Well, good afternoon, everybody. Stephen Hartz here with The H&H Impact. We are recording our ninth podcast.

We’re here from NEMSMA Conference, the inaugural NEMSMA Leadership Conference, and today I have two guests with me. I have Monte Chambers and Gregory Hanna. Hanna, Hanna?

Hanna, all right.

I like Hanna Barbera cartoon.

There you go, Hanna Barbera. Now, do you like Gregory or you like Greg? Greg.

Greg, all right, see, I’m a Stephen and I prefer Steve. Only my mom and my wife call me Stephen, and it’s usually when I’m in trouble.

So that’s what happens with me too.

Excellent. So, you know, I appreciate you guys taking the time. You know, what I love to do is kind of talk a little bit, introduce yourselves about what you do, who you are, where you’re from, and then kind of talk about your presentation you guys gave today.

It was really inspiring to listen to what you guys had to say. I’m going to go ahead with you, Monte.

So right out of high school, started my journey working as an EMT. I worked at the St. Louis City Fire Department, did that for about five years. And then I crossed over into law enforcement and I was a police officer at City St. Louis for four years, St. Louis County for five.

And then I worked in public safety and management as a communications director, overseeing the communication across eight departments, and then promoted to executive strategist where I help oversee operations and public safety as well. Now I am a full-time public safety consultant. I get the opportunity to consult on the law enforcement side as well as the EMS side, and absolutely love what I do.

And to your question about the presentation today, had an opportunity along with my colleague here, Greg, we spoke about the case for act of bystandership and why that’s so important and prevailing, especially for our EMS professionals. Oftentimes we’ll see things that happen. We don’t want to speak on it.

And there is reasons behind that. So how can we encourage our workforce to create a culture to where individuals feel like they can speak up when they see things that are happening, regardless of their rank in the organization?

Awesome, Monte. That resonates with me a minute or a lot. And I’m looking forward to talking about that in a minute.

Again, thank you for your service, both on the EMS side and the police force. Yeah, I appreciate that. Greg, tell me about yourself.

Yeah, so Gregory Hanna, Jr. Again, Greg. I started out in law enforcement. I started out when I was 21, right?

So started Academy two days after I turned 21. So I started at a very young age here in Washington, DC., DC.

Metro Police Department. Retired as a captain up to 27 years of service. And I’m going now into my sixth year of civilian life as a full-time public safety consultant.

So I served on a lot of different roles within the department, a lot of command roles on the department from precinct command. And my last stint, I was the internal affairs commander. I did two tours there.

And so that is a part of the reason why I’m so passionate about the work that we do now in active bystander ship. I went through the FBI National Academy and through that partnership. I then joined ABLE, which is Active bystander ship full law enforcement, so that’s the law enforcement side.

And then from there, we developed heroes for corrections for our EMS. And so I became a national trainer for that as well. And so both go hand in hand because in public safety, we all do the same thing.

We all have to work with each other at some point. We all have our component and our share of public safety work that we do together. But we experience a lot of the same things.

And a lot of what we talked about today in the hero session today was just about that. And as Monte talked about, there are a lot of challenges that come in our profession and we don’t always talk about. We know those challenges exist.

We know that they’re there. Sometimes we don’t understand how to navigate those challenges. But the biggest thing that comes out of the training that we do and that a lot of the students learn is that we know that we all have an obligation in public safety to be good active bystanders and to intervene when we see them do wrong.

And most times, in most cases, there are laws behind it that says, hey, you have a duty to intervene. But we don’t always do that all the time. And that’s because of some of the challenges or what we call inhibitors that kind of get in the way.

No, that’s a great point. And my journey in EMS, I started in 1992. I was 16, became an EMT out of Fairfax County.

Worked at Dunloring Station 13. Went through Firefighter 1 and 2, did the EMT route. I’d love to say it was because I wanted to get into public safety, but it was more because my Catholic school required so many hours of volunteer.

And I was like, and I could read to old people or I can go car wrecks and fires. And I was like, car wrecks and fire sounds so much more cool. So I did that.

