It's not necessarily realistic to take some of these things back to your department and expect that they're going to happen immediately, right? So how do we give practical, actionable things to individuals that they can apply on a regular basis? Welcome to the Firefighter Crasmship Podcast where we coach you to deal with the stressors of the job as a first responder as well as how to thrive off duty. My name is Kevin Housley, a Huber Performance Coach and a firefighter since 2005.
I've been able to coach over a thousand emergency responders on ways to be more resilient, better prepared for the job, and how to be happier and healthier at home. Let's get to it. All right, welcome back to the Firefighter Crasmship Podcast. Today we have an awesome guest, Mr. Jesse Clark, who's a captain with Boise Fire Department, and we're going to dive pretty deep into relevant stuff around wellness and maybe shake the wellness trees a little bit today.
So thanks for coming on the podcast, Jesse. Yeah, Kevin. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Excited to finally meet you face to face. We've only been communicating for just a short amount of time around the Forging Wellness Conference, which we'll kind of talk about. And so tell us a little bit about who you are and why it's relevant. You're on the Firefighter Crasmship Podcast. Sure. Yeah. So, Jesse Clark, originally from Montana, grew up a farm boy.
Just looked at the population of my small town. It's 184 these days. And just found a passion for the first responder space way back when and have just devoted a ton of time to it. And luckily I got graced with really good mentors early on in my career that just knowledge shared, right? And that's something that I really want to carry forward.
And so took over, been a first responder for 18 years now, been with Fire for eight years and took over fitness lead for my department two years ago to start making some changes towards wellness. And we developed a lifetime wellness group that then me and our peer support lead, Ashley Rosenbaum, came up with this idea for our Forging Wellness Conference. Awesome. Okay. So, where does that draw the passion, if you will, towards wellness? Where does that kind of come from?
Is it from farm boy strength or where does that come from? Yeah. I mean, I grew up playing team sports for sure. So I've just always, you know, I've actually, I've had my own roller coasters with wellness up and down. You know, you go on and play some college sports and man, you eat a dump truck worth of food and you're working out two or three times a day. And then once that stops and you're still eating a dump truck worth of food, but you don't have the same activity, it changes, right?
So, but I've always, I've just always valued my fitness and my ability to do things and take care of those around me in every aspect. And as I've started to get more and more into this space, started with kind of get my cross fit level two, being a coach around the area here for a while, but it really came around that this is a very holistic thing, right? It all intertwines. Mental health, you know, combines with physical health.
Our sleep has so much to do with whether we were able to even get up and do fitness, have the energy and motivation to do fitness, right, which then obviously when we're in a good space for doing that, we typically choose healthy habits for eating, right? So just really come in full circle on that holistic view of wellness.
And then really in my, my own space, dealing with a number of pretty significant events just prior to COVID actually, I got to really witness firsthand what some of that tragedy can really do and impact a person and how it compounds the other way. So that like job related calls and things like that, or you know, definitely don't need to go into specifics, but give us like a cursory over. It's okay.
I'm really happy to actually talk about it because I, like I said, I have really good mentors who really pushed me to take a proactive approach to my overall wellness anyway, especially in the mental health space. And so one of the tips I got early on was, hey, have a, have a counselor that you can become friends with that you can have in your back pocket, right? Not that you need to go to them like on a weekly basis throughout your entire career.
But if there's ever that time where something happens, they're there, right? You don't have to wait to get on the list. And I know as we probably all experienced during COVID, if, if you had something where you need to get in, whether it was to see a physician or a counselor during that time, like the wait list were out of control. And so I actually had a friend co-worker kill himself at work.
And I was the one who found him the morning of and it, as soon as that happened, I knew that that was something that like, I, I wasn't prepared for. That I'm never prepared for anything quite like that.
But being that I had that counselor in my back pocket, I had reached out right away, was able to get in and deal with that right up front without any wait time, which allowed me to utilize, I feel like a lot of these other resources that I built up over my lifetime, such as my fitness routine, such as healthy habits, such as, you know, trying to stay on top of my sleep and getting the right amount. And so just very proactive is what's really kind of kept me in this.
Yeah, that's some tragic stuff, man. So sorry, you had to go through that for sure. But it's, it's pretty great that you've, you're resilient through that based on the systems and processes that, you know, people had gifted you the advice on really, really good stuff. And it doesn't, it doesn't diminish like that event by any means.
But now it's also empowered you to kind of share, hey, these, these are things that also helped me get through that and can help everybody, you know, depending on whatever their stage is in their own personal wellness. So let's, let's kind of talk about what does wellness really mean to you? You know, that's kind of the new buzzword that we hear kicked around. So like, what are you guys doing up there in Idaho or what does wellness mean to you overall?
