, right? We need all this to be done.

So research is important to get funding. But it reminds me of the old Nextel commercial like a generation ago where it was what if firefighters ruled the world? And the guy gets he's up there and he says, he says, all right, so this is and he shows like a stack of like three feet of paper. This is a lot of paper to see decide if we want clean water. Who wants clean water? Everybody goes, I so done. And he's like, this is easy, you know, as he goes through all these different things.

And so I think about a study that was done on on on gear washing a couple of years ago. And it was the study was that I think it was in Boston, that if you have a gear washer in quarters, you're more likely to wash your gear. Duh, like isn't like isn't that of course, if I have a washing machine at home, I'm more likely to wash my clothes today rather than wait for it to pile up and go to the laundromat. I mean, I just you know, just like the and you mentioned it, you started it.

So I'm going to I'm going to chime in on this. The 40 hour work week or the 56 hour work week or whatever variation in between. Where did the 56 hour work week come from? And the FDA, why we do a 40 hour work week, you can't. Why would we want a 56 hour work week? We should be aiming for closer to a 40 hour work week. Just like everybody else. When we think about recruitment, young young kids today, they don't want to work 40 hours in somewhere necessarily. You think now they want to work 56.

What is that impact of that extra night tour do? And you know, the only way I can think about how do we come up with a 56 hour work week is that I know departments that if you don't go out after midnight, they don't pay you for the eight hours from midnight to 8 a.m., which is crazy. Right. But so you think about that. That's three night tours, eight, eight and eight. Do the math that went from a 40 hour work week to a 56 hour work week. How is that acceptable?

How do we allow our pay to be based on a 56 hour work week or any variation above a 40 hour work week? When we think about sleep deprivation, all these things that we know are impacting us. So we're looking at all of these different work schedules. But I haven't seen too many people looking at working a schedule that is 40 hours a work week. And I couldn't imagine a work week in the FDNY would be as busy as we are.

And I'm not even talking about fires, as busy as we are going out the door all day long and all night long. You know, why would we allow our profession to continue to go down a road that we know from research now and there's more research being done on this now. We know that that's not the optimal way to get sleep. That's not optimal way that we should be doing things. So I just had to get that out there because you because you commented on it. Impreciations of the choir and I love it.

I think it's something that we have to talk about. And as far as peer support, what Dina said, I love it. It's right on. We're all we're all peer support. So this idea of we need special people that are going to get the training. We all should know what are the things that we should be doing for peer support to make sure we're taking care of our brothers and sisters. Like what are the 10 commandments of being a peer support person? Right. What what that means?

What does the firefighter who comes in on day one need to know? And or that five year firefighter who what is that firefighter have to know to make sure they're taking care of that brand new person when they start on day one and the first call they get isn't a working fire. It's a car accident and somebody somebody dies at that car accident. And for this 23 year old firefighter, that brand new firefighter, it's the first time they've ever been exposed to death, that type of stress in their life.

And we go back to the firehouse. And for most of us, we go on. We've learned to cope. We've learned to deal with it in different ways, some productive, some unproductive. But how does we may sit at the kitchen table and have our own dark humor that what are we doing to that firefighter? We have to make sure that we preload this firefighter with the knowledge that they need to know while they're in probably school, while they're new.

But we also have to make sure that our middle of the road firefighters, those other fight have have the training that they're able to be that first peer support person for that individual along those lines. We have to extend it to their loved ones as well. Our loved ones need to have education on because they had a first first responder for us when we go home. So two things on that that you hit.

So first of all, with the peer support, our North Carolina peer support program, one of the things that we open with is a quote from Brene Brown. And it says, when you attach judgment to receiving help, you knowingly or unknowingly attached judgment to giving help. So basically, in order to be really good at peer support, you have to understand that you're no better than the person who needs peer support. At some point, we all need help and we all need to reach out.

And if you're unwilling to reach out, you're always going to attach judgment to reaching out. And one of the greatest inhibitors to peer support is judging others. And what's fascinating to me about that is a lot of people who want the certifications and who want to certify are less likely to be people who will admit that they need help. And that's why ensuring that we're all peer supporters is so important.

But then what's super fascinating about all of that and the conversation that we just had about the research, you want evidence based research to enact peer support and to have a clinician. Yet, we now have all this evidence based research that tells us if that's asleep, why aren't we utilizing that to make policy changes? Why are we requiring the research to implement important resources?

But when we have the research that says sleep disruption causes poor decision making, is causal of cancer, can lead to PTSD, we disregard that research. And that's what's always been fascinating to me is how we pick and choose the research that we use. Absolutely, well, I want to go back to Frank on something that you talked about.

I don't hear a lot of conversation, it's not blaming the Northeast, but I don't hear the conversation of the inequity within the fire service and where I'll use Anaheim an example, which is my favorite fire department, they were phenomenal. We mirrored a lot of stuff on the FDNY, we use some of your hose loads, we use obviously the California roof ops, but people are always looking to Boston, to New York for so many areas, but not the work week.

So why is there resistance to that conversation exactly what you were just telling us, yet everyone's fine with all the kind of operational stuff from the FDNY? That's a good question, and I think to whether it's the work schedule, or whether it's any other really wicked problem that we don't have the answer, we don't know the best way to solve the problem. But I have seen some departments that have at least tried to add an additional shift.

They've done some things that they can to try and combat and try and make a difference in some of these areas, but it's a wicked problem, right? Figuring that out the pathway forward, because that costs money to go to a lesser hour work week. Yeah, well what we're seeing in a lot of departments is their money is there. It's just downstream. I was just Googling this quote because I love it. I'm actually going to write a piece on it.

Desmond Tutu once said, there comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in. This is the thing. If you look downstream financially, most departments are bleeding millions and millions and millions of dollars in overtime, in lack of recruitment. They're training these young people, and then they go work somewhere else two, three years later.

So with the money thing, this is what drives me crazy is not all, but most departments, the money is there. It's just being mismanaged. So it's just reinvesting into their people, creating that D shift, and then that in turn is going to attract young people back into the profession. And then the recruitment will go back to how Dina and I found it, which is trying forever and competing against thousands of people to just get a handful of spots. That's what the fire service should look like.

Yeah. And I think that's a great point. And Dina has that quote in her book. She uses that often, that whole engineering solutions is a big part of her mantra. If I've heard her say that quote once, I've heard her say it 50 times. And I now use that quote as well. But I think, so the money's there, right?

And moving it upstream would require effort, and it would require probably in the first couple of years, extra money, because it would also, training, injuries, careers cut short, all of that will have downstream payback. But Ben Franklin was right. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In fact, an ounce of prevention is probably worth many pounds of cure. But the ability to shift that funding upstream would mean temporarily spending more money upstream to get to that point.

And I think that's what makes this a wicked challenge and a wicked problem for people to overcome. But we're overworking our people. There's not many departments that are saying that they're fully staffed, that they have enough people where their people don't have to work a crazy amount of extra hours on top of a 56-hour work week. That's newsflash, that is not a recruiting tool. Come work for us, and you can work 80 hours a week. That doesn't work. And I'll always remember, I had a firefighter.

So because of several reasons, there was a lot of reasons, we were really behind on our hiring in the FDNY. And I had a firefighter come up to me and they're like, Chief, if I continue to work overtime, my wife is going to leave me. How can you help me? And I'm like, we have to help that member. How do we not? We're not doing our job. We're not doing our job as leaders, as caring people. There's so many levels.

And you know, but if you have a zero tolerance policy where you have to work no matter what, then those people, when you think about the culture, when you think about what they think about the organization, well, it's going to suffer. The morale is going to suffer. Because we want our people, if they're married and they have a healthy marriage, we want it to continue that way. And when you're not home, the added stress on that is enormous.

I'll never forget when I had a firefighter and took me on a side and told me that. And we just, we got to find a way to do better with that and make it where there is a work-life balance when members want it. There's always going to be people who want to work. Well, they're great. Let them work. But there's people that know that they're working too much and it starts to impact negatively other aspects of their life. Dina, you had something to add? I completely agree.

And we're seeing that in every single aspect. For example, we know Generation Z, this new generation, they value work-life balance. And we see that. We see the retention is difficult and a big piece of that is work-life balance. Today, at my job, very few of the firefighters put in to work overtime. It's all the captains that are putting in for it. So they don't want to work extra hours.