And then I went on to become a paramedic when I was down at Blacksburg at Virginia Tech. And I enjoyed that aspect of it, but your message resonates with me because in aviation, as a pilot in the Navy, we have that see something, say something mentality. The expectation is that regardless of rank, if something’s happening, if you make a mistake, if you see a mistake being made, it’s an obligation to be able to go and talk about it.

And you have to be able to do it without worry that you’re going to be gotten in trouble, people are going to crap on you or whatever it may be. And that’s a challenge. And it seems to be not only a challenge in public safety, it’s a challenge in the military.

Again, we have orders, we go out and execute our orders, but there are times when things happen that aren’t always, it’s not the way it should be. And it’s a safety-related issue. And so in naval aviation, it was based on safety, right?

We’re not talking about if somebody’s doing maintenance, we call it gun decking when you go and do maintenance, but you really don’t do the maintenance, you’re just saying you did the maintenance, you just signed it off, right? Things of that nature. And I would imagine it’s very similar with what you guys are talking about.

Can you guys give me an example from each of you, like, you know, something that just kind of sticks in your mind, like, hey, this was a time when I had to deal with this, or I recently just did a training class and somebody brought up this situation.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I give you an example. When we piloted the program at the St. Louis City Fire Department, EMS, Bureau of EMS back in September of last year, I came in as one of the instructors along with another colleague of ours, Dr. Abigail Tucker.

And it’s never easy being able to present and teach to your former department, especially individuals that you used to work with. We used to work the streets together with, and now a lot of these guys and gals are now the supervisors. But walking into that room day one, I could be honest, a lot of people were not happy to be there.

And so because I know where some of the bodies are buried, some of the skeletons that are in the closet, and to be able to watch them go from day one at 8 o’clock in the morning and then by the end of that day, it’s like a complete 180 of their behavior, their personality, as well as just their overall feel and engagement. It’s almost like it’s like a fire that’s finally been lit the right way. And you can see the light bulb going off in a lot of the students’ minds.

So much so that by day two, when we were doing the Train a lot of them were starting to come out with different things that have been going on in the agency for a long time, such as, I can’t believe this person right here has gotten promoted. This person is so negative, every time they walk in a room, it gets darker from a personality standpoint. And so a lot of folks didn’t have the right tools and the techniques on what to say.

How do I tell someone when they dark in the room? How do I intervene? Because I don’t have any rank.

They’ve been on for 20 years. I’ve only been on for two years. But being able to offer actual tools and being able to offer other perspectives about how you can show up and actually have a conversation professionally to where you’re actually worried and you’re covering that person, not covering up for that person.

So that’s what I will say is more of a practical way. And now you’re looking at those EMS supervisors and managers, they’re some of the greatest ambassadors for what we do here at Heroes. I mean, the testimonies via emails, they just keep coming in because they’re connecting it now.

It’s connecting from their head to the heart. And now they’re starting to see the actual viability of what we’re teaching because they understand the common denominator is just that we’re all human. And I always think back when I used to work on a medic unit, man, if I had these skills back then when I started brand new at 18 years old, I wish, because there’s so many moments that I can play back and say, you know what, I wish I would have said something here because that could have prevented that.

There’s so many great points you make there because you’re talking about a level of accountability, a level of integrity. And it’s interesting because I would imagine in EMS and police force, not everything is taught at the boot camp, at the base level. In aviation, you get taught how to be a first-in-officer.

You get taught how to be a pilot. But from then on, every moment is like, hey, you are accounting for everything you do. Every mistake you make, you have to be able to say something, raise your hand, I made a mistake, this is why.

And then was it a lack of training? There’s a difference between holding people accountable and punishment. And that’s accountability for, is it a training issue?

Is it, you know, I won’t say lack of integrity, but lack of understanding of the situation? And then we’ve all seen that just pure negligence. Those are always just, they’re never good.

You know, but that’s a great example. I appreciate you giving that. Greg, what do you got for us?

Yeah, well, you know, like Monte, I have so many examples, which drives me to be as passionate as I am about what we do. You know, one of the things that I experience as a very young police officer was innocent with another jurisdiction, wasn’t my agency, but it was a misconduct situation. And essentially, it was assaulting a handcuffed individual.

Now, when I came in law enforcement, it was back in the 90s, and things were quite different back then in the 90s. And that didn’t make it any better, right? But things were different.