Like when you say wellness, what does that term mean? Yeah, that's a really good, it's a loaded question. I feel like we, you're right, it is a buzzword and a number of times as we were even getting into exploring this conference, we were like, are we just using all the same buzzwords that everybody else is using resiliency, you know, but wellness truly, it, it has to be so holistic in my mind.
But wellness really is understanding that we have an incredible career in the fire service as first responders, because of the neat things that it allows us to do and impact other people's lives and support our communities. So it's not all doom and gloom. We have an awesome, awesome job that we can be really good at.
And but with that comes an exposure to things that the general public doesn't see on a regular basis and the truth of the matter is, is that that can be tough and it can weigh heavy on people. And so when those things do culminate to really weigh us down or impact us significantly, we have to be able to deal with it. Right. And so basically it's not always about balancing back. It's stand strong and have fun, because that's what this is. It's fun. And we do a lot of cool things.
But the reality is we have to be prepared and have the tools in place to battle the things when they, when they happen, right. So the, the thing that we've kind of talked about, right, is a lot of times there's a lot of first responders who have survived this career. And we don't, we don't want people just surviving. We want them to thrive in this career and beyond it. Yeah. Really good stuff there. And you've covered some parts and pieces of wellness so far.
You've talked about, you know, why fitness is important in your life. And it sounds like from a pretty young age, right? If you were able to play collegiate athletics, you, you were committed to whatever that sport was for a long amount of time and fitness is a part of any sport, right. And then obviously, you know, with your involvement as the fitness lead for Boise fire, that's going to be bad. And you mentioned the good old CrossFit word as well. So some people like it when they heard that.
But again, you know, like I've said before on the podcast is I don't really care what your feeling is on CrossFit. Don't don't throw away the good stuff from any athletic program just because of the word and whatever the connotation is around it, right? Like he didn't, he didn't talk about how many, what his fran time was during CrossFit or anything like that.
So like just be realistic around wellness, but you've also talked, you know, a lot of times when we hear wellness, we hear, oh yeah, we have a peer support program. It's like, that's awesome, man. And I hope it's effective. I hope people are actually using it. That's not a wellness program. Like that's a part in a piece of wellness.
So if you've already talked about that, like a clinical psychologist or clinician, you know, that you're a counselor that you're able to use, that's a part of wellness. Fitness is a part of wellness. You've talked a lot about sleep is a massive part of wellness that in the fire service specifically, we just continue to be like, oh, well, that's just not attainable because we work 24 hours shifts, which is complete nonsense.
And so, you know, of course, we're probably not going to go down the nutrition thing because it's kind of like when I say CrossFit, you know, or you say nutrition, then you hear about the newest whatever diet they're on or whatever thing that they're chasing. And it's like, okay, dude, if that works for you, that's great. But just because I'm doing something different doesn't mean that it's necessarily wrong either, you know. And so there's all these parts and pieces about wellness.
And I think that's really, really important for us to look at. And like, in your opinion, like what's an organization's role in wellness? Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's a really good one. So as we as my department has really started to create some pillars of wellness and look at it kind of in the same way. But honestly, it really does come down to creating that culture to go along with it. Right. Sometimes we think there needs to be documents or policies and procedures related to some of these things.
And while that's not bad to have accountability for certain things along those lines, it can't be done without creating a culture around it. And so I'll give a plug, right, for South Metro. So the whole, like, as we are moving into this space and we are networking and marketing to build forging wellness, part of that included going down to South Metro, meeting with Chris Macklin and his team and seeing, you know, their approach to wellness within an organization.
And Chris will be the first one to tell you that they are obviously blessed with a decent amount of money to be able to do things that they need to. But that doesn't mean it's unattainable for any department, right? And then as I brought that back and I really kind of dove into it, that's what I found, right? So they have implemented some of the WFI stuff as far as having certain standards for certain things that they hold their people accountable to.
What they did and talking to all of their people down there is none of them are concerned about any of those things coming up because they know that they are supported in that by the department, right? The department's not out to get them. The department's there to support them to make sure that the time that they are off the line is less and less and that they can take this career all the way to retirement and have a long retirement, right?
I think the other thing that departments really do have to start looking at is something similar to what South Metro is doing with their expert approach because we've done this for years, right? And it's a good old boy approach that is awesome because we really do a lot of things internally, right? We are tacticians. We go out, we get stuff done, but strategically, that's not always the best way to approach things, right?
So looking at that expert vendor model, if we were to compare it just to a peer fitness program, right? So comparing peer fitness to bringing in experts of strength and conditioning or PT, whatnot, peer fitness is great. That program was super great. They started it. We started people down the road of, here is some tools to help people within your department.