And it's really unfortunate that we do have tremendous research that talks about the fact that more hours do lead to more disability, more injuries, and here's the cost of this. And fewer hours will actually save in that sense. And the research on illness and cancer is undeniable, especially related to short sleep.

So to me, it seems like an absolute no-brainer to consider a 24-72, especially I know in my job about three years ago in North Carolina, every department started hiring laterals because we were struggling with both recruiting and retention. So people were looking for laterals and they were giving bonuses and lots of people came. But then within a year, they all left.

And it tells me that if we do something drastically different and take that risk 24-72, you can only imagine the recruitment that would provide. And then when you realize the benefits it has for health and maybe longevity, the effect that that will have. So it's just a few things that I've considered.

Yeah. I think another area where I hear crickets and it's very disappointing is all the hot guys and I'm talking about sexy and talking about hands-on training guys that are out there doing their VES and the full sport entry and FDIC. Because if you really want to forge a high-performing firefighter, then they need a high level of fitness and rest and recovery, just like an athlete does.

So again, even if we're not talking about what I would argue is extremely important, the health of the firefighter and the health of their marriage and the health of their children, then if you really are a salty, mustachioed, leather helmet wearing fire god, where is the conversation about creating an environment that forges elite performance?

Because if you haven't slept for 48, 72 hours and now you're making entry on a primary search and you can't even think straight, that is a huge detriment and you might be the one that burned up and that kid dies as well. So I think no matter which way you look at it, even on that thing, which is I have to subscribe to that. I went to all the conferences, I took all the classes. I wanted to be that person going through the window and looking for that kid.

But if you're going to really, really fight for that, just like your favorite athlete, you've got to fight to be a tactical athlete, which includes the rest and recovery that allows you to get into that flow state when you're 100 feet in the air on aerial or third story primary search. Yeah, and I just saw a video that Dr. Walker posted on his Instagram yesterday.

It was based on research of NBA basketball players and he shared the effects of more sleep on performance and it hit every aspect from field goal percentage to minutes played. But then what was fascinating was the reduction in fouls. So you saw how performance went up, but also the little things that I think when you consider the fire service, some of the mistakes we make on the job, because when you think of a foul, it's either short temper or a mistake.

Well, on the job, we do those things and they have severe consequences. So I know we haven't been able to apply that research to the decision making on the fire ground, but it's so cut and dry, the effects of increased sleep on performance and behavior that it just seems like such a no brainer.

And it's so unfortunate how difficult it is because I'll be honest, I know you've been fighting and arguing for that 24 72 and we've been trying to improve our schedules, but I know that in my department right now, it's almost impossible to do that. So now it's trying to look for that next best alternative, which I think we can agree there's truly no next best alternative.

And it's sad that we're looking at that because you see a lot of people sharing the 48 96 as being the holy grail alternative, but that's or 48 96, but that really, I mean, as a 48 hours in a row, is that really an optimal schedule? And we know absolutely not. Yeah. Well, I won't jump into that, but the study that people use to say that it was better if you actually listen to the episode where I had Joel, Dr. Joel Billings in, you'll discover why that doesn't apply to 99% of the fire service.

So so yeah, well, Frank, let's get to you. I mean, you were at the rock. You were in charge of training. So talk to me about sleep, rest and recovery and a high performing firefighter. Yeah, we would we would make that a priority. In our internal magazine, WMIF, I even I wrote an article about sleep to kind of make sure that it was out there for our members to understand. Because in my career, you know, it was never about sleep. It was all about, you know, staying up.

If I was up a whole 24, that's OK. You know, I'd get a tactical nap when I could. But I didn't mind. I would have I would have coffee all day and night. I didn't understand the half life of caffeine. I wonder why I do lay down at three in the morning and I can't sleep. I realize that's because I had coffee three hours ago and I had way too much coffee than I then I should have had.

But it's it's educating the firefighters on on some of the basics of that, right, that that we are better when we are rested. And you know, that's that is a mind shift, a cultural shift for many organizations, including the FDNY, because we are so busy going out the door so often that I'd be like, you know what? Why even try and sleep? I would just stay up when I'd study for a promotional exam.

You know, I would I would start studying sometimes at 11 o'clock at night, knowing that I'm going to have a medical run sometime in the next two hours. So I might as well just stay up. I would finish my 24. I'd go home. I'd be exhausted. I feel like I'm drunk driving home from from lack of sleep.

But, you know, I didn't know any better and educating our young firefighters on that is something that we tried to try to do at the fire academy by putting it in with other putting it in with other training. You mentioned the hands on training and different conferences. We see we see more of it being introduced far more today than ever before.

There's a lot of proactive instructors now out there that when they're going over stuff at the beginning, they talk about that before they get into the hands on evolution. And then during a recap, sometimes they're doing that. We see different conferences that have programs that are on sleep. Everything that the FRCE does just about what we do a program, we incorporate the importance of sleep into it. But we know that that's a gap. Right.

And that's why that's one that's one of the things that that we take on with the FRCE is taking the research. There's so much great research out there that, you know, how do we how do we translate that and apply it and change the culture so we know that, hey, you know, I want to be brilliant at the basics. Right. We have to be because that's going to keep us alive.

But part of that is incorporating all these blindside issues, sleep and all this other stuff that's going to make us even more effective, efficient, efficient. And the byproduct of all of that is safer. You know, we track and you have to know why we track how many runs that you've had and how many hours you're into your tour when you get injured. And, you know, so we know the deeper into a tour, you know, the more injuries, the less sleep you have, you know, the injuries go up like that.

That's not really a surprise. Right. I mean, if you if you haven't slept in 24 hours in my career, it's only been a couple of times after September 11. There was some times that we had to work more than 24 hours. I hated it because I was just I was already tired. I wanted to go home and then you have to work and you know, your decision making suffers from that. So but it's it's really incorporating all of that into what we're doing.

Podcasts like this, the training at the FLC is doing bringing a greater awareness to our to our firefighters. But as you point out, that awareness has to go to the instructors. And I think they are. I think the conferences that Dean is going to some of the conferences that I get invited to, they are incorporating that in.

And by having someone like Dina come and speak about all of these different topics shows you that the people that are running these conferences get it because five years ago, Dino wasn't as in demand because this topic was really not talked about. So now, you know, she's in demand, that's why she's stuck in Texas today, you know, because if she's off, she's traveling and trying to spread the good word.

Absolutely. Well, I want to go back to the kind of research thing just for a moment and then talk about the paper. So while we're talking about the bodies downstream, we just had a local firefighter, I'll keep it anonymous, but someone, you know, department close to me that just took their own life, you know, young firefighter, and I know that particular one, the family supposedly didn't want it advertised what happened.

And so when I see the reported deaths in our profession, knowing especially that the moment you retire, you cease to become a statistic in this profession, I would argue it's a fraction of how many people we actually lose in each of these categories, especially suicide and overdose. So Dina, with you first, talk to me about the research and then have you kind of dive into that a little bit more? You know, what is that really just the tip of the iceberg?

Because to me, as far as you know, common sense, it seems like it is, but what are you finding on the data side? Completely, but we have to be careful not to say it's the tip of the iceberg, the rates are much higher for us when the truth of the matter is this is impacting all populations, not just first responders. You know, we see the statistic a lot that firefighters and other first responders are three times more likely to die by suicide than in the line of duty.

And we use that so alarmingly that, wow, we claim that we have a, you know, an unsafe profession, but we're dying at our hands three times more. But the truth of the matter is that's normal for most populations and most career fields. The suicide rate in the United States right now is 14 per hundred thousand. That is up by 37% since 2000. The line of duty death rate in the United States is three per hundred thousand. And if you're a professional firefighter, it's below that.

So it only makes sense that our suicide rates are much higher, but not because we're first responders. It's because it is truly a public health crisis. And I think we know that's the case for both suicide and, you know, overdoses, substance use disorder. Chief Lieb and I were just at a conference in Florida that specifically surrounded the overdose crisis and just trying to reduce that by 50%. Unfortunately, and I think it goes back to community and connection.

What we talked about is today we are far more isolated in so many areas and so many, I mean, aspects of life. And you know, we think the relationships we have on social media are strong and sustaining. And now we're starting to understand just how damaging those social media relationships are, especially if you aren't truly a part of a community.

If you can't truly be in environments where you don't have to modulate who you are, where you can be authentic and you can, you know, talk about your struggles far before their crisis. Something I was thinking about a minute ago when we were talking and, you know, talking about upstream and downstream and transitioning is you've done such incredible work and you've brought so many different aspects to health and wellness. I mean, you've had several different sleep researchers now.