And I remember, I was barely two years on the department. I’m still trying to learn. I’m still wet behind the ears.

I’m excited about the career. Slightly jaded about the reality of public safety, right? And so I come on this incident, another jurisdiction, and this officer is beating on this handcuffed individual.

And I knew that it was wrong, right? But it wasn’t my jurisdiction. At the same time, I’m actually kind of saying some things to him.

My sergeant, my supervisor, comes on the scene and he sees the same thing. And he says, You know what, Hanna, let’s go with 10-8. And 10-8 meant we’re back in service.

And I’m like, what, but sergeant, wait a minute. This, and he’s like, nope, not our problem with 10-8. Right?

So it was a path of passivity there. And we could have stopped that thing from happening. We could have prevented it.

I have no idea what happened to that individual. But I will say that it had an impact on me, my entire career. And it was one of the things that I said I would never do.

I would never put myself in. And from that, I will say that that gave me the courage to do things when I saw things that were wrong, even if it was a supervisor. You know, one of the things that we cover in the course, and we actually kind of talked a little bit about it in the presentation today is what we call inhibitors.

And those inhibitors are rank being an issue, gender roles being an issue, a rookie officer versus a veteran officer, where you have these informal hierarchies that go on there. And knowing those inhibitors are ways, if you know what those inhibitors are, you know how to overcome those fears, helps you to be able to apply some of the intervention techniques and strategies that we talk about. And what I experienced was fear.

I mean, I had barely two years on. This is a whole other agency. My supervisor is telling me this.

I mean, what happens if that person got killed or severely injured? And I could have stopped that thing from happening. And there’s so many different examples that I can come up with over my entire career, would be here all day.

But what I will say in the classrooms, to Monte’s point about feeling comfortable, even when you’re talking with your own agency, the thing that always amazes me and makes me feel so very proud and humble about what we do is when we get into a classroom, they don’t know us. We don’t know them, right? We travel all over the place.

We talk to fire EMS personnel, talk to law enforcement, we talk to corrections. They don’t know us. We’re developing a level of relationship immediately out the gate.

They’re looking at us. We’re looking at them and they’re like, okay, trying to size us up. We’re trying to size them up.

But by the time the training is over with, people are in a space of psychological safety where they now feel like talking about things that they’ve probably been holding on for years. I can’t tell you how many times at the end of class or on a break, I get a student or someone to come up and they’re just in this info dump and they’re in this psychological info dump. And the most that you could do is to be there for them, right, because they may not have shared that.

And the surprise always comes when another colleague that they’ve been side by side with for 10, 20 years looks at them and like, this is the first time I’ve ever heard this. And so what I’m very proud of is the structure in which we do it and how we present it to them, and putting them in that space of psychological safety to say, hey, listen, it’s okay. It’s really about transforming a culture, decades of culture and public safety.

It doesn’t matter what discipline and public safety you’re in. Whether it’s EMS, fire, doesn’t matter. We all share some common, hard cultures, and there’s a lot of things that we don’t talk about out loud.

And so the work that we do really creates that space. And one last point I want to make is something that we draw on in the class, where we really talk about the difference between blind loyalty and constructive loyalty. When we make those delineations between the two, blind loyalty as we know is just one of those things that you just say, I’m blind to the profession, I’m blind to the individual, I don’t care, we’re going to stand here, 100%, doesn’t matter if you’re wrong or you’re right.

But that constructive loyalty is like, hey listen, I’m going to be here for you, I’m going to be here for the profession, but there’s some accountability piece that goes with this. There’s a little bit, now I’m more accountable and on top of being accountable, how can I get you help? And so on those two themes, we contrast those in the class, we build on those and then we added a framework of active by sedative training.

That’s outstanding. So a lot of breakdown there.

Yes.

I’m going to break down a few things. So what I heard, as inhibitors, and in our language, we use this in coaching called barriers, right?

Yeah.

Especially in communication, what can limit your ability to communicate with your fellow workers, your individuals? Rank is always a big one, age, gender, culture, language sometimes. Always challenge, and I’m sure you guys see that even when you’re dealing with, you know, whether it’s a victim or somebody’s in a medical incapacitation or somebody’s committed a crime, you know, language can be a challenging today.