But as we have also tried to balance work and life, it is a lot harder for us to spend an hour of our time with like that we would normally have with our families to go in off duty to do something with a crew, right? But if I bring in an expert and just to go a little bit further, while peer fitness is really great program, it does not equip people well enough to actually develop people in a fitness way, right?
You don't know all the finer details of watching people move and diagnosing, oh, that movement pattern is not correct. And here's why, and here's how to fix it so that we don't have those nagging injuries that occur from that later on, right? So now we shift that focus to looking at an expert vendor model, and we've got a strength and conditioning coach. And I see like, cool, I'm going to plug a strength and conditioning coach in with my recruit Academy, right? That's my first thought, right?
Ground up approach. That's they create programming for the entire recruit Academy that takes them, you know, a good amount of build up time, maybe a month or two prior to Academy to make sure that it's built out appropriately for the schedule. But then while recruit Academy is going on, that's one hour out of either three or five days during the week that that strength and conditioning coach is committed to during their normal 40 hour work week, right? So it's it's nothing.
So then my utilization of that person has so many other options, right? Because I am essentially only taking one hour one hour out of their day. Well, the remaining hours that they have left, I can send them out to meet with crews or have them work on something entirely different versus asking my guys who are already on the line already doing the job to try and do the same things on their own free time.
Well, I mean, they might get some overtime for it, but really we're we already have guys working 14 hours over a normal work week schedule, right? Because we work 54, you know, average on our rotating 40 and 96 here. And so I'm asking them to give more on top of the 14 hours extra that they already work. So yeah, if I can grab a person and hire them to take an hour out of their work week to do that, like it's a lot more successful. So that's just one approach, right? That's only one area.
And just because I find it so easy to like relate it in that fitness realm. Yeah, a great conversation that we've had in the fire service for a really, really long time around fitness. But I mean, you know, from traveling around the country or taking conferences or classes or talking to people, you know, culturally, it kind of depends on which area of the country you're in, you know, so you talk about culture of an organization.
But what's like the just a real quick answer on what's the culture of fitness in Idaho, especially in Boise? Yeah. Yeah. But thankfully for I would say our valley as a whole is a pretty tight, tight knit valley. We have four or five good departments right in this area. And the the culture has shifted to being a fitness culture already in this area, right? And that that's just come from personalities that we've looked at hiring and brought in.
Plus, I think it has been really led by some of our our leaders throughout the years. I know for my department, my current deputy chief of operations was the one who really started to shift that approach by making sure all of our stations were equipped with gym equipment and that we actually had something for our recruit Academy so that we could set that culture early. Like we understand that this is a career that you need to be fit in for so many reasons.
And so we're going to set that precedence early on in your career. And that's that's really where it started. We don't have any accountability necessarily in writing for some of that stuff now. But we do have a really good culture. Yeah. And I would venture to guess just based on, you know, surrounded by the mountains and stuff like that, the community as a whole is hedges more towards being outside and going on hikes and riding their bikes and all of that sort of stuff, right?
Yeah. It's the the Boise area here is is really just a very cool atmosphere. We've got the foothills. So yeah, we've got we've got mountain bikers. We got rafters, ski snowboarders. So it is a very much a fit community of people who like to get outside and do stuff. Yeah. And so it's very much like here in northern Colorado, you know, same same topography and stuff like that and, you know, the culture around being outside, going to the breweries, like all of that sort of stuff.
And that's a huge win for us in areas like that. Or, you know, the people down south Colorado, South Metro, like just south of the Denver Metro area for those of you that are not familiar with that fire department. We have some advantages on areas like Boise or northern Colorado or, you know, other pockets in the country and from getting to go out and teach some classes, you know, like at the Metro Atlanta firefighter conference, MFC.
We've gotten to be down there a few times and we've gotten to work with some people that are really trying hard to establish cultures of fitness or wellness. And man, oh man, they have an uphill battle. So for those of you out there, utilize your resources that, you know, when Jesse talked right from the jump about like, get those mentors early, and that's one of the coolest things. Jesse, now we're kind of talking about how COVID changed the world in relation to basic skills training.
But it also changed it in a positive way where now we have, you know, a podcast explosion, we have tons of online resources, we're going to kind of talk about some stuff that Jesse and his team are doing in that regard. So you can create mentorship, use resources like myself, use Jesse, figure out those small wins if you're having a hard time, you know, I got a chance to talk to a really small department in Louisiana not that long ago.
And they are, they're having a hard time getting a minimum fitness standard at all. They don't currently have one. They're a career fire department. The union is actually actively working against them to get that because they're scared, right? People don't want to get fired over fitness, but I mean, they're shooting for an eight met minimum, right? And so, and they know that people on their jobs, some of those unfortunately won't make that.