You've had so many different people talk about their traumas, previous military. It was really cool to hear that you had like Ryan Muncie on all these different aspects.

And yet, despite all of that and what we know, I think a lot of times we still so much our focus on getting individuals in crisis to ask for help when it is truly time to transition away from that and really put such a greater focus on not just sleep, but all the other areas that we're uncovering or we're peeling the onion away that we know are impacting us. And some of them are controversial. Frank and I have talked about a few of them.

When we talk in Nashville, we're going to talk about upstream. We're going to talk about, you know, improving systems, prevention by design. And you know, there's three main components that will hit on. One of them is, of course, pre-planning the crisis. So now we have this greater awareness. We know it's the tip of the iceberg. We know that, yes, suicide is, you know, not a high probable event, but it is possible. And we're hearing about it every day.

So with that knowledge and Dr. Craig Bryan has really turned some of the research upside down, whereas two years ago, every single professional was speaking about the relationship between mental health and suicide and that if you fix mental health, you'll reduce suicide and 90% of suicides are results of mental health. That's the messaging that's been continuously shared and believed and I've shared it and it's been cited by me several times.

But newer research is out now that is saying the mental health is about 50%. They're finding that there's almost 50% of suicides from people who had no diagnosis of mental health disorder at the time of their death. And a lot of it had to do with a sudden crisis, a major loss. You know, it could be something at job, like you get fired from your job and you take your life the next day. Is that a mental health disorder or is that stress? Is stress a mental health disorder?

And a lot of people would argue that it's not. But the point of that is understanding that we have to pre-plan our crisis and unfortunately small things, and this is the controversial piece of it, is our easy access to handguns make suicides much more easier. So with that knowledge, how do we create barriers between ourselves and handguns? That's one piece of it. The other piece of it is pre-planning through creating a crisis card.

You know, just knowing, hey, when I find myself in crisis, when I find myself reaching for that handgun, let me list three different people that I can call. Let me list three pleasurable activities I can engage in. Let me learn a mindfulness activity ahead of this. Let me make sure I have the number of the crisis line written down, 988. And then lastly, a beautiful piece out of the research that we're looking at is this concept of tipping points.

And historically, a lot of the discussion that I had and a lot of the research that I had basically said that suicide was absolutely not impulsive. There was nothing impulsive about suicide, but now some of the more recent research is finding that there are suicides that between the decision to die and death is 10 minutes. And so with that, there's this tipping point where one thing, one negative attitude, one negative look, one dismissal, one rude comment could push somebody towards death.

Whereas the opposite is true, a little bit of positivity, one smile, somebody reaching out, somebody expressing belief could push somebody towards life. And so we're really looking at that tipping point and trying to understand that for me, the big responsibility that I try to express now, especially since I'm a battalion chief and I find myself as a more formal leader, I recognize I have more responsibility not just for the job, but for the people.

And creating that environment where people feel valued, feel like they belong, and hopefully keeping them away from that tipping point that can push them towards death. I don't know if that made any sense the way I just expressed those three concepts. Yeah, no, it did. And I don't think it's controversial, realizing that the access to weapons is part of the conversation, because that's what's always cited when it comes to law enforcement. Your death is strapped to your hip.

So how do you be cognizant of that? And I think when I think of the contributing factors now, I don't know why this just popped into my head, but those kind of Indiana Jones style movies where they've got the metal piece and it fits perfectly in the stone and then they turn it and all these pieces come together, that is what I've learned over a thousand plus episodes is it's not one thing.

So if you are, the straw is full on the back of the camel, then that one breakup with that girlfriend or that one job could be it, but then the conversely, how many people lose a job and like, oh well, that job sucked anyway. You know what I mean? So it's understanding all of these pieces and the unaddressed childhood trauma, the side effects of drugs. I think a big thing that's not discussed is the impact of alcohol on actually completing suicide.

And I've always used the kind of tongue in cheek analogy. There are women that I spent the night with, I woke up the next morning going, what have I done? No disrespect to any of these young ladies, but it was alcohol that blurred my judgment. So you got someone in crisis and you add in Jim Beam. Now all of a sudden that kind of hand that's pushing you away that wants you to live has kind of dissolved.

So I think this is this nuance conversation that we need to have about suicide because I mean, as I've underlined many times on here, having heard so many stories of crisis, when someone's brain is miswired, they believe that they are the problem and that their family will be better off if they're gone, which makes their version of suicide, their truth at that moment, selfless, courageous, and they're probably terrified when they do it

instead of cowardice and all those things that we talk about. So getting the person before that brain becomes miswired is a huge part of the conversation. But if we add shame and guilt to the mental health conversation, you just freaking plunge the last nail in the coffin. Completely. And I think you just hit on it and Frank mentioned it earlier, the concept of a wicked problem. And I never heard of that before and didn't know what it is, but now I do.

And it's important to talk about wicked problems in the sense of suicide. So wicked problem is a problem where there's multiple avenues to the outcome and then there's multiple solutions, but there's never one solution and there's never one pathway to the outcome. So just like you mentioned, for some people adverse childhood experiences impact them. For others, that has nothing to do with it. They had great childhoods.

However, maybe it's that socially prescribed perfectionism and the environment that they're in and that could be some trauma exposure added to that. But we know suicide is a complex problem and there's never just one algorithm. There's in fact, tons of researchers were trying to find the algorithm and they've been looking for the algorithm and there is no algorithm to predict a suicide. It is not possible today to predict a suicide.

So with that and with understanding that, that's where the idea of understanding, okay, what can we do community wise to just make it harder to die by suicide? And like you just said, and I love what you said, even though I maybe don't, but you wake up the next morning and you're like, oh my gosh, what did I do? I would never do this again. I regret this. Well, they found the same for people who attempted suicides and survived.

People who had very lethal suicide attempts, the people who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, which less than 3% survived. But out of that small percentage that survived, nearly all of them said it was an instant regret. And time and time again, in the research of people who've made near lethal suicide attempts, that is what told them that no, they never wanted to die. That death wasn't what they wanted. They wanted to stop their pain. But the idea that it was an instant regret.

So with our knowledge of that, and then in fact, that of those people, 90% went on to never die by suicide down the road. So if we can create environments that make it harder to die, we can save lives, especially knowing that the goal is never to die. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Frank, anything to add on that?

And then your perspective as well, being in this profession a lot longer than the two of us, as far as what the old school perspective was, and then what you're seeing through the FDNY lens as far as the magnitude of this problem. Well, listen, you're hearing, just listening to Dina, right? That's why I brought her on. I mean, just let it go. All the things that she's saying, the wicked problems, right?

I was talking to a police officer in St. Petersburg, which is where we were teaching the class that she referred to. And one of the problems, right, if you say you have even remotely a problem where you're thinking about committing, you're thinking about suicide, that now you're on administrative duty. They take away, like your career has been altered significantly. So, you talk about a wicked problem, right? So we have to end that stigma somehow. And I know that's like a cliche.

We say that all the time, but like, it's a wicked problem in doing that. And it's one of the things that we're hoping to do. It's why with the FRCE, the First Responder Center for Excellence, Dina mentioned it. We're having an event in Nashville, March 19th, 20th, and 21st, starting out with an opening reception at the Country Music Hall of Fame on Wednesday night as an icebreaker event, followed by an incredible lineup on Thursday and Friday. I'll let her speak about that.

But I want to finally answer one of your questions. You keep giving me questions, and then I'm like a politician. I answer totally different questions. And I appreciate you not hammering me on that. So in the FDNY, our counseling unit does a fantastic job on what they do, but we still don't prevent suicides, right? I mean, we haven't gotten it down to zero, right?

And Dina made the point that we're really a microcosm of society, and there's so many societal issues as well, not just within our profession. Some of the other stuff, poor leadership that Dina also talks about, I do a class. I have a half-day class that I do on soft skill leadership, which is really how to treat people. And when I first started teaching that, and I've been teaching it for a while, I didn't have any of this in it. And I have totally rewritten it and putting some of this in.

I'm going to be doing this program in the next week at a fire department. And I've added some of the new stuff that the FRCE has, some of our new whiteboard videos. I've added some of the stuff about poor leadership. There's so many different things that it's not just the calls, as I think is the name of Dina's class that she does on this, her keynote and her class, which are both fantastic.