The other things that you’re facing is that accountability piece is huge, you know, because what you’ll find in organizations, as we look at culture and you talk about accountability, we all want to have accountability. If you ask everybody, I’ve yet to meet people like, nah, no, we’re not, I don’t want to be held accountable. You hold them accountable, not me.

They may not say it, but through their actions, they do it, right? And it also happened, like, if you have different departments, you know, say, like in Fairfax County, you’re EMS and firefighter in the same side. They’re the same organization.

But if EMS holds it one accountability and firefighter holds it the other accountability, it’s very easy to cross fingers and be like, well, you know, they’re not doing it this way. Why are we had to be held accountable to that standard? And that’s a huge challenge.

And your other point on culture, right? We all know culture takes a long time to change. But I had a great leader, former Admiral of mine that I worked with, made a very strong point.

He’s like, you know what? We’re not really changing culture. What we’re really trying to change is behavior.

And if you can break down those daily behaviors, if you can change that behavior, I can change your behavior in a day, right? And I think if people started realizing, that’s what we’re focusing on is your behavior, making it normal to be able to talk about a challenge, an issue or concern, like, hey, go around the table, what’s going on today? What’s the issue?

Are we doing daily huddles? Do we feel comfortable enough to say, hey, this was an issue, this was a challenge? And it’s not always easy because to your point, do you want to be that outcast?

If everybody’s going this direction, and you know you’re in the right, but everybody’s going this way because this is the way it’s been done for 15, 20, 30 years. That’s tough to paddle up that river.

When you said behaviors, the thing that comes to mind is that if you can picture for your listening audience almost like an iceberg, what you see on the surface is a little piece of the iceberg, but underneath is like a mountain. So the top piece on top of the water would be the behaviors, but everything else underneath that, coping strategies, your true feelings, your feelings about the feelings. And these are the things we often don’t talk about even in public safety, let alone in EMS.

We give off certain behaviors to our family and our friends and we say, oh, no, I’m fine. Things are okay. Or we go silent.

But deep down underneath, we all know that we’re carrying stuff that’s really weighing out this particular set iceberg. And it’s the culmination of all that. So when Greg was talking about psychological safety, it’s giving people permission to now address the things that are underneath those icebergs, that iceberg, to say, you know what?

It needs to be talked about. It’s normal. Once you can talk about those things, and like you said, it’s like people is almost like people having like verbal diarrhea to a certain degree because they just want to overly share, overly share, overly share.

Because for the first time, they actually feel someone actually sees them, hears them and actually validates, you know, who they are.

That’s a great point. So, you know, one of the things that I was thinking, I really wanted to talk to you guys on the podcast today, is when you guys finished up your presentation, I was talking to one of the paramedics who does our F-TEP training courses. And she brought up, she’s like, you know, my entire career, I was always told, there’s no crying in EMS, you know, there’s no crying.

You can’t have feelings in EMS, feelings is like a four letter word, you know? And you look at like the suicide rates, the burnout, the lack of resiliency and all those challenges. I mean, it goes into everything that you guys are talking about and it’s, you know, getting it to a point where it’s normalized and it’s okay to say, hey, you know, I’m having a bad day or this is going on.

I mean, I’ve yet to meet people who have gone on, you know, I remember a rescue that we had, we had a small aircraft that crashed into the side of mountain. It would, in and of itself was bad because death occurred, but the hardest part was two miners, two children went through the windshield of the plane into the snow cap, and it was like they were a balls from head to toe. You know, and when you are lowering two guys down to see that, and two little kids, I don’t care how.

I mean, it is gut wrenching. Yes, yes.

You know, it’s interesting that you say that because we touch on the wellness piece in the curriculum as well. And again, as I mentioned, I came in to law enforcement and public safety in the 90s, and it was just that, to your point, right? It’s like, listen, we don’t have time to do this.

You were viewed as being weak if you showed emotion towards the situation. And it was almost robotic-like, right? And the words compassion wasn’t necessarily a part of the everyday vocabulary, more so now than then, right?

But as time grew, you had a huge number in spike on the law enforcement side, just like EMS, just like fire, just like corrections. We have folks now that are having these challenges because we hold stuff in. And a lot of that is due to primary and secondary trauma that we experience, right, in the profession.