And so they have a much harder hill to climb than your ID, just based on like cultural implications of our region, nothing to do with our departments. Yeah. And that's something actually I'll to interrupt you real quick and kind of go back to that something that's really cool that I was a part of that we just finished. So one of the speakers that we had lined up for our Forging Wellness conference is named Eric Haskins. He's a firefighter out at Nampa.
Him and I have been really good friends for a long time and just have done a lot of neat things together. One of the things that we did do was actually implement a new entry level fitness test. So as we were looking at it within this area, so we don't typically, Idaho doesn't typically use the national testing network. And so for us to utilize the CPAT, like a lot of states do, can be challenging because we don't have sites specific set up to post the CPAT.
And so then it looks like each individual department kind of doing it on their own. And that ends up being a lot of resources used, a lot of different offerings of that and not really sustainable. So we actually created a new entry level fitness test designed somewhat around the ACFT. So we call it the FPFT. We went through the process last year. My department supported validating that test.
So we went through a full validation process and got that completely run through and proved which is super exciting to us because now we have this five event test that actually has minimum standards for physical fitness requirements coming into the job. And we already have two departments utilizing it in the area with a third about to join in the next month or so. And I think that's going to be a huge win for a lot of different departments in a lot of ways, right?
I get that the CPAT works, it was validated back in 97, I believe, is when they validated that and works well in a lot of areas. But for our area and potentially for other places, this is a really cool way to not have a lot of resources, but still test on some minimum fitness standards. Because the cool thing is once you put the documentation out, people could go to any gym in the nation and get prepped and prepared for this test.
So that's actually just going back to your previous question of how my department is helping develop a culture of fitness. That's one of the ways. Yeah, that's good stuff. They supported going through that.
Really good because it's like start where your boots are and then try to figure out what can we do based on the resources that we have and the climates that we have to navigate and hopefully you have people around you, especially decision makers at the top of the organization that are willing to say, yeah, let's fact check all of this stuff, but we got to do something.
And so that's just a really good proactive thing that at a low level in the organization, you're able to make a tremendous impact. And now that impact is at three, four departments. It's really, really cool. And I think a lot of that what you talked about, the expert model, bringing in experts, we've seen that, you know, you're like, Hey, do you have a wellness program? Yeah, we have a strength and conditioning coach. Okay. Well, like, are they a former emergency responder or what?
Oh, no, they just graduated undergrad, right? And like, we pay them 50,000 bucks a year, even though you can't even rent an apartment based on our region of the country or whatever. And they last for five months and then they're not effective because they don't know anything about the job. They don't understand the work cycle. They don't understand that it's not just all a bro session to Jim and sets and reps like that you have to ebb and flow.
They don't understand that the career, especially in the fire services on average 25 years or so. And your game is different when you're a 22, 24 year old recruit than when you're a 55 year old officer or firefighter or engineer or whatever, like, you have to train differently. And so I think that that's a big progression that we're finally starting to see of the expert model. You got to pay for them.
However, when you put your money where your mouth is, it actually doesn't only save your department money. It's a revenue generator, but it's a revenue generator that's kind of hard to track, right? So you talked about, okay, PFTs are great, but they may not actually have the education on like, oh, that's probably not the best way to lift because they're not doing a functional movement screening.
And a functional movement screening should come from like a professional, like a doctor of PT or something like that, not some dude who just worked a 72 and is now like, oh, I'm trying not to die, but I'm doing a functional movement screen because my department's paying me overtime to do it. And so there's a lot of options there.
And a lot of times your health insurance and your HR teams can really help you like, man, oh man, we didn't even know this was something that was offered from our vendor or health insurance company. Let's work with a local community member that's willing to come and they'll spend two weeks and they'll do functional movement screening. And again, like if we say I've moved terrible, right? Like I got to do mobility stuff all the time. My hamstrings are strung like a piano.
And so, you know, I have to intentionally work on that stuff and I don't feel like it ever gets better, but hopefully it's injury prevention. And so that's a hard thing for us to track is we don't really know if you would have gotten hurt or not. And then, you know, when budget season comes, it's like, whoa, is this valuable? Prove it when you have a bean counter that's involved?
It's like, no. And so I guess now a good thing, maybe even if you're trying to start where your boots are is start capturing data. How many light duty injuries or how many, you know, if you have a light duty program, what's workers comp look like, capture it now, try to trend that over the last 15, 20 years, if you can. And then if you finally get them to take a risk, even if it's one day a week, did it make an impact?
I mean, it does, you know, and it actually generates revenue for your department, whether your EMS, police, fire, it might even generate, you might even see numbers where, well, we don't really have good numbers on workers comp. But we last year, we lost whatever percentage of our workforce. And we started doing some of this stuff and we have people sticking around. Like that's a win, you know?
