Choosing Growth Over Grief with Guest Rick Cheatham | S5 E16

At the end of 2012, I was nominated to the board. And unfortunately, a month later, my son was murdered. So I had to battle coming back from a forced retirement, the death of my son, and then dealing with the conflict and the turmoil of a management and union conflict. And the primary emotion identified with, I was useless as a man because my body did not function the way it used to. There's a way out that life can then be regained and live with a purpose again, but it requires to go within and stop being a victim of your circumstances.

Welcome to Responder Resilience. I'm David Dashinger, and we're excited to have with us today Rick Cheatham. He's the president of RK Consulting Group. He's also a retired captain from the Anaheim Fire Department and retired union president from local 2899. And we're going to dive into rising from the ashes, the power of perspective. We're going to explore how the challenges faced by first responders shape not just their careers but their very identities. So join us as we uncover some powerful truths where pain can be a catalyst for growth and transformation. The struggle you're in right now isn't here to break you, it's here to build you. We invite you to like and subscribe, YouTube Responder Resilience, Facebook, Responder TV, LinkedIn, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and check out our website responderTV.com for past episodes and guest information. Our resource partner, Fight Camp, is offering an exclusive deal for viewers of Responder Resilience. For a limited time, you can get an amazing free package valued at $238, which includes punch trackers, quick wraps, and a free 45-day membership trial. Don't miss out. Email us at inforresponderTV.com with the subject line Fight Camp to claim your free package today. This episode is made possible by the First Responder Center for Excellence. Discover more at FirstResponderCenter.org and connect with us on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. We'll be right back to speak with Rick after this. In this family, more of us die by our own hands and by the hazards of the job.

In this family, up to a quarter of 911 telecommunicators have symptoms of post-traumatic stress. In this family, our mental health and wellness are in crisis, while responders are quietly suffering.

In this family, many struggle with job-related stress, burnout, state disruptions, substance abuse, and relationship problems. In this family, we can help the helpers.

With vital information and resources, resilience strategies, and success stories of overcoming the obstacles.

Welcome to Responder Resilience. We co-host retired Lieutenant David Dashinger, Dr. J. Raymond, and Bonnie Rimley, LCSW EMTV. I want to welcome Rick Cheatham to the show.

Thank you. I appreciate you having me. It's an honor.

I'm going to just read a little bit about you, your background, and then we'll dive into having a great conversation. Rick Cheatham is an inspiring life and career transformation coach with a rich history as a retired fire captain and also past union president in Anaheim, California. His journey is marked by profound personal challenges, including overcoming sexual addiction, the tragic loss of his oldest son, and a severe neck injury that required him to relearn how to walk just five months after retirement. These experiences have fueled his passion for resilience and personal growth. Rick's been married for nearly four decades to his wife Kelly, and he exemplifies dedication to servant leadership and specializes in crisis management, empowering others to navigate life's toughest challenges with clarity and confidence. So, Rick, let's dive in. Let's do it. All right, so as I just said in your bio, you're a retired fire captain and uh past union president. You've had decades of experience on the job. How has your identity as a first responder shaped your perspective on life and relationships both personally and professionally?

That's a good question. Uh you know, when you spend a career in the fire service as a first responder or any first responder uh um type of career, you learn a lot about people. And there's a lot of people that I can relate to who are struggling. And one of the things that I realized in my career is not only do we respond to a community of people who struggle with different types of adversities and challenges, but those struggles and those traumas that we deal with day to day have a have a uh a profound impact on us as first responders. It's hard to move away from some of the stress that we feel when we're dealing with things like full arrests, the different traumas, the different fires, the different uh different calls that we go on that uh are very traumatic. And we think that we're okay, we think that we're probably able to navigate this, but in time, those little things just keep adding up and they compound over years of years of service. And before you know it, it affects you pretty profoundly, usually in a negative way. So that's kind of what I've learned about the whole process. Uh it's really enlightened me to have a lot more empathy having navigated that side of my life and now on retirement and dealing with all the issues that I had to deal with, uh just gave me a real connection to people at a heart level.

Well, that's uh that's so important. And especially as a fire officer, supervisor, a leader, um, how did you how was it for you as a fire captain um to have people under your command or under your supervision who you were responsible for, right? And that's that's the kind of uh things we it's the inwardly facing leadership that we have um in the fire service. What was that like for you? And how did you find you were able to serve them with, you know, say compassion and to help them through their challenges?