We’re in the front line. We see everything. We’re trying to get patient care.

We’re trying to arrest the bad guys. We’re trying to put out that fire. We’re trying to save someone’s life.

Ultimately, all of us in public safety are in life safety mode. All the time. And so you internalize those things.

My mom was a paramedic. Well, she was an EMT here in Washington, DC for DC Fire. And as a kid, I could, you know, you start to get to a certain age, your mother starts kissing on you like, ah, come on, yeah, get out here with all of that.

You know, I’m too grown for that. But as I got into my career, I understood why she did it. She used to come in and sometimes just hug us.

She would be at the station for four days, you know, working 24s, or she might be on this three-day stretch where she’s working these 60-hour days or going in and overtime. And I never really understood it until I actually got into the profession. And then I saw it extended that same care to my kids.

We take in a lot of stuff. And the good thing is, is that over the years, I would say, in public safety, even though we still got a lot of work to do, we try to turn the corner on that and getting more help. But there’s still so many of us that are suffering in silence, that don’t say anything, and they just deal with it.

And then that has a spillover effect into the family, has a spillover effect into patient care, into just day-to-day routines. And so in the Heroes Active Bystandership Training, we dive into that. We get into all of that and why those things occur and how to overcome those challenges.

You know, those are huge points that you’re bringing up there because they’re constant challenges. You know, you look at all those issues that we deal with in what we do in public safety, you see the best of humanity and you see the absolute worst of humanity. And oftentimes you don’t have that.

When we were in the military and we’d come back from combat deployments, you know, they would talk to us all the time about having a battle buddy. You need to have the people, your connection, your family, whoever it may be to reach out to and be able to connect with to talk to things. And I think for many of us, that was life-saving.

I noticed the guys who struggled the most were the ones who try to isolate themselves. Like, oh, they couldn’t understand me. They’ll never understand what I went through.

A little different in the military because when you’re shooting down range and you guys are all like, shoulder to shoulder, shoulder is like, I was literally right next to you. You know, we were literally shooting at the same time. But it’s not always the case on the force because you guys work in small groups and EMSs and, you know, onesy, twosy, I mean, you’re two, typically, I would imagine.

But, you know, it’s just two of you. And you may not be seeing it in the same way. It’s just, you can be an island out there.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s unfortunate at times because of the stigma, but I am encouraged by the newer generation, millennials, Generation Z and ultimately Generation Alpha. Oftentimes, we can view the generation that’s coming up in the workforce now, and we say, well, they’re just don’t understand the culture or they’re too tapped into their feelings.

They’re always asking questions. Well, to a certain degree, that’s good because there’s a lot more awareness. Like, work is only one aspect on the value spectrum versus some of the other generations to where you work when you were sick, you save your time, you didn’t call off work, you were committed to the job no matter what.

And unfortunately, we have colleagues who’ve actually died on the job because they made it their whole entirety of their life. But you have a lot of the newer generation to where work is only one aspect on the value spectrum. So I think there’s something that can be learned about how are we thinking about careers?

How are we really thinking about where EMS is going to go? And how does that really affect the overall responder in terms of just workplace culture fit even at that?

Well, Monte, that’s a great point. I look at it like there’s a balance, right? Like, I have my daughters 27.

You know, they have the grandiose ideas, we should be able to do all this stuff, we should have everything. And I’m like, well, there’s a level of that. And there’s also a level of stand in line, do your time.

There’s value and experiences that you get, you know? Not everybody can go from A to Z as fast as possible and be the next CEO of a hospital or the next police chief or fire chief, right? We got to earn your stripes to a degree.

But I think that aspect of being able to tap into our feelings, be able to talk to each other, and then the training. I think that’s one of the biggest things is just having the programs like your program there to be able to get out to people, to be able to talk to them and say, hey, this exists, right? We’re out there.

We’re now training this. I think it will even get better if this starts becoming standardized training in every, every initial, you know, in the military we call boot camp, you know? But from the get go that, hey, this is the norm now, and this is how we’re trying to lead it.

And I think that’s going to be the next step where we really start to see this consistently getting out there to people. And it won’t be the first time they’re hearing it.