So I think there's a lot of ways to do this that isn't just like, well, we want to create this massive optimization program and they're not supporting me, so I'm going to give up. You know? Yeah. That's it. Oh, man, that is a really, really good point that you bring up with all of that, Kevin, right? The XRIT model is great. Obviously, there's things that you have to consider moving into that, right?
But one thing that you kind of talked about too is how can we do that without, especially if we don't have access to the same type of resources that maybe South Metro fire might have, right? Like, what are some other approaches and looking at some of these things? And yes, screening is a big one that we've looked at, right? FMS has been around for a while. You know, there's a couple, not necessarily new programs, but programs out there that are also doing something similar.
Now we're starting to utilize some technology involvement with those screenings as well. And realizing that we need to actually capture people moving to actually get a really good screening on them versus kind of those static positions that we typically see in the FMS, right? So I know Fusionetics is out there doing some cool stuff with that. Ready Rebound has a program that they're doing that is utilizing some of those technologies. And so those are some of the things that we are exploring.
But to touch a little bit more on what you're saying, when we went down to South Metro and visited with those guys, I actually took down my local physician in this area. So we have a doctor by the name of Rob Hilbers that has been passionate about first responders for decades now. And he originally started as an ER doc and basically had a couple people reach out to him and say, hey, would you mind doing some of our health checks on some of our people? And he went all in.
He went down to Phoenix in the early days and kind of got plugged in with all the WFI stuff and brought it all back and has been doing some phenomenal things for us. So I took him down there. And what was cool is he has built a lot of the things that South Metro has, but it's in a different way. So he supports the entire valley from his clinic, Emergency Health Responders here in Idaho. And it's cool because all the departments know him. All the departments love him.
And now that we took him down there to South Metro and have seen the growth that they've had and the success that they've had, potentially now it looks like our departments being able to dump into him to help create something similar. But that's going to benefit all the departments in the valley, not just one specifically. So that's something really cool.
And I think with that, and we just had a meeting not too long ago that we're probably about two and a half years away from building out that facility of his, which sounds like a long time, but obviously, as we know in the grand scheme of things, that's pretty awesome. Right? Two and a half years, that'll be here before you know it. And I think we have the ability to help him set the gold standard in a new way. Not taking anything away from South Metro, right?
But like, that's not feasible for every department. But now maybe we actually are able to show another way of doing things that supports multiple departments. And so just super excited about that partnership with him and that he's on board with doing something along those lines. That's awesome. Yeah, I can't wait to learn more about that and then watch how quickly that comes together.
Yeah, and our game is two and a half years, not very long at all, you know, especially when you're on a year out budget cycle. So that's not long at all for sure. So that's really, really cool. And it's a great way to get the community members involved and people that have way more education and knowledge around this. And you know, you get a physician involved and oh man, get out of the way, right?
Give them the ditch banks and get out of the way and then just figure out how to support that, whether that's budgets or culturally or whatever, how do we support this thing? And I think the reality is, you know, I love the Chief Scott Thompson, you know, when he went to the colony, Texas, and he talked about they had never measured what the community expected of them, you know, and so he went to the grocery store and just said, Hey, what do you expect of your fire department?
And he was kind of the story tells us funny, right? He's like the big, he's a big dude. And so he's there in plain clothes. He's not in his chief uniform and he's just asking people what they expect of the fire department. Like, who is this weirdo? But then he listened, you know, and it comes down to they expect us to solve their problem and they expect us to be nice and they expect us to be competent.
And they expect us to show up when they call us, you know, and that's really what it comes down to. And that's a fun thing I like to, especially when we have probes, I like having probes on my crew. I like to do that in the grocery store when people come and thank you for your service, which is completely unnecessary. So you say, Hey, thank you, that's great. We really, really appreciate that totally unnecessary.
What do you expect from us if you call us, you know, and they're like, what, what do you mean? Like seriously, what do you expect? And I like to ask that from that World War two vet, you know, all the way down to that seven year old kid that mom made him come and say, thank you to us. You know, and the crazy thing is, is they all say the same thing. And I think if we look at that in a wellness perspective, if we, if we are in emergency services and we say, what does the community expect of us?
Well, first off, we got to ask them and then we got to listen to them. And then we got to work hard to meet that. But also, hey, do you, do you think that it's okay that we have emergency responders that are happy and healthy and they have great relationships at work? They're super competent, basic skill wise, they can show up in a timely manner, they solve your problem. Some days are bad days, right?
But they try to solve your problem and they're, they're, they have the powers and the tools and the abilities to solve most problems. But is it also okay that when they go home that they're a good mom and they're a good dad, they're a good partner, right? That they get good sleep, that they're compensated enough where they can eat real food and live in a place that they're safe. And the community of it would be like, yeah, of course, why, of course.