When I became a firefighter, um, I was a little older in life, so I'd already create I'd already started a career in uh construction. So I'd spent several years as a as a contractor and felt like it wasn't what I really wanted to do. It wasn't really my purpose or my desire. It was just what I needed to do to fill in uh because becoming a firefighter came with a list of uh credible background, if you will. And mine wasn't very credible. I had a lot of problems in my early years, uh, you know, overcoming um sexual addiction. Uh it nearly destroyed my my wife, it nearly destroyed my family. Ten years into my marriage, my wife said she quit. She hated me, God, and the church, and she was done. And uh it started me down a road of self-discovery, self-awareness, and literally started me to put the pieces back together in my own life. Fortunately, I was able to do that before I became a firefighter. So I had already experienced um the process of diving into myself and developing my inner personal skills as not just a man, but as somebody who was out to provide value and service to other people. So when I became a firefighter, um I used a lot of the tools that I had learned along that journey to pour into the people that I had the opportunity to serve. So for me, it became very evident once I promoted a captain, I did not want to be the type of supervisor that was fixated on just results. What I wanted was I wanted to build people, I wanted to build my my crew, I wanted to uh develop them as men so that they could become the men that they wanted to be, and more importantly, the husbands that they wanted to be in their own home. So for me, the value was personal relationship over results because I realized that you can ask for results all you want. And anybody who's ever worked for a supervisor who put that as the priority on the list is making sure your the results were completed the way they wanted it to, it allowed me a different opportunity. I would rather build them up as people and the results come naturally rather than have to force them. And I was very fortunate. My whole career, I had the greatest crews I've I I could imagine. I had to manage anyone, all I had to do is show interest and pour into their lives as humans, and they produced the results because of the the uh um the gratitude that they had that I was a supervisor who was really interested in them as a person.

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Yeah, perfect. Yeah. Um you know, it was um we were going through uh our department was going through a rather difficult time. We had um we had hired a new chief from from outside who came in and was more of uh he was more of a disruptor than a unifier. He he came in here with an with an agenda. And the agenda was to cut our resources, cut our budget, and follow through with uh city managers' desires to you know bring down the cost of doing business as a firefighter and and the budgets uh that they had to deal with. And although I I recognized at the time that I I I wanted to support this man, I found within a year uh his agenda and the direction he was going was was more self-centered than anything else. And I decided I'm gonna run for the board. So I ran for the board in uh in uh uh 2012. At the end of 2012, I was nominated to the board. And unfortunately, a month later, my son was murdered, and I was able to take four months off from my obligation as a new board member to navigate the tragedy of our loss, and although although I was dealing with the grief of my son, instead of pouring into that in a healthy way, I chose rather to pour into the work of union business and protecting our membership from what seemed to be at the time uh a hostile takeover, to put it bluntly. And within a year, our organization, our membership, voted me to become the president of the union to lead them through that. So when you ask, you know, tell me about what was going on with your son, there was so much that was going on at the time. Um I was forced into retirement by this chief um with an injury that I sustained, knowing full well that the injury would be would would would soon heal, and there was no reason for me to force myself into retirement. So I had to battle coming back from a forced retirement, the death of my son, and then dealing with the you know the conflict and the turmoil of a management and union uh conflict. So when I got the notice that my son had died, uh for the first four months, it really caused me to just reflect on my family. But as time went on, I started to bury all the emotion, all the pain, all the suffering that I was dealing with. And it started me down this road of being angry and bitter and resentful, not just towards you know, the fight that I was in as a union president, but it got to the place where life started to feel like it was unfair. How is it that you know my son was the one that was murdered? It just felt like life was hitting me at different levels that caused me to become more stressed about life in general, and um seeing the impact that my son's death had on me and my family started to take me down a road where um I became very angry and bitter. And what I realized was that even though we suffered a tragedy, it was the remnant of the emotional pain that was left behind that was literally killing me from the inside out. Uh the resentment that I was holding on to, the bitterness, the the unforgiving spirit was uh was a toxin that was riddling my body and destroying me emotionally. And um I got to a place where I just that I couldn't do that anymore. And um, you know, I know that many firefighters go through uh all kinds of different trials and struggles in their life, and a lot of it's job related, I know. Um the stress and the impact that the job has on us. But even though we go through that stress and we go through that with uh the negative effects of it, there's a way out that life can then be regained and lived with a purpose again. But it requires to go within and stop being a victim of your circumstances, and that's what I found happened to me with the with the loss of my son. I became a victim very quickly, a victim of another man's decision, a victim of another man's greed, a victim of another man's evil character, and it affected our family at a level that I've never experienced. And I became justified. So I know that there's many of us out there in the fire service that feel justified, justified to have the the trauma that we have uh um in our lives because of what we deal with every day. PTSD, PTSI, PTS, uh, we all struggle at some level with those types of uh issues, and it's easy to become victimized by it. And what I learned through my my journey was the more that I focused on the adversity and the challenges as a victim, the more stuck I felt as a man and as a human. And the more I lost my bearing, and it became almost like uh like a journey through my own wilderness, if you will, trying to find myself. And at the end of the day, what I recognized is the best way through this, the best way in a storm is through it, rather than running from it, just go through it, face it. And on the other side of that, I found so much more hope and resilience and found purpose that navigating life could eat could could easily become um my pit or it could become my pedestal. And I chose to climb out of the pit and become uh the pedestal for others to see that it is possible to navigate through your adversity, no matter what the challenge may be.