So with the FDNY, one of the things when I was the chief of safety, and I wasn't the chief of safety for very long, a little over a year, our safety week, the topic that we did was suicide awareness. Because I understand the importance of it, because I had a firefighter that I was very good friends with take his own life, and nobody saw it coming. I didn't see it coming, and if anybody should have saw it coming, it would have been me.

And through that experience and through talking to Dina and talking to Frank Leto, who was in our counseling unit, now Drew Kane in the FDNY runs it, does a great job. I've learned that sometimes we don't see that there aren't signs, right? But the ways that we can do better is important.

And the reaction that we got from doing our safety week, so the safety command goes out to the firehouses and gives the presentation to the brothers and sisters, and they go out to the EMS command, was so overwhelmingly positive. Because as you mentioned earlier, James, we don't always know. Families don't want to know the stigma. We don't always know when suicide was the cause of death.

And that makes it a challenge as well, because then people say, well, we don't have a problem, because they don't know, right? You know, the idea of a medical condition or whatever other reason, maybe you never hear anything. And, you know, how do we change that, right? We have to certainly, you know, the families will, you know, we have to, you know, be respectful to that. But we have to change it, and education and knowing when somebody does, you know, is, I think is helpful.

We touched on teaching leadership. This is another thing that I've been trying to, you know, call out a little bit more this year just because when you give X amount of information, like, you know, all three of us have on the school, basically, and that there's an acknowledgement of information and disregarding when there's a recruitment crisis, when they're burying their own, that is where I start going, okay, well, then the only thing that's left now is courage.

And this is why you have the bugles on your jacket, is this is how you earn your very large pay scale versus a firefighter, is you're paid to lead, you're paid to problem solve, you're paid to find that money for that new shift and speak to your city or county and say this is how it's going to save us a huge amount of money and reopen fire stations and put the fourth person back on the rig. That is your job.

And where I see another elephant in the room as far as mental health is toxic leadership, you know, organizational betrayal. So let's expand on that a little bit more, you know, how do we get the good, not just leaders, not bosses, but good human beings in these positions that will actually have a fire in their belly to fight for the wellness of their people because we all can name good leaders.

But as time goes on, and I don't think I'm in an echo chamber, I feel like there's, there's a larger gap between, you know, as many great leaders that will, you know, basically have a knockdown drag out fight to protect their men and women. And I agree with you. And I totally went not in an echo chamber, which means there's hope, which means that we can find a way forward. You know, leadership matters. You know, when in command, command, be the boss.

That's why you're put there to lead, you know. And I used to think leadership didn't matter. As a young firefighter, I was like, the firefighters run the firehouse. And I was largely right. But every once in a while, that invisible hand needs to guide. But there's times even on a fire ground, right? The chiefs can't just sit there and be a spectator at the fire. There's times when they have to make decisive actions and decisions. Sometimes the firefighters won't like that.

That's okay, because they ultimately are the ones that are responsible for the outcome of that fire. And if somebody gets seriously injured or loses their life, you know, people are going to look to the fire chief and to see what they did. What was their strategy to combat that fire? Were they just a spectator or did they actively partake in the command? And that is so important. And we need to train our leaders in all of these other blindside issues. That's what I call all these issues.

If we're not forcing a door, if we're not stretching a hose line, right, cancer, PTSD, sleep, these are all blindside issues. Our schedule, hearing loss, there's so many things. These are the blindside issues of the fire service. Our leadership has to be educated on that and has to take action on that. And you know, I would hold my firefighters accountable for the policies and procedures. Well, like that's a two-way street.

Like our leadership could be held accountable as well to make sure that they're doing what they need to do. And I think that's vitally important, right? Don't just do as I say, right? Do as I say, but also do as I do. Lead by example, but make sure that we're looking at all those things. But leadership doesn't always know. So we have to educate them.

And listen, I've learned a lot listening to podcasts and listening to Dina and reading her book and all these other things on issues that were more of a blindside for me than I realized. But so the superpower is not knowing what you know and knowing you don't know what you don't know, right? And I make it my business to make sure that I'm interested and I'm aware of those topics.

And I think that's the beauty of the event that we're going to have in Nashville is I've had people say, well, why should I attend that? My department doesn't have a suicide issue or we're not in mental health crisis. Because you want to be educated on the issues that may become a problem or issues that you're not aware of. So I sit in on classes. I try and sit in on classes that I don't know anything about and with brand new instructors.

Like when I go to FDIC, I will pick classes that I have no knowledge on or very little knowledge on. And I will purposely pick instructors that I don't know who they are and sit in on a class. Because otherwise, I could have a huge blind spot and not even be aware of it. So that superpower is not knowing what you don't know. So going and hearing from different speakers on topics that you may not be comfortable talking about, you certainly may not know a lot about, is the power of it.

That's why you attend these events. That's why you go to the icebreaker beforehand and meet the people and talk to the people. Because then when you have a question, the beauty of it is when these speakers are there and the people, they're all willing to share their knowledge and information. And you get that by attending these types of events. So I think I answered the question. You did.

Yeah, just to put in, because I know Dini wants to talk as well, but just to reply to that, there was that, well, it's never happened here mentality in the last place I worked. And the guy who ended up murdering all those people in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, he went to Disney Springs where I was, that was my station. That's where we protect and is on camera with a stroller full of weapons. And there was too many kind of sheriff's deputies. It was shift change.

And so they've got him getting back in his car and going up to the club. So that was a near miss. And they still were like, well, still nothing's happened. Let's do nothing. And to me, it's like, well, yeah, if you haven't had that happen, learn from a Valde, learn from Parkland, even though some of the guys responded amazingly in Parkland, certainly the SRO, for example, did not. And so do you want to prepare now before it happens?

And it can be an acute event like a shooting or the mental health crisis. Or do you want to wait until you start burying your people and then go, oh, yeah, maybe we should actually change something. And I think a real leader in the corporate space, for example, let's take cyber threats. They pay people a lot of money to come up with every single scenario that someone could attack their business and fix it before it happens. I think that we're reactive in the fire service by nature.

And that is what we do. And that somehow gets carried over into the leadership model rather than being proactive and saying, all right, well, you know, for example, this work week, this recruitment crisis, this is not heading in a good place. I don't want to tell my town that we don't have a fire department anymore. Maybe we should fix this ahead of time, even though maybe you haven't lost anyone in your department. But I think that's very rare. Many of us have lost numerous, numerous people.

And God bless you if you've never, I mean, and hopefully you never do. But for you to not be prepared, for you to not prepare for the possible, whether it's something that can happen on a fire ground or whether it's something that can happen to your members, you're negligent in your duties as a leader. So I know Dina has a lot to talk about on this topic. A lot to say. So let me mute here. Now, I won't tie up too much time, but I appreciate the question because I think it's so important.

When I first started researching first responders suicide, that was my niche. That's what I was working on, is first responders suicide. And my focus was primarily on individuals and ways to prevent suicide and ways for people to recognize when they're struggling and things that they can do. But the more I researched it, the more I talked to people, the more I read on the subject, the more I started to realize that suicide for first responders had very little to do with the calls.

Going back to Tribe, he explained in that book that less than 10% of our military cease combat yet over 50% are claiming disability for PTSD. So what's going on? And then another eye opener from that book was from World War II to the Vietnam War, casualties decreased significantly, but disability increased. And then from the Vietnam War to today's war, same thing, casualties decreased significantly, but disability increased substantially.

So there's obviously what we've been putting the blame on, the trauma, what we see isn't quite the answer. And so for me, over the years, what I found was most fascinating is I was fortunate enough to get out, take classes, hear people speak, get book recommendations. And the book recommendations that impacted my knowledge today have nothing to do with fire service. And in fact, they're not specifically leadership books.

For example, three or actually four books that are just absolutely instrumental in my thought process today is Simon Sinek's Leaders Eat Last, The Culture Code, Legacy, and then Adam Grant's Think Again. And all four of these books hit on one big overriding theme and that's psychological safety.

And what's so fascinating is when you start to learn about psychological safety and you really, really get into the science of it and understanding that as humans, we're all just big organisms and we're constantly sinking homeostasis and we achieve homeostasis when we feel safe. And when we feel safe, we achieve homeostasis and that's when we're able to grow, we're able to think, we're more resilient, we're able to collaborate, we're able to push harder, fight harder, do everything that we want.