So then we can also say, cool, that's how much this actually costs, right? This is how much it costs to be, to have quality health insurance, to have programs where we empower people to be in the career for a long time. And when they leave, whatever timeline that is, that they don't get cancer in three years and die. Because that's nonsense, right?
Like it's time for us to draw a line in the sand at our levels and say, for lack of a better term, this is complete horseshit and enough is enough, right? And that is really kind of where we're at. And that's why I continue to do all of this stuff is like, it is time for us to shake the trees. And just because we've done it for a long time in the American Fire Service or an emergency services as a whole, it doesn't mean that we need to continue to do that.
And I think that that's where like this expert model coming in, you got to put your money where your mouth is, but we're also delivering on that service that the customer, the external customer expects. And then we're also benefiting that internal customer in a massive way. And so it's really, really cool to hear, hey, we can't do it the way that other fire departments are doing it. And it doesn't matter that we hear, oh, well, they have more money than God, you know, you'll hear that.
Well, that doesn't mean that we should just do nothing. You know, like how can we get creative at our own level? And this dude is is a massive asset for you guys. And there's a lot of those people out there. It really, it really is. And we are blessed. But at the same time, that that was actually how forging wellness was even born, right? Like, well, so it's not necessarily realistic to take some of these things back to your department and expect that they're going to happen immediately, right?
So how do we give like practical actionable things to individuals that they can apply on a regular basis, right? So that's really what forging wellness was all about at its core mission, right? Was to bring those actionable things. And so our speaker lineup was was prime and just a list experts to do that. And the hope, right? Like we're not done with them. We'll see him again. We're going to bring them back around. And I'm super excited about that. I was it's funny.
I know this is obviously just supposed to be a podcast, but I I'm taking notes here because I love some of the things that you're saying. And, you know, I want to remember I love the the community involvement and asking the community, right? One thing that sparked in my mind was a conversation I had with one of my battalion chiefs. And we don't always see eye to eye on things, but I really respect him as a battalion chief as a person.
And he he was talking to me about some of these wellness ideas that I had and like me wanting to shift priority towards some of the wellness things. And his argument ended up being that, well, our number one priority is our response, right? Always has been always will be that that's our mission, right? Is to respond and absolutely, right? Like we that's what we sign up for. That's what we want to do. We want to respond. And we want to respond in the best possible way, right?
Whether that's in medicine, whether that's in fire, we want to be experts at our craft. And that's really what I encourage out of all my my crews. And so with that being said, the flip side to that argument would be how much better can we accomplish that mission if we do shift that priority to wellness, right? Because he said we've never had to brown out stations. We've never not been able to staff what we needed to. And in reality, that is absolutely 100% true.
And that's due to forcing people back. That's due to a number of other things. Whereas if we just change that perspective slightly and say, well, what if we just take care of our guys so that they aren't using as much sick time because they're actually well, right? And you know, they they are taking care of. And so, you know, we, we do have a really good culture here, but the reality is when we've got somebody who might have that nagging injury or maybe just isn't feeling like themselves, right?
Because maybe the last year has been tough mentally, physically for whatever reason. And then RIP training comes up. And all of a sudden that person is non-existent for the week of RIP training, right? But if we're supporting them with all this wellness stuff, potentially that's not the case. They're going to be a lot more confident in their abilities and able to show up for all those type of trainings and for the community as a whole, right? Yeah, massive fireball right there.
Really, really well stated and said. I like to get on my soapbox a little bit, but you did such a better job of not emotionally just saying, hey, this is kind of the reality of it. But I think you're you're spot on. And that's the thing with proactive approach towards wellness, a holistic approach, like you've said, is you can help in a lot of other areas, you know, and it like you've also said, it's not all doom and gloom, right? Like we don't all get cancer.
We certainly don't all have to get cancer and we don't all get PTSD or PTSD. You're going to have really bad days and emergency services. That's just unfortunately the experience of what we've said to do doesn't necessarily lessen the pain of those things. But if you have proactive approaches and I like to call that resilience, how can we train you and ourselves to have resilience before we need it? So that way, when the bad day shows up. And that bad day could be organizationally, right?
Like I'm excited we're going to talk to Chief Dean Ali and talk about the impact of organizational culture on mental health. It's not all the 911 response stuff that we're dealing with. And so proactively, how does somebody who has a good solid fitness routine that's relevant to them and where they're at and what their goals are, they even have goals, right?
The mental health stuff, whether it's a clinician or what are the systems and processes, spirituality, like all of the different things that can go into mental health. How does nutrition play into that? How does sleep play into that? Right? Like how does hydration play into that? How does the internal mindset play into that? The inner voice, like all of that stuff. Mental performance coaching, which is not a clinician.