Yeah, you know, one of the things that we have been finding, which we knew through the research of the need in the fire EMS component public safety, is the strong desire to have something like this. And here’s the thing, like we’re not presenting anything or providing anything that they don’t already know, right? Is utilizing the training that they already have, but putting it into very intentional framework that they can apply in different situations.

One of the things that we talk about is we present a intervention time-based framework, right? So we break down situations to early in an event, before an event, later in an event, and then after the event happens. And so when you look at that framework, there are opportunities that you could do things early.

So like, for instance, if Monte is making a mistake, I might just say, no, Monte does that every now and again. But there might be something bigger happening here with Monte, right? There could be a greater thing that’s happening with him outside of the professional space.

He could be experiencing some things professionally, right? And so those mistakes are repeated, I need to focus in a little bit more. And so we introduce some framework, whereas before something even happens, I have some framework that I can start applying towards Monte to be able to dissect what’s happening, not understand exactly what’s happening with him, but identifying the emerging harm that could be there.

And then we introduce framework before the event happens, right? So there’s a difference between early and before, because early is like, all right, I’ve noticed these things, but nothing’s quite happened yet. But before the event, it’s like, all right, something’s getting ready to happen.

And now I’m just catching it, right? I didn’t catch it early enough. And then there’s situations that happen during the event, right?

And so, all right, while the event’s happening, while the harm is happening, here’s some framework. And then we talk about later in the event. And then there’s always something after, there’s always something to do after, there’s always a follow up.

And I think oftentimes that’s where we miss. I think back to my career, and there’s so many situations where I could have intervened, and I didn’t for a variety of reasons, to those challenges, inhibitors, or those barriers that you talked about. And then when that happened to them, where someone lost their career, or they retired, or they medically retired because they had some type of chemical dependency or something like that, the thing that went around the agency was, oh, I knew that was going to happen.

You know, oh yeah, not surprising to me. The reflection that I had was this, well, why didn’t any of us do anything, right? I understand what was inhibiting me, but what’s inhibiting other people?

What’s creating the barriers for other people? And so a lot of the interbeing training is centered around those types of discussions.

Right, you know, I see that. I would imagine to a certain level and degree, it’s similar to the military, is you’ll have an aircraft mishap. Somebody crashed an aircraft for an accident occurs, loss of an aircraft.

And when we get back and we do the after action, when we do the root cause analysis and understand it, you know, they’ll sit there and say, well, that’s the culture of the organization. You know, they always took extra risks, or they’re always going farther and beyond than they have to. And again, it goes to your point of like, but why didn’t anybody step up?

Why are we so reactive? Like, why do four or five guys have to die before we take action and realize like, hey, we need to change culture here? And I would imagine it’s the same on the EMS and the police force as well.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, having served in internal affairs for, I did two tours there, combined both of them in about eight years. And I learned so much about my agency.

I learned so much about employment law. It wasn’t always as bad as people think it is. Just, you know, hey, internal investigation, this is terrible, you know?

IA’s coming to get you.

Yeah, IA’s coming to get me. I mean, now listen, I got less Christmas cards every year. But I learned a lot.

But one of my biggest takeaways, which is a part of why I’m so passionate, what I do now is that the small, if we took care of small things, they wouldn’t have become big things. There’s so many people that had their careers either lost or derailed because someone failed to do something. Someone failed to intervene or stop that thing from happening.

And more importantly, the individual that was impacted or experiencing or going through whatever mishap it was, failed to recognize it within themselves. And so those two components right there is one of the things that really just drove me. And I think drives my colleagues because I’ve worked with my colleagues.

I was just bragging in the hallway to Audrey. I was like, I said, man, I love everybody that I work with because we’re all very passionate. We all have something to share, but we all care so much about public safety.

And it doesn’t matter what you do on public safety. We all have a lot of the same common problems. And it even goes beyond this country because I’ve actually traveled outside of this country and talked to law enforcement outside of here.

And it just astonished me that they do the same thing. The exact same thing. And they have almost, I’m not going to say identical training, but very, very familiar training outside of the walls of this country.

No, that’s absolutely true. I’ve traveled all over the world, and you see the same challenges, same issues. It doesn’t matter what part of the country or world it’s in.