Thank you for sharing that. And you you used the word chose um because um obviously there there is choice in these matters, but you were dealing with incredible adversity on many different levels, many different fronts. So was there like a moment when you had an insight or you know, light bulb went off that kind of helped to switch the course of everything, you know, the kind of victim identity um and the the darkness to kind of start to move towards a different sort of path?

You know, during that period, I was so focused on my career and the job at hand as the union president of our or of uh of our membership. So I didn't focus a lot on that. I maintained, I I I actually used my my trauma, I used that as fuel to uh have the courage to go up against uh some pretty daunting. Um pretty daunting experiences, you know. You know, a captain as a union president dealing with a fire chief, there's that rank issue, but yet a lot of times we're in those positions, and those of us who are have the the the less rank, we some we sometimes just go ahead and we cave into the ways and the wishes of of the leadership. And I wasn't about to do that in this case. So it gave me the courage to just continue to fight. I didn't have the transformational moment until it was after I retired. I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and five months into my retirement, I fell and broke my neck at C4 and five and was paralyzed from the chest down. It was through that process that got me to that stage of transformation. It was there that I lost my identity. It was there that I lost my purpose. It was there that I took my victim mentality to a level of uh feeling pity, feeling useless, feeling uh like I had lost my identity as a man.

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You've described this um when you and I were talking. Um can you paint us a picture of exactly what that was like? You know, what life was like for you now that you've you're five months into retirement, now you've had a catastrophic uh fracture of your spine. Um so where did that, you know, physically, what were you doing, and and how did that affect your ability to do this inward reflection that you're talking about?