So like all of that is pre-zilliance, which then leads down to things like the blue flu, where we got a really hard training coming up and I'm going to call on sick because I'm absolutely terrified to fail, right? So then we go back to the culture of failure. Like we could go on and on and on about this. So I think you're spot on. You're spot on. So talk a little bit about forging wellness for people that haven't heard of that.
And unfortunately, talk about what the unfortunate news was that you released this week as well in relation to the conference, but from the fire comes growth as well. So what is the forging wellness conference and what does that look like moving forward? Yeah. So as I stated a little bit, so myself and Captain Rosenbaum also with Boys Fire, good friend of mine just had a shared vision for wanting to bring a lot more of this to the just the front line and get it in front of people, right?
And we actually ran one last year with the help of the Center of Excellence and Molly Jones and she was phenomenal. She did some really awesome things for us and we loved it and people loved it. But we wanted more, right? Like we wanted to make it bigger and so this year we set out to do that. And we might have gone too big to be honest, too big, too quick.
And so the unfortunate reality is that with a number of obstacles that we face that some of our speaker fees and whatnot and costs just outweighed the donations that we were able to bring in. I mean we were still going after some and still had some coming in but as we were just looking at the deadline we had to be realistic with where we were at. And so we made the choice to cancel the conference, the in-person conference this year which, man, yeah.
It was hard to swallow that because we are so passionate about it, right? And we just were so excited about the opportunity to host it here in Boise to just because it's a really good location and we have a tight-knit fire community and first responder community in this area. But we also are kind of a unique location for the Northwest as well. And so we were really hoping to bring something special to the Northwest.
Now with all that being said, we have already pivoted on this mission with the lessons learned from this. And we are still partnering with Fire Nuggets to look at offering some virtual sessions coming up in December and January. And with that, hopefully we're just, we're going to get these out there. We're going to get some exposure for some of these experts in our field that really understand what we deal with and how to speak to us in that way, right?
And provide those practical tools for individuals. So now, hopefully with those virtual sessions, we get those speakers out there. We get them some more exposure and how impactful they can be. So that way, when we do come back with the live event, which we plan on looking at next year, that we just have already set the groundwork and the foundation for that. So we're not done by any means. We're not dead in the water.
We're super excited moving forward, unfortunately, bummed out that this didn't work out. But yeah, man, obviously that's life, right? We don't always get things right on the first go as much as we would like to. But what do we do from here? And I think it's going to kind of pull this into something really cool. Is it this might once we get the virtual session set up, I think, honestly, this will allow us even associated with the live event when it comes back to offer a streaming option for it.
Yeah, really cool. And just a great thing to adapt, right? Like it's painful when you spend so much time and energy and you have, it's a great idea. It really is. I think probably you guys are a little bit on the leading edge. And so you have, you're still dealing with the early adopters a little bit.
But then you also have budget constraints and people going back to school and, okay, we'll go into Boise might be really, really hard for me to get there, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, and so it's just a great way to pivot and kind of be on the lookout. How can people find more out about the Forging Wellness conferences or web page? I know you got an Instagram account as well. Yeah, that's so right now, social media is probably the best way that we're going to update people.
Just letting them know what that first virtual session will be, when it will be. We'll get that out there, but we had already started to work on our own dedicated website. So that will be coming up and then we'll just push people towards that website that will have constant ongoing update of the next virtual session that is upcoming and then what to expect with the live event as well.
Awesome. Yeah, and Fire Nuggets is a great one as well because not only the Forging Wellness conference, they have all the conferences and one-off classes that they're involved in. So jump on firenuggets.com and jump, you know, get on their email list and then open it when they send it to you.
But you know, Fire Nuggets has a pretty cool online library and we were very fortunate back in the COVID days to teach an online class there and so you have this massive online library because of COVID where all the regional conferences were getting canceled, Fire Nuggets really stepped up and they have a pretty cool online library there and whether that's basic skills stuff, you know, you got great stuff in there from West Coast Fire with Jay Bonifield
teaching a class and I mean, they've got engine company, truck company, technical rescue, they got everything in there and then this hippie-dippy baloney stuff of wellness, right? So jump in there and check that out. But yeah, you know, I think probably some of it too is you're a victim of the algorithm as well.
You know, it's hard to bootstrap a lot of these things and I've been involved in some conferences including the mile high fire con where we just try to grind it out with no money and figure out how to make it work. And so for all of those of you that are listening to this podcast, you're obviously into this sort of stuff. So let's support Forging Wellness and be on the lookout for that.