However, in order to be safe, you can't be alone. It happens in community. And then on top of that, especially within the work environment, we're seeking safety greatest from the people we answer to, from our leaders, the people who hold our livelihoods into our hands. And so all these books, I know I'm speaking a little bit high level, like untangible, but all these things become really simplified.

And what I loved about the culture code is he opened up the book by explaining culture comes from the Latin word cultus, which means to care. It's all about caring. The book Legacy is basically just a book about the New Zealand all blacks and why they're such a high performing team. And basically, they explained that they don't hire for talent, they hire for character. And again, it goes back to caring.

One of the concepts, well, two of the concepts I like, one of them is no dickheads, no dickheads allowed. And then the second one is sweep the sheds. It doesn't matter if you're the team captain or the newest guy, you sweep the sheds. And it's about community building and relationships.

And so as I continue to read all this stuff and start understanding this stuff, I remember I remember the first EFO class I brought up and we talked about psychological safety and somebody stood up and said, well, you can't do that in the fire service where, you know, it's autocratic, this and that. And it was dismissed. But then you look at NASA. And now looking back to Challenger and Columbia disasters, the thing that was attributed to it wasn't just the normalization of deviance.

It was a persistent lack of psychological safety, the inability to speak up and say, I don't know, or, hey, I think there's a problem because everybody was in self preservation and nobody wanted to have their head chopped off for speaking up. But just to really simplify it in terms of mental health.

And that's what I loved about the book Leaders Eat Last is Simon Sinek just basically explained that when you go to work and you're in an environment where you feel like every move is being watched, if you say the wrong thing, you're going to have your head chopped off. If you make a mistake, you're going to be scrutinized and remembered long term. And you have a slow steady drip of cortisol in that environment that is continuous.

And that erodes everything within you that leads to restoration, growth and ability to recover. And we know what that cortisol does. I liked Simon Sinek when he talked about working with SEAL Team 6 and how they select their people and he did a graph and there was I think it was like education and operational experience and then there was trustworthiness. And that was what it was. It wasn't the best person on paper. It was the person they could trust the most. And I think this is an issue.

Like I was just talking to a firefighter friend of mine who was about to be the chief of a Florida fire department and he had the audacity to have a stroke and was completely disregarded by, discarded, excuse me, by his department. And imagine mentally what that did to him. He loved his department. He was an incredible firefighter. He was literally penciled in to be the next chief and then everything was just cut from under him. And so this is what I hear over and over again.

Police officers that were shot wearing their uniform on duty and then discarded. And so this lack of forging community and again fighting for your people and doing the right thing and I can name many leaders who do. There are some great ones out there that have been on the show. But the impact that that has. We are a tribal species as Sebastian talks about.

When we wear the FDNY patch or Anaheim or North Carolina, wherever it is, you have basically said I will die for that man or woman to the left or right of me and for the people that we serve if it comes to it. And so then to have that tribe turn their back on you, if you look at it anthropomol, look at it in old times, I can't say that word, the anthropology of it, that meant death.

If we were in a primitive tribe and we were ostracized, we were left out and we were probably not going to be able to catch anything to eat and we'd starve to death or freeze to death or whatever it was. That's still in our DNA as well. So when we give ourselves to a tribe, that tribe owes it to us to take care of us. And if you are that toxic leader, I don't think people realize the immense detrimental effect that has when you turn your back or you betray. That's the word I'm looking for.

You betray the very people who have said they'll serve you. No, completely. And I've known my whole career when you enter the fire service from day one, they want to know if they can trust you. And now as I've progressed, we hire new people and we give them these little tests to see if we can trust them. We look to see if they catch something or if they miss something cleaning and we let them know you have to earn our trust.

And what was really fascinating for me as I've been just getting just so immersed in the research revolving leadership and psychological safety and creating environments where people thrive is that if you want to gain trust and you want an organization where trust exists, it doesn't start with a new person. It starts at the top.

And everything that I've learned and everything that we want people to model, Chief DeGrasse in 2018 when he keynoted at FDIC, that was really like for me, it was earth shattering because he basically said, leaders have to model the behaviors we expect from our people. If we want our people to say, I need help, it starts with us admitting that we might need help or admitting that at some point we needed help. It starts with the leaders.

And from that point forward, that wasn't just mental health. Dan Shaw talks about AARs right at a tailboard debriefing. And he says, if it doesn't start with the IC saying what they missed, frankly he said once, what they wish they had seen, the decision they would have made if they would have known this. If they don't start with the mistakes they made and then talk about the good, then you won't ever get the people to do the same thing.

And how else do we learn and grow than being able to admit, hey, you know what, this is something that I wish I would have completed that 360 because I would have saw that we had a basement. And because I didn't do that, I missed it. And I let you guys operate above a fire and could have ended your lives. That's a mistake I made and I'll never make it again. I will always do a 360. And just by being able to admit that mistake, you've now created a mental model for everybody on scene.

But again, I'm so glad you brought the leadership because every positive thing that we want out of this service of ours, it has to start with our leadership. Our leadership has to create environments where people thrive. And it's beautiful now that we know just the value of caring. It's okay to care about our people. Brene Brown in one of her books talks about how in 1943, the original Air Force manual had all these expressions of love and caring.

However, today leadership manuals are so sterilized that they don't mention caring and loving. You almost have to convince leaders it's okay to love your people. That's not going to have you in HR. You can actually care about your people. And so now we're kind of like moving back again, just like peer support, we're moving back to what we've always naturally done. And again, it just starts at leaders being able to model that and demonstrate it so that others know it's okay.

Sorry, that was a soapbox. You're in the home and soapbox right now. So Frank, what about you? Anything to add to that? Yeah, I think it's show your people you love them and care for them by having standards and holding them accountable. And it's, as Dina said, it's not going to get you in HR. There's different types of love. But it's really about caring for your people and doing the right thing by them. And the golden rule. Caring people how you want to be treated.

When it comes to some of the programs with the FRCE, we have some online programs, a stress first aid that will help. We're working on some other programs that Dina is helping make. And we're going to actually roll them out. The first module is going to be rolled out in Nashville. And we hope to create a bunch of modules. And these are all on the FRCE's website. And we have online training. It's no cost. And so if you're listening to this before March, show up in Nashville.

If you listen to this after March, show up online and do the online training. But I would like Dina to speak about some of the because she handpicked several of the people that are going to be speaking there. And I know several of them have appeared on your podcast as well. So I'd like to have Dina speak about some of those instructors. I know she wants to do that. So that would be good. Please. No, awesome. Thank you.

And yeah, I was just smiling because it just dawned on me that I think every single person that's presenting has been on your podcast, almost every single person. And so there's been two really cool things that have happened since the last time I was on with you, James, is you and I have become really good friends. And I fed you a lot of guests that you brought on, which has always been so cool to listen to the podcast and be like, hey, I connected them.

And then Chief Lead kind of gave me he empowered me to help create the agenda for this Nashville Symposium. And basically what I did was I pulled every person who is rethinking mental health and suicide because one of the things that I realized was the main problem was a lot of the people who first got involved with first responder mental health, they found the thing that they were passionate about and they didn't rethink.

And what we've learned consistently over and over again is that we haven't always been doing the right thing. And it's OK to say, you know what, I said we should do this, but now we shouldn't. So I look for, OK, who are the people who are brave enough to stand on this stage and say, when I said this, I was wrong or this article I wrote was completely wrong? Because that's what's happening today. The research is just boom, boom, boom. And we're realizing everything's changing.

So all the people whose work I've been reading and researching who have been on your episodes, these are the people that I reached out to. And I was so fortunate. I think everybody that I reached out to is available, which is super cool. The problem was Chief Lead later informed me we only had a day and a half. So I couldn't bring everybody that I wanted to bring, which is sad. But I think there'll be future opportunities and it's only going to get better.

So we're going to open up the keynote with Dr. Thomas Joyner, who, for me, when I first started researching this subject, every bit of fire service research came from his lab at FSU. He took on this and did tremendous work for us. And his father died by suicide. So the beauty of him is he's researching it. He's working with researchers. But he also has this personal story that he shares.

And one of the things that I always appreciated was he talked about when his dad died by suicide, how people treated him and how he realized that if his dad would have died by cancer, people would have bought casseroles and showed support. But when his dad died by suicide, people treated them like they had a disease that was contagious. And the lack of compassion truly impacted him negatively. So he's been committed since 2005 to bringing compassion to suicide.