My my accident was was having a sinkable episode uh on the way back from the restroom, and I fell face first, broke my neck, as I said, and uh spent the next three months in uh the hospital after they fused my neck. Um was able to regain the ability to walk, but it took it took uh uh several months. In the process of that, my fire department along with my wife, they set an environment for my healing while I was in the hospital. My wife created this environment that was as because she was a she was a nurse, she she's uh she was an ICU nurse. So she understood that my environment, my mindset was going to be huge for me to be able to bounce back from this. I didn't know if I'd ever walk again. Um my department was sending people my union, the my my membership. They they had people flying out here. So the entire time I was in the hospital, I literally had union support. And I'm retired. They were here every day. I had people in my room, and I'm 2,000 miles away from California. And uh the love and support that I received from my wife and my my uh my brothers and sisters uh gave me so much inspiration to push and to ensure that I would walk out of there. And three months later, I walked out of that hospital with a hope and a dream that I would regain the function and use of my body again. It wasn't until everybody left and my wife went back to work that I was left by myself to reflect on this 10-year window that I had gone through, losing my son in my early 50s and breaking my neck in my late 50s. And that's when life started to become unfair. That's when I started to really look at life through the lens of man, this sucks. I've spent my entire career, can count on one hand how many times I was injured and had to go on uh, you know uh IA for for uh rehabilitation. It was just incredibly disheartening that now five months in, I'm I'm I'm I had the expectation I was gonna be enjoying my my uh my retirement, and now I can't do anything that I used to do. I can't work with my hands, I can't uh walk across the room uh without in without extreme difficulty. Uh I couldn't run, I couldn't exercise, I could only do little minor things to try to get my head right, and it just wasn't working. So I became very, very angry and resentful for life. And at one point, literally contemplating ending it all. What's the purpose? It's just so unfair. I thought I did everything right, and yet here I am um in my late 50s, looking at the rest of my life with this new normal. And I ended up meeting a man that you know he helped me navigate it a little bit by asking me, you know, what is it? Why do I feel like I'm useless? And I told him, I said, you don't understand. I mean, I don't have the use of my body like I once did. I was a fire captain, I was a USAR captain, I was a union president. I had all these identities that were surrounding me with a very active lifestyle, and now I can't do anything. Hell, I couldn't even wipe my own rear end. You know, you talk about useless. I had to rely on other people to do the things that I knew I could do for myself one time, and um just left me feeling like uh there was no hope, left me feeling like there was uh no reason to live anymore. And my wife pulled me aside and said, I feel like you're giving up. I feel like you're giving up on life, and I was, and she said, Rick, I can't do this anymore. And we'd been married, you know, well over, you know, 30 some odd years. And my wife is saying, If this is how it's gonna end, I can't stay with you, I can't watch this. She says, You need to get some help. So I met this man, and his name's Nick Santanostaso, and as he started to work through this with me, he said, What is the primary identity? What's the primary emotion that you identify with right now? And the primary emotion I identified with, I was useless as a man because my body did not function the way it used to. Well, it was interesting. Nick asked me, he says, Do you think I'm useless? Of course, I said, No, of course you're not. Well, the reason he asked that is because he said, You put a lot of a lot of validity in the use of your body mechanics. Well, Nick had no legs and one arm, and yet I was able to identify that he was of use. But here I am, I've got all my body, you know, I I can function, and I'm having this pity party. And that started me down the course of reigniting the spirit within to try to overcome and achieve uh my mind set in a in a way that would produce the results I needed. And so from Nick's first introduction, I started a deep dive into meditation, mind shifting, taking responsibility, stop being victimized, and become an instrument, become a light for others who go through the same types of traumas, and then put that information, put that experience in a way so that your firefighter family could then see that anything is possible if you have the right mindset. Now, coming from that union perspective, and at the time when we were looking for mental health uh advocates to help our brothers and sisters dealing with PTSD and PTSI, it was very important for me to then turn that back inward to where it all began and start helping firefighters who were struggling with their own demons and with their own uh experiences and their own pain and their own suffering, so that we don't have to bury anymore to suicide, so that we don't have to deal anymore uh with the trauma that comes along with a broken home and the remnants of what that does to not only the couple in the marriage, but with their families and use that as a as a tool to develop and inspire others to take the challenge of becoming the hero of their own story. Because once I realized that anything is possible with the right mindset, then it's all about putting the focus on the life you want. See, we don't get the life we we want necessarily, we get the life we focus on, and we can confuse that real easy. We can say, This is the life I want, but in the meantime, we're still focusing on all the shit in the past, all the all the baggage that we come to the table with, all the calls, all the trauma, all the all the uh the the reality of of being a victim of our careers, being a victim of not getting promoted when you should have been promoted, being a victim of suffering um the pain and and and and the trauma of uh adversity and challenges, and that stress that we feel as a result just starts unloading you know that cortisol dump that we get addicted to over time. And so we live in this fight or flight system day in and day out, and by doing that, all it was doing to me was it was feeding the negative emotion, and I would then just keep creating it over and over and over. I could not get past ruminating on my past. And once I shifted gears to stop looking at the past and start looking to the future where I could be of service, where I could be of value, where I could help others climb out of their own pit, I realized very soon that that was the answer. So, in forgiving the man that murdered my son, forgiving myself for retiring and breaking my neck five months in, forgiving myself for living the life of a victim, forgiving myself for getting to the place where I just almost decided it was time to call it quits. It allowed me to have the fuel necessary to take this journey to the next level and helping our brothers and sisters who suffered in the same way.

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I want to pick up on that thought about forgiveness because that's a huge piece and something that many of us struggle with. Um got the anger, the resentment, and then we have the need to forgive, but sometimes we don't know how to get there. How do we, you know, how do we actually forgive ourselves? How do we forgive others we feel have, you know, um perpetrated transgressions against us? What what worked for you in terms of finding forgiveness for for yourself and for others?