And it sounds like they're going to release it where depending on what part of the country you're in, it might be super crappy outside and it's a good time to sit back to a virtual class as well. So stoke that it's not gone forever. Yeah, thank you. Very excited to see where that thing morphs and I'm excited to learn, right?
So and from the speaker lineup that they had for the in-person one, you had people that were not in emergency services all the way up through how do you build a wellness program? So you're going to be able to get lots of different stuff, sleep specialists, all that sort of thing. So it's going to have content in it that you're going to be into even if you're not, if you don't have the time and energy to build an entire wellness program from zero. Yeah, it's going to be so cool.
The partnerships and just relationships we built already has been phenomenal, right? And you're right, like moving forward, the stuff that we are going to be putting out there from people that like all over the country, right? And the ones I'm super excited about to really help her get her message out there is JD Miller from Canada. She partnered with Dr. Chris Fru, who's already doing a lot of work with operator syndrome in the military.
And she kind of helped coin the term firefighter syndrome, which potentially opens the door for so many things and just the ability to look at, it doesn't put us into a box of say PTSD, right? Now it's this umbrella thing that allows for a number of different things underneath it. So just super cool things associated. Yeah, I mean, so much good information here and just really cool to talk to somebody who's out there in the trench doing it, figuring out how it works for them personally, right?
All of this stuff, we're all super selfish. That's where this podcast is amazing. As I get to meet and talk to people like you and learn so much, I have a whole page of notes here, gets me excited to see traction or ways that maybe I can help as well. Really, really cool stuff. Very, very exciting to just continue to create and maintain this community of people that are into this sort of stuff. Yeah, I mean, it just goes back to what I was saying with that knowledge sharing, right?
The best leaders, the best mentors I've ever had are obviously not afraid of sharing that knowledge. They want to pass it on. You want to make the person who's under you or working for you better than you are, right? So that they can just carry the torch and keep going with these things because it's not about having our legacy set in stone because we know that doesn't exist in the fire service ultimately, right? The fire service first responder, they don't stop moving. It just keeps going.
And so the legacy that we set is with the people that we train and pass the torch to. What you were saying about fire nuggets for having all of those cool things about things from the basics of stretching the line, tech rescue, everything all in one place. And then our hippie, dippy shit, right? What's super cool about that in my mind is once again, thinking about from a holistic approach.
But as I really dove into a lot of the fitness stuff when I first got involved, if I'm able to make them fit for their job, for whatever they're doing, right? The impact that has on somebody's competence is incredible. And there is a number of studies to actually not a number. There is probably only about two studies that actually have a direct correlation specifically looking at that, but they are there.
And when we help somebody in this holistic wellness approach, the confidence that they end up having in their ability to do the job leads to better competence with all of these skills that are available. So I think just having them all in the same library is going to really help that person or an individual excel in that way.
Like not only am I improving myself as an individual, as a family person, whether it be a husband, father, wife, mother, whatever, I'm also able to then transition and work on my craft at the same time and crush it. So I love that. Yeah. And you talked about... Oh, thank you. Sorry, I'm sorry. Absolutely. And you talked about legacy and there you go. If you help or you take power over your own journey, wellness, fitness, all of those sorts of things, you do leave a legacy.
It's just not necessarily an emergency services. You leave a legacy for your family's name and the people that get to influence your neighbors. It's so much bigger than like, oh, well, what am I going to be known for that's written down? If you're able to help somebody get over the hump of fitness and create confidence and competence, it's exponential where those things go.
And so for all of those of you out there really grinding and pushing the envelope, especially in the world of wellness, whatever that word means to you, like keep it up because it does matter. And what you do matters and we value you and your contribution to all this stuff. And excited to continue to build the community around that. Really good stuff. How can people find you if you want them to?
How can they reach out to you, get more information or have conversation about what you've all been able to accomplish up to this point or help you? Absolutely. I would love to talk with anybody because as I've gone down this rabbit hole of things like the partnerships and connections that I've made along the way are phenomenal. And so I might not be the expert. I might not be the person to talk to you, but I have a good idea who I can send you to. And I just open the door for that.
And so yeah, I mean, if you want to call or text me, my number, 2089672001. If you want to email me, you can use the Forging Wellness email, which is forgingwellness208 at gmail.com or my personal email. If you just want to have personal conversation about something that I've talked about, small town medic at gmail.com. Awesome. Fantastic. We'll let the, let the games begin, right?
Sure. So thank you for willing, for being willing to share that, you know, their contact information and then being willing to help. And so excited to see kind of where that goes from our for you, you know, with the community that we have here. And we appreciate all of you tuning in today, the Firefighter Crasmship podcast with a cool episode. I'm stoked to continue to push the envelope for myself personally and then also for the things that I'm involved in.
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