And he always says, he's not looking to find individuals and prevent suicides. He's looking to stop suicide. Suicide is the enemy, not the people who die by suicide. So he'll be that opening keynote on day one. On day two, Dr. Sally Spencer Thomas, she's going to be keynoting. And you've had her on and she's amazing. She's brilliant. I first heard her, I think the three of us sat down with her at the Rosecrans Florian Symposium. And that keynote she did there just inspired me.

After that, she shared some of her slides with me with all the notes and a lot of people don't do that. So that told me she's here for the right reasons. She lost her brother to suicide, but she also speaks so compassionately. And one of the things she does is she gives you tools that you can take tomorrow and start using. So her keynote is going to be moving away from awareness to action. So I'm absolutely excited about her keynote. And then you've had Brandon Drymon on.

He's going to talk about, okay, you've had a suicide, what's next? I think that's an area that we're really struggling. The messaging that we're delivering after a suicide isn't always consistent and isn't always helpful. Chief Dan DeGrasse is going to be on. Substance use disorders and addictions have been something that's that are really personal for him.

And one of the things that we know is how difficult it is when you see somebody struggling with substance use disorder or you see somebody struggling in certain areas and you know that they need help. And you know the things that they can do to help them, but they're unwilling to do those things. And for family members and loved ones, it's so difficult. So he has a newer class. It's called the art of intervention. And I'm really excited about that.

And then Dr. Sarah Jenke and Captain Frank Lito are going to team up and they're going to talk about basically words matter. And it'll go back to that tipping point and safe communication and how we're communicating about the problem. Dr. Kelly O'Dare, the Second Alarm Project out of your state. And she, she has really emerged to become just one of my heroes.

When you do this work and you engage with people who have PhDs or certifications, I know for me a lot of times it's been difficult because academic people will look at me and be like, well, who are you? People need to be listening to me because I'm academic. But from day one, Kelly has always been one of the most humble, gracious people who, despite her expertise and her level of education and the company she runs, she'd never tell you that to your face.

When you talk to her, she looks at you as if you are the expert. She always just lifts people up, but she's absolutely brilliant. And she's going to speak on something that I think is so incredibly important. We've talked so much about the value of cultural competency. And I know on your show, you've brought it up a lot, Dustin Hawkins in his episode, he talked about reaching EAP and the girl on the other end started crying. He's asking for help and the person he's talking to is crying.

So we've done a really good job with cultural competency, with getting clinicians, training them on our work, and then ensuring first responders are reaching out to culturally competent clinicians. However, now what we're realizing is in your area, you might have three culturally competent clinicians. They're not going to be able to help every first responder.

But then another piece of the puzzle that we know is the relationship between the individual and the clinician is far more important than the clinician's ability to do their job. So Kelly's going to talk about cultural competency, but she's also going to talk about moving beyond it to that relationship and ways that we can address not having enough culturally competent clinicians. So that's absolutely exciting. And then we'll be closing out day one with Ryan Muncie.

And I'm super excited about him. He's a coach. He's not in the fire service. He's not a research nerd. But if you've read his book, you understand how much he has learned about psychological safety. And he talks about polyvagal theory. We talked about earlier in the podcast, the value of rest and recovery for optimizing performance. And so he talks about how we optimize performance through extending rest and recovery and then some of the science behind that. So we're going to let him close.

And we basically, you know, we said four o'clock to when you're done. So I'm super thrilled about that. And then day two, Chief Lieb and I will close where we'll talk about systems thinking and maybe rethinking and being able to admit, you know, knowing what you don't know. And then Frank, do you want to hit on some of the additional speakers like Iowa and whatnot? Well, our new partnership with thank you, Dina, for that.

The new partnership with the University of Iowa and University of Pittsburgh. And then we'll be rolling out without giving away too many details. We'll be rolling out our new online modules. So sign up. Maybe we could put those in the go to the FRCE website and you'll see a link to that and also a link to our online online training. And I also sent those to James, if you're able to put those in the show notes. Absolutely. It's yeah, it'll be good. It'll be a good day. I tell you what.

So not only the quantity of your guests, but the quality of them to have so many nodes from what we're looking to do with our symposium. You know, how many of these are direct connections back to you? And it's it's pretty cool. I didn't realize it was all of them. I knew it was a lot of them.

But you know, that tells me I have a couple of episodes, a couple more episodes I need to to listen to, because I've listened to several of them of the speakers that I know were on here, but I didn't listen. I didn't listen to all of them. So I have some work to do now. Well, I think Dr. Joyner, I think we went back and forth and I've got a wrist circle around with him, I think next month.

And then Kelly, I just met her and it was funny because she seemed really quiet and I was talking to her husband, but she lost her voice. That's why she wasn't saying anything. So we spoke over the phone not too long ago. She is part of the research they're doing on Gainesville fire rescue. So they've done baseline testing pre 2472. And now they're going to be doing they're still kind of working through staffing, but they'll be fully staffed in April. So they're actually going to come on.

She's going to come on talk about second alarm, but also about that research. So I think it will be the first time anyone's heard any data for you people that love that word on the before and after, even though of course we fucking know what's going to happen, it's going to be better. Let's be honest. But if you like statistics, we'll have it for you. So yeah, so I can't wait to talk to her.

And then that way we can appease some of the squeaky wheels out there and remove their final excuse of inertia. All right. I can't wait. That's going to be a really good episode. She like I said, she's brilliant in so many aspects. Absolutely. Well, yeah, I look forward to hearing that episode for sure. Well, Dean, I want to go to your book. But just before we do this, keep Frank on a little bit longer.

When people hear the center of excellence, they're thinking about the IFF wellness facility in the very northeast corner of the country, which I think is great that we have a facility. I think maybe there's a potential for more than one in the profession that has a million firefighters. So that's just my thought on that. But we're moving forward. The first responder center for excellence is who you guys are working with.

So let's kind of explain to everyone listening the difference between the two. They coexist, of course, but so that they understand the training and the resources that you're offering versus the one they're probably most familiar with. Yeah. Thank you for pointing out the difference. So I look at the first responder center for excellence, which is firstrespondencecenter.org. Our mission is to put the National Fallen Firefighter Foundation out of business.

They honor our fallen members and they do a fantastic job. They get to meet your family after you die in the line of duty. And I joke around with the CEO, Victor Stagnaro and Gary Kersbaum, the two guys at the top of their organization that they know I say that, right? Our job is to put them out of business. And that's through education, research, being involved. We are the connection to the researchers. And by offering these programs, oftentimes they're free.

Other times, you know, an in-person training, we have different ways that you could have us come in and do training. And that's all available on our website. But it's about preventing these preventable deaths, right? And there's whether it's cardiac, whether it's cancer, whether it's suicide, whether it's PTSD, all these different things. Like I mentioned earlier, the blindside issues. And that's what we're here for. That's why I took this position, because this matters to me.

And I think, you know, listen, I love talking tactics and strategy as much as the next person. And I can talk about that all day long. But these are the issues that are really, really, really, really impacting our brothers and sisters. And we can really move the needle far in these issues. And but you know what? You want to talk about ventilation-limited fires? You want to talk about fires in strip malls? You want to talk about fires in high-rise? I'm all in. I'll talk about it.

You want to talk about leadership? I'm all in. But where we make the greatest impact right now is talking about these issues, which is why I'm passionate building the team. And as I said, have Dina and Zamzow and Tim Graves from running some of our cancer programs and all the other people that we have doing stuff for us as we build our team of teams.

While we're on the physical health for a moment, because obviously, firstly, there's a complete correlation between physical health and mental health. We know that. One of the real, I guess, jarring things that's become apparent recently is when I speak to the Navy SEALs, the SAS, the power rescue guys, the ocean lifeguards, especially the military side, their whole environment is designed for them to perform at the optimal level.

When I look at the strength and conditioning nutrition conversations in the fire service, and this may not be the case in FDNY, but certainly most of the country, it's, well, let's just get them moving a little bit. Let's try and teach them to not have so many sodas. And we are so far from forging human performance that it's terrifying. Because for example, that same Disney station that I used to work at, the closest building to me was a 28-story hotel.

So if I had to do a high-rise trip with 100 pounds of gear on my back, I'm climbing 28 floors before I even go to work. So this isn't a profession where it's okay to be completely deconditioned. And then in my opinion, you shouldn't have the response of, oh, you're trying to take my job when you put in the demand for fitness and strength conditioning in this profession. Now, to me, it's a win-win because that obviously forges longevity and a healthy retirement as well.