Well, worked for me was I got tired of living with the poison that was destroying me and my family. Resentment is uh it's a source of a lot of pain. Um and justified resentment is even worse because when you're justified to resent, that means you're justified to hold on to that pain and not let it go. And in my justification of resentment and anger and bitterness, I was looking at a man who murdered my son. And by anybody's account, I was justified to hold on to that. Um the problem with holding on to that is it's like holding on to the venom of a snake. The poison that riddles your body will destroy you if you don't get the help to remove that poison and that toxin from within. The snake does what a snake does. Once it bites, it's gone. And the snake that murdered my son, he's in prison for the rest of his life. And I was almost feeling like if I forgave him, it was letting him off the hook. In reality, it let me off the hook. So when I got to the place of recognizing I'm really no different than that man. I mean, before I became a firefighter, I nearly destroyed my wife's heart by cheating on her with a sexual addiction. And she got to the place where she hated me so much that she was really, she was, she was really ready to walk out that door until I made a change. Looking back at it now, it was almost like you did that to her, and then this murderer did this to you. Can you find at least a common ground of realizing that yeah, you didn't murder somebody's child, but you nearly murdered the heart of the woman that you said you love more than life itself. You betrayed her at a level that nearly broke her. So when I connected the two, that you know, really in life, there's a lot of times when we look at life and we we criticize and judge other people, but if we'll re if we're if we're really honest, we can find areas in our own life where we're just as guilty of hurting other people. So there's this concept that I learned, uh, you know, when you know it's a it's actually a spiritual concept that you got to take the beam out of your eye first before you can start helping those with a speck in their eyes. And so it caused me to go back and do a real deep dive into who I am, who I said I was, what I said I believed in. And I believe that I was a forgiving man. So if I was truly what I said I was, maybe I can learn to forgive the man that actually murdered my son. And once I did that, once I was able to put those two pieces together and forgive him, the resentment, the bitterness, the anger all just left. And it was almost immediately. I have my uh my stepmother said, uh, you know, I don't know what you did to change, but there was this underton of anger and bitterness that was always running through you, and now I see the old Rick back. And that's what it was like. It was like I finally got my life back. So for our audience today, I don't know what you've been through, I don't know what challenges you're faced with, I don't know your adversities, but I do know mine, and I know that they nearly put me in a place where I could never be a value to another person again until I forgave myself and the man who killed my son, but then forgive myself for taking this victim ride for so long that nearly destroyed my wife again. So forgiveness became the true nature of setting myself free. And what really motivated in the end was what I believe Jesus on the cross, when he looked out in the audience of those who were putting him to death, he said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. It's easy to forgive people when there's really no test behind it, but to forgive the unforgivable, that's where the rubber meets the road. And if we get to a place where that's impossible, it's okay. However, it's just going to weigh on you with resentment and bitterness, and your life will have an undertonment of anger, like my stepmom told me mine had, and it will affect every relationship that you enter into from here on out, even the relationship towards the person you love the most, your spouse and your children, they will suffer the most because you're not around, you're checked out, you're a victim. And when you're a victim, you have no control. And when you have no control, you have no way out. And so I offer a way out. I've been through That battleground. I've been through that battlefield. I know what it's like to have to forgive somebody that doesn't deserve your forgiveness. And I know what the outcome looks like. It's an outcome of peace. It's an outcome of joy. It's an outcome of happiness. It's an outcome of finding purpose. It's an outcome of finding value. Not in the trial, but as a result of the trial, you learn these gold nuggets. And when we face adversity and we can find the gold nugget in the adversity, that's when we realize just how empowered we can become when we look for the gold in the adversity that's trying to take us down.

Well, thank you for all that and the powerful reframe on that how to look at things, uh, you know, where there's a gift in the adversity and the challenge. And I want to get to what you're doing now to pay all this forward. But before I do, just curious, do you have like a daily practice that helps you stay grounded and focused and in, you know, in the present moment, sort of how do you how do you kind of stay uh in that in that place of peace that you were describing?

Well, uh I start every morning with meditation. That that for me is the foundation. Um, and uh it's a non-negotiable. So every morning I start the day with a meditation. It could be anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes. It just depends. Some of them are guided meditations, others are just quiet meditations. Um working out. I got back into working out. I hired a personal trainer to get my physical body back into shape, and uh that's been very helpful. And of course, my spiritual connected to my creator, being reconnected back to him in a way that uh is meaningful, and mind shifting becomes a part of that meaningful meditation that I spend every morning. And then at night I end my night with a quick minute meditation as well, just observing where it was in my day that I fell short and how I could be a better person tomorrow, better version of myself, and move forward from there. It's not that I don't make the mistakes, it's not that I don't go back and think about the things of the past, it's just now I become much more aware of it and I can stop myself, and then in the present moment I can make a different decision.

I appreciate you sharing that. And you've been through quite a bit and you've had quite an amazing career, um, both as a fire captain, but also as a union leader. Um how are you paying that all forward today? Like, what are you doing with your life that is sort of like giving you purpose and and the uh the opportunity to be of service to others?