Yeah, and that shows you that there’s a common denominator. We’re all human. And so part of the curricula is that we walk through four different social science experiments so that we take it off of us as EMS or us as public safety professionals.

Now we’re just looking at strictly human behavior, how we’re designed and how we naturally want to react when presented with different types of variables. So the common denominator is that we’re all human, hence why you see it in different professions and industries.

Absolutely. You know, talking about social experiments, I think one that applies somewhat to this, I use in training all the time. It’s called the monkey business illusion.

Have you ever seen that?

Oh, yeah. Is that with the basketball?

Yeah, they’re passing the basketballs around, and then, you know, the monkey walks through, Serena Black and then Kirsten. And I will tell you, when I do that, you know, all together as a team, they will identify all the issues. But there’s not one person who can identify all three of the things.

And I think it’s very similar to that.

It is.

It does take that team, as we train our teams, as we get them integrated, like, you don’t have to see and know everything, but as a team, we can be perfect, right? As a team, we can get it right. When you said social experiment, I was like, I love that one.

Yeah, that’s a good book. I read that. It’s called The Visible Guerrilla by Daniel and Chris, and the concept of what they call inattentional blindness.

Yeah. Oftentimes, because you and I are focused on something right now, it’s like we miss the other layers of information is also associated with that. So yeah, that’s a good read.

So yeah.

Well, awesome. Well, gentlemen, I want to finish this up. I’m going to give you guys a second.

I’d love for each of you to kind of give me one or two words of wisdom from you, from your training, from your experience, from your background. Go ahead and start with you, Greg.

Oh man, words of wisdom. You know, I would just tell people to just be courageous. You know, it is tough with the environment that we’re in, in public safety to be courageous these days for a variety of different reasons.

I mean, if you just look at our social settings, our internal settings, new training that comes out, new people, new thought process, new leadership, new legacies, it is difficult to be courageous. So I would just simply tell folks to be courageous, be observant, and to try to save lives beyond patient care and beyond the public, save those lives internally. When we have classes, I tell and give the challenge to every single member of the class, every student, and telling them that if you can save one life, and you can save one career in public service profession, you far exceeded the expectations of this program.

You can’t save everybody, but if you could just do it one person, one moment, one incident at a time, it helps to better our career. I’m a silver lining guy, so I’m always going to just be in this space of silver lining. But I know that I have, me and my colleagues have saved someone’s career and someone’s life because people have told us as much.

And so I go into every session, every presentation, with the idea that I’m going to be courageous and I’m going to try to change the norms and disrupt things. Change is something that we don’t embrace, but it’s meant to be uncomfortable. And if you’re uncomfortable, that means the change in the behavior to your point is happening in the right direction.

Awesome, I love that, Greg. That’s good. How about you, Monte?

So I’ll say two. One is for the organization culture, and another one is probably for you personally, your personal reflection. So culturally, I would say, whatever you and I tolerate silently, we endorse publicly.

Whatever you permit, you promote.

100%. And so for the personal side, when we’re talking about self-reflection, as people are listening to this conversation, you know, humility actually speeds you up, and ego actually slows you down, right? So when we’re thinking about, even to Greg’s point about being courageous, use that as your backdrop when you’re considering someone and new information and someone probably correcting something about you.

Before you try to figure out a point out things that are bad about them, consider your self-reflection first. And I think that will be the goal in mind for sure.

Awesome. So I’m going to add one in. We had General Neller, the 37th Commandant of the Marine Corps spoke earlier this morning.

Yeah. And one of his leadership tenets that I really like, which I think falls into this, is being humble, right? A lot of times we let our egos get in the way of us doing the right thing.

We can’t be wrong or there’s no way. I think that humble is a very servant leader approach to how we’re going to handle things. A lot of times, just, hey, nobody’s infallible.

You’re not perfect. Be humble. Take it sometimes.

Sometimes you gotta be the one. Mea coppa, right? It’s my fault, my bad.

Right. But, gentlemen, I appreciate you guys very much taking the time today to have the podcast with us at The H&H Impact. Love, love your guys’ program.

It’s awesome to have you guys be a part of it. And thank you so much for being part of the Namaskar Conference today.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me.