But what is your perspective knowing the impact of obesity and hypertension and all these things on the other line of duty deaths and having been in charge of the training division in the FDNY where when we see the videos, there's a lot of very, very fit, conditioned young men and women at the rock. On that slipping bar, that slipping standard of fitness in a profession that demands a high-level athleticism where lives truly are at stake. Yeah, and that's a great question and I appreciate that.

So we know like for our new pro-bees, our new firefighters, our recruits, we know that their fitness score, we give them a fitness score when they start. That is the greatest predictor of whether they'll pass or fail pro-bees school. More than anything else, that is the number one indicator. So we offer all different classes for them to come in to teach them about fitness months before they start. Some of them take us up on it, some of them don't.

It's about starting them off with a career-long educational process of learning physical fitness, nutrition, all of these different things and implementing them and putting them into our, not only with our recruits, but also when people come to the fire academy, they can stop by our fitness unit, they can give them tips.

If you get out of shape for some reason, the FDNY will put you on light duty, modified duty and you'll be assigned to the fitness unit and they'll instruct you and help you get back into shape.

And we saw that with their first Respondent Center for Excellence and part of a program we just recently concluded with Skidmore College and part of the fresh initiative that they had, we have a 40-day recruit program that's now offered for free on the First Respondent Center for Excellence online program. And we only rolled that out in late December and I already know fire chiefs that have assigned that to the recruits that are coming in.

And I know other people that have used it as a New Year's resolution to get in better shape. They might be mid-career and they say, you know what, I want to do better. So you're 100% right. We have to focus and make sure because the number one and one A, one and two, right, of line of duty deaths in the fire service are cardiac and cancer. And those are preventable. So many of those are preventable. And we need to focus our efforts there.

And that is one of the programs that we have available now. Again, it's no cost. Sign up for it and take the 40-day challenge and do the fitness class. Aaron Zamzao is the host on that. And if you don't know, I'm sure everybody knows Aaron. It seems like nowadays he's on the most recent cover of Crackle Magazine. If you don't, take a look at that. But yeah, it's a really good program and 40 days. Take the challenge.

But assign it to your recruits that are coming on and start them off with their day one with the fitness and nutrition information that they should have. Absolutely. All right. Well, Dina, let's go to you. I want to get the title right. Hope out of the darkness. Because as you mentioned on the podcast I heard recently, there are a lot of play and words between darkness and light and the whole mental health first responder book collection.

So talk to me about what made you write the book and then give people an overview of what they can find. Thank you. And thanks for the opportunity. So I think you might appreciate this. You had Josh Matts on years ago and his story in his book changed my life, changed my perspective. I will read that book once a year for the rest of my life to go back to that. But based on his book, The Beauty of a Darker Soul, the original title was Finding Light in the Darkness. And it was based on that.

But when I went online, there were already a lot of books with that title. So I didn't want to have a similar title. So Hope out of Darkness became the title. And I'm very happy with that because what we know is hope is an antidote to suicide. But the beauty of hope is hope isn't solving every problem and achieving your best life at the top. Hope is just taking one step forward.

And the beauty of that is when you understand the people who survive the worst disasters are the people who can just put one foot in front of the other, small steps. And it's the same thing for mental wellness and mental health. It's not about fixing every single problem today. It's about taking a step forward. And even back to what you all were just talking about with fitness, I think we know the people who lose 40 pounds in a month a year later gain it all back.

But when you make long term changes one foot in front of the other, that's sustainable change. So hope and there's actually a whole chapter about hope in here and how you develop hope because it's a cognitive process. Hope comes from having belief and having persistence and just taking those steps. So that's the title of the book. It's broken down into three parts.

And so one of the main reasons I wanted to write this book was we started teaching our peer support class and I started becoming more known in terms of peer support and a lot of other people were reaching out basically wanting me to tell them how to peer support. But the problem with that is it's so complex. And like we mentioned earlier, it's not about teaching people the right answers and how to fix people.

It's truly about being there for others, knowing how to sit in the dark with somebody else, knowing how to have empathy and maybe express your understanding of their pain and not just try to take their pain away. So peer support is just far too complex for me to reply to an email and tell somebody how to create peer support.

So I got really fatigued because the problem was when somebody reaches out, they generally reach out after they've had somebody die by suicide or after they face some big crisis. They don't reach out when everything's going great. Nobody cares about this until they have to care about this. And I shouldn't say that way because there are a lot of people who care, but the people that were reaching out to me, it always seemed like it was, we just had a suicide and we have to fix this right now.

I need you to send me everything you know so I can fix everything. So I got really fatigued because I couldn't compassionately tell them no. Because I was constantly trying to share all that I could and I said, man, if I could just put this all in a book and when people reach out, just give them the link to my book. So that was the initial goal. And I also knew from the articles, I started writing articles in 2016 and for me, I never felt like I was a very good speaker.

I never felt like I could express my thoughts well verbally, but I knew that I could put them down to paper. So I really loved being able to put something down to paper and put it out there and help other people. So I started writing articles in 2016 and out of the blue, I just sat down and put them all together and outline and that was a hundred pages. And I said, wow, I've pretty much got a good start to this book. So I sent the manuscript in and got approval to write the book.

And from there, it became, okay, what do I want to share? And it became really fun because when I wrote articles, they were just too high level. I think I was writing, I was trying to, I was trying to sound too collegiate.

I was trying to put out, you know, peer reviewed literature and I kept always wanting to have cited sources and you know, nobody could discredit anything, but writing the book, I transitioned to storytelling a little bit within, but also talking about those better practices and the things that I felt were just falling short within the fire service. So part one is just an overview of mental health and suicide.

And it's not what people expect, you know, tell me those signs and symptoms and warning signs it's, Hey, we've got to know what we don't know and understand that suicide extends beyond finding people at risk and creating environments where people can seek help. But I also talked in the first part of the book about trauma, what it really is, little trauma, big trauma, adverse childhood experiences, conversation on bullying and harassment.

A lot of the research that we find points to, you know, the effects of bullying and harassment and how it can lead to suicide. And I think I thought that was a very important chapter to talk about because it's something that we don't always talk about. One of my favorite chapters was the chapter on emotions because like so many other people, I was raised to believe that there are good emotions and bad emotions and if you have bad emotions, you have to learn how to control and suppress them.

But I've now learned and understood or understand that emotions are signs and symptoms and there are no good and bad emotions. If you are angry, there's a reason for that. And if you could try to understand why you're angry, you could probably resolve the anger. So I really enjoyed the chapter on emotions and basically explaining that emotions are just signals. They're telling us that we have to prepare for something and we can make a change.

So part two of the book was basically kind of followed the idea from Ryan Muncie, how he, you know, wanted to talk about polyvagal theory and increasing heart rate variability. And he explained throughout his book and his work that when you increase heart rate variability, you increase resilience. So the entire part two of the book is how to increase resilience, how to increase our heart rate variability.

And it opens up with a stress bucket model and understanding that there are many ways to empty our stress buckets and you just have to pick what works for you. Of course, the more things you do, the more stress you can release, but it doesn't have to be yoga for first responders. It doesn't have to be running. You can pick what works for you and then slowly add other things to it.

So part two goes into everything from play to gratitude to relationships to journaling, humor, everything that we can do to just empty our stress buckets. And then part three is that consultation guide. I took our two day peer support class and I basically wrote it out. And then I added parts that I thought were important that, you know, aren't necessarily in our two day class. For example, there's motivational interviewing, there's postvention. So you had a suicide, what's next?

There's a whole chapter on facility dogs and how they're being implemented. Probably one of my favorite chapters in the third part is the chapter on potentially traumatic events because I included a basically a step by step. And whereas we generally will have a traumatic event or a potentially traumatic event and we call an outside team, it starts with get to know your people, find out what they need.

Maybe it's a phone call home, maybe it's a hot shower, sit down and talk and express the emotions and help your crew. You don't have to call an outsider right away. And the beauty of that chapter is Scott Robinson, who leads the IAFF with behavioral health and is just probably one of the most brilliant subject matter experts in behavioral health. He responded to the station nightclub fire and he shared his story. And in that chapter is his story.

And one of the things I appreciated about it is he talked about the difference from the sterile CISM team that showed up versus when he got back to the firehouse, the guy who wasn't a trained peer supporter, but actually, you know, it was like, hey, what can I do for you? Like, how can I help you? And the impact that had, because I think that to me just gives everybody the courage to know that it doesn't matter if you've had this formal training, just show up for people.