We all go through darkness. We cannot escape the darkness that's out there. We are challenged by outside forces that lead us down a dark path. Some of us anesthetize that pain through addictions, um, through pushing away those we love the most. Um they end up in rehabs, they end up in marriage counseling, they end up uh in divorce court, they end up uh child custody issues, and it's their darkness. And what I want, what I bring back now is I bring light to that darkness. I shine my light in the dark places of our brotherhood's trauma and their pain and their suffering as a guide, as one that brings hope, as one that can bring resilience, as one who can share how to navigate to those dark corners of our life that we don't want to deal with. So it's turned me into a man who is his priority is pouring back into our brotherhood for all that the brotherhood has done for me. It's time for me now to pour back into them as a light, as a guide, as a resource. And so I'm a transformational coach now. I'm a transformational marriage coach. Um, I help people navigate their darkest hours. And in that process, I teach them how to mind shift past the bullshit and get into the reality of who they truly are. Every one of us, every one of us, no exceptions, has a warrior inside. We wouldn't be in this profession if we didn't have that warrior in us, if we didn't have that desire to help, that desire to overcome, that desire to be, uh make a difference. Unfortunately, we lose our way and can't find the hero within ourselves. And so my purpose now and my program is designed to highlight the hero that's in every one of you and bring that hero to life, and bring that hero to where it needs to be, and that's the same hero that put you in the career to begin with, and you started rescuing others in their trauma. It's time to become the hero of your trauma and find your way out, and that's not always easy, but with the right guide and the right light, it makes that transformation a journey of awakening to find your purpose. And I help men now find their purpose, find their purpose as a man, find their purpose as a husband, find their purpose as a leader, so that they become the true warriors that they were created to be in the first place.

I salute you for that. There's no higher calling than uh to be of service to your brothers and sisters as you are now. And uh, and I was just thinking as you were saying that, you know, I I collect the sound bites of each guest to kind of make a an introduction when the show starts, you know, just like the snippets that you know, the best of kind of to get people draw people into the to the episode. And you just unloaded so many amazing sound bites in what you just said, Rick. So uh um I really want to just give you credit for um not only the amazing journey that you've had and and and flipping it uh through that choice that you made, but also um continuing to be of service to your brothers and your sisters in a way that is so profound and so important and so much needed. So um having said that, where can people find you? Website, social media, books, anything like that?

Uh my social media, that probably the best way is just uh I've got a website, uh riccheatham.com. And in that you can get connected with uh my social media pages on Instagram and Facebook. And I just recently just recently opened up a YouTube channel. It's a whole new venture for me. It's probably it's probably one of the most difficult things I'm learning how to navigate is is YouTube. But anyway, I believe it's uh www.youtube at Ricky C AFD, is I believe the uh the the the URL. So it's whatever YouTube uses, and it's at Ricky C AFD. And Ricky C AFD stands for Ricky C, which is my name, Rick Cheatham. And then the AFD is the department that I will forever be grateful for for giving me the chance to be the man I am today, and that's Anaheim Fire Department. So it's Ricky C AFD.

And then are you doing anything else? I know you were we were talking about uh some of the other kinds of outreach you're doing. What else are you doing out there to uh keep spreading this information and your story?

Uh I'm I'm I I am a keynote uh speaker, so I'll be speaking at uh a conference in October up in Ohio, a first responders health and wellness conference. Um I coach men, I have a coaching business, so I work one-on-one with men. I work with group counseling as well with men, and uh I'm in the process of writing a book. I don't know when exactly that book's gonna be completed, but I'm in the process of it. Excellent.

I'm glad to hear that. Um, we'll look forward to seeing the book when it's done. And Rick, um, it's been a pleasure having all these conversations with you, and especially this one today. I want to again thank you and salute you for being so willing to share things that are difficult, I'm sure, to uh to put out there in public. But I know that uh you know that it's gonna impact people in such a positive way that you're bringing the light to perhaps uh someone else's darkness. So thank you so much for being here today. And uh just know that I appreciate you and look forward to speaking with you again.

Well, I thank you too, David, and I appreciate the work you're doing for uh for our for our brothers, you know, for our cause, for our family. Um, it's so needed. We are so uh we are so stressed from the day-to-day activities of a firefighter, first responder, and what you do on this show is you bring that to an attempt, you bring that to, you highlight that in a way that brings about results. And I appreciate what you're doing.

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