So that's pretty much the book in a nutshell. I hope that everybody can get something out of it. It's one of those books you don't start from the beginning and read to the end. You pick the chapters that are of value to you. I'm going to read that out. Frank just said, Dina, I've read the whole book and the time you took to explain it. All right. Well, I want to throw one more question at both of you before we wrap up. And I think it's in the title of your book.

And I think this is what I've seen now, this constant evolution. Like I looked at the Dark Side project that I started eight years ago as a Facebook page. And I said about having PTSD. I don't have PTSD. I didn't. But at the time, that's what the phrase was of anyone that had been affected by the job. And so we've evolved. Now we understand moral injury and all these other nuances.

But where I feel that we've a lot of people have got caught, I say like caught the trouser like on his stigma when you smash the stigma, we need to be able to talk. Call me, bro, if you're struggling. Where I feel like the value is, is the hope of post-traumatic growth. And I know the word resilience and you talked about this and I think it was a responder resilience podcast has come back to me now because they you had that awkward moment.

We realize you were questioning the very word that was in their title. But but I think that the two point O version of people that I've heard so often that have found their own unique toolbox and work through it. And again, it's still a roller coaster, but a much less acute roller coaster. That is exciting to be a beacon of hope for other people to now really use your struggles as strength. I mean, it truly is resilience. If you look at it that way, where it's a growth, I think that is exciting.

That is inspiring. That is like, oh, this is worth the work. You know, I can maybe kind of repair some of the damage that I did at home, whatever it was. So talk to me about hope when it comes to people kind of understanding that there is a better version of a self different. As you point out, we you know, I'm a different person than I was when I, you know, before I entered the fire service. And that will never change the things I've seen.

And you know, the impact on my body from the shifts and all the things. But here we are sitting at 50 years old and I'm talking to you incredible people. And you know, come out the other end and able to do this. I didn't, you know, end my own life at that point. And I think that is exciting. That's what really needs to be talked about. So Dina, because your mic is off, is on still. Let's start with you. The hope in the person on the other side of the work. Absolutely. Great question.

One of my little slogans a lot of people don't quite understand is hope is a function of struggle. You don't learn hope without having struggle and through struggle you learn hope. And when you implement what you've learned, that's how you come on the other side better and stronger. And we know from anybody who's experienced tremendous trauma, those are generally the people who, you know, have the most hope because they've seen that they can get through it.

But also, you know, I've always for years, it's amazing that you run into people and you can almost tell that somebody's been through something because of the kindness that they show or because of their appreciation and their love for life. And we know studying, you know, prisoners of war, it's amazing. Years later, they say that was fundamental in creating the people they are today was that experience. It's not these experiences that break us. These experiences truly do give us perspective.

However, we do and that's where the whole, you know, polyvagal theory and the idea of upstream comes in because, yeah, you can be broken by a bad call or traumatic experience if you're not prepared, if you don't have the resources to cope from it. But with those resources and the ability to talk about it and the ability to process it, you do come out on the other side.

And that was one of the reasons that Joshua Mence's book was so powerful to me because he mentioned that the trauma he experienced when he got shot and almost died was a red herring. That was a scapegoat. His struggles, his adversity had nothing to do with being shot. It had to do with everything that happened in life before then and then relationships. But it took him having the courage to be honest about his struggles for him to heal from them and move forward.

And I think one of the problems we're facing today is we've destigmatized having adverse reactions to bad calls. We've destigmatized what we see. I think one of the things that you would always show or you would always say, you know, if my eyes could forget. Yeah, I wish my mind could forget what my eyes have seen, which is a quote from Byrne. Yes, yes.

But a lot of us have, you know, we're seeing, and Sebastian Younger says it, we're searching our memories for that traumatic call or that traumatic event that has messed us up when maybe that's not it and we just have to be patient and have the time to try to understand what's truly impacting us. And that's why that's one of the reasons why I'm not the biggest fan of the word resilience and its true definition, because resilience is just bouncing back. It's recovering your original form.

I wish there was another word. And the closest word right now is anti-fragile. But a lot of people struggle with that word because it sounds callous. But anti-fragile is basically taking tools so that you don't shatter under pressure, so that you can withstand, not to be callous, but to be able to grow and move forward and take the adversity and the struggles to be stronger. And since Frank could probably read his entire book and the time that I took to explain that, I'll let him.

Well, Frank, we talked about Dina's book. So let's talk about yours and then answer that question as well. I like the word resilience. So now I got to come up with a new word. I think it's exciting, right? The work that we're doing is building resilience and even if it is just bouncing back, right? So both mentally, physically, I think that's important that we have so many people not only pulling in the same direction, but also pulling on the same rope, which I think is so important.

And it's so hopeful for the future of what we're doing. So I think it's been a great conversation. So I have two books. I have Cornerstones of Leadership, which has been out a little over a year now. And then I have 35, as you must know, which is more recently out. That's about 35 that you must know. And it's co-written with Billy Goldfeder. Both of the books have done really well. It's been really humbling on how well they've both been doing. And they're both available on Amazon.

Or if you see me speaking somewhere, I typically have them as does Nina. And one's on leadership and one's on fires that you need to know about. So it's again, humbling the support that each of them has gotten. There'll be another 35, as you must know, at some point, because the feedback that we've gotten, the messages I've gotten from people saying, hey, you've got to look at this fire. And fires I've known nothing about, people have got to my attention.

So there'll definitely be another addition. Will that be called 35 as slightly less important that you should probably know as well? Yeah, or just 30 more fires you must know. Because they're all important. That's part of the problem. They're not part of the problem, but they're all important because every firefighter, especially the ones that resulted in the line of duty injury or death, they're really important because we lost somebody.

Yeah. Was it yesterday or the day before that was the anniversary? Chief DiBernardo, his son and the other gentleman on Black Sunday Fire, which I know you don't like calling it the Black Sunday Fire and there was two that day as well. Yeah, there are two fires. And each claimed the lives of firefighters, one in the Bronx and one in Brooklyn. And the generational impact that those fires have had, and knowing several of the survivors and knowing I knew Joey D. I've since gotten to know his dad.

And he posts often on social media. But it's a generational impact. He lost his son, something that no parent should have to go through. Absolutely. I think that really kind of rounds off the conversation is we're going to lose some people having done everything we can to make sure we don't lose anyone operationally. I mean, Honolulu, I don't know the backstory, but we just lost a Hawaiian firefighter about two weeks ago. And I believe that was a collapse. Can you extrapolate?

Was there mistakes made? I don't know who will only have to find out the after action, but there's just going to be times where we lose people and that's the hazard of the job. But what we've been talking about today, each one of those elements is preventable. The health of the firefighter, the work week, the conversations, the offloading of childhood trauma as we enter the profession. There are so many tools that we can action.

As you mentioned, I mean, suicide, cancer and heart disease or cardiac issues, those three alone make up most of the pie chart if you think about it. So imagine the resources we would have to focus on operational losses if we weren't losing people from completely preventable mental and physical health disease.

Yeah. And we used to lose a lot of people on the fire ground, but we've looked at that and evaluated that and we've made sure we've made adjustments and changes to policies and procedures and tactics. So we see the roadmap and that didn't happen by accident. And now if we could take that same approach, imagine if we could take that same approach and make a similar difference in off the fire ground line of duty deaths.

It would be profound and it will be profound when we get there because we will get there. Absolutely. All right. Dina, just for people listening, where can people find your book? You can find my book both on Amazon and then fire engineering. Sometimes fire engineering has specials. The shipping there is a little high Amazon for a lot of people. They can get it with free shipping. Brilliant.

And then where's the best place for people to learn about the fire service, mental wellness and suicide prevention symposium? So we've got an abundant amount of social media. However, if you go to either the First Responder Center for Excellence or the National Firefighters websites, there'll be an easy link to it on both of those. And then if you find our social media, either Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram, we have an awesome person behind the scenes with the social media.

There's a lot of information being shared there and even information about each of the speakers. Well, I want to thank you both so much. It's been such an amazing conversation, two very different perspectives, lenses, generations, and that's what makes this such a powerful conversation, as I always say, the Venn diagram when it overlaps, that's where you find the truth. And we've, I believe, extrapolated a lot of truths today.

So I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today. Thank you, James. It's been great. Thank you. Thank you for what you do for the fire service and what you continue to do. I'm glad to you. Thank you.