S6 E37 Cultural Empathy vs. Competency: How Chief Manny Almaguer Actually Earns Trust

SPEAKER_04 0:00

And so, as a leader, to develop trust, I really believe go out there and start having these conversations with community groups that are centered on building mental health programs or long-term or short-term recovery. I believe that is probably the most effective tool that us as leaders have is to have that eye story and establish some trust with the people that you lead. Everybody should be functioning at a basic mental health competency level, just like we have CPR. Well, how do we take care of each other? How do we provide opportunities for growth? And all that I believe encompasses psychological safety. Do you have my back? Do I feel I can come to you in those moments of triumph and of crisis?

Voiceover 0:46

Welcome to Responder Resilience, along with Bonnie Rumoli, LCSW, EMT, I'm David Ashinger. 4,500 people applied to be a Denver firefighter the year that Manny Almaguer did. Only 40 got in. He ranked number eight. Twenty-six years later, he's assistant chief and he stopped counting the fires. Now he counts how many of his people stayed home in one piece mentally. Cultural competency, that's a class you sit through. Cultural empathy, that's relationship you build. Manny learn the difference the hard way, and he's here to show you why one just checks a box and the other saves careers. This episode is brought to you by Fight Camp, real training on your schedule. Head to joinfightcamp.com/slash RR and use code RESILIIENTE for 10% off. We invite you to like and subscribe, YouTube Responder Resilience, Facebook Responder TV. We're on LinkedIn, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our website is respondertv.com. We'll be right back to speak with Chief Omlage right after this. Ask a first responder who they are. And you're likely to hear I am a police officer.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

I am a firefighter.

Voiceover 1:56

I am a perfect.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

I am a 911 communication operator.

Voiceover 2:01

I do this work. I do this. Ask a clinician why they work with first responders. And they may say, no firefighters, join us in tape of culture where mental health, wellness, and leadership. And we're no enough to carry the weight. Welcome to responder reality. We spend a spotlight on the unseen battles of first responder reality. And celebrate the powerful wins that come from the grit of post-traumatic group. We understand the culture under the trust and bring you conversations from the change makers, passionate about helping first responders come home home.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

With your host, retired Lieutenant David Dashinger, Dr. Stacy Raymond, and Bonnie Room, LCSW EMT.

Voiceover 2:58

We'd like to welcome Chief Manny Omaguer. He's an assistant chief to the Denver Fire Department, and 26 years in, he's worn nearly every hat, division chief of fire prevention, assistant chief of both training and operations, ASMAC captain, and lieutenant in administration. For the last 15 years, he's been a national voice on first responder mental health, invited to speak at the White House, the Pentagon, at NATCON on suicide prevention, and men's mental health. Before the fire service, he was a psychiatric nurse. That background shapes everything he does now, building programs that actually work, not just ones that look good on paper. Chief, welcome to Responder Resilience.

SPEAKER_04 3:37

Good morning. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure.

Bonnie Rumilly 3:41

Thank you for your time, Chief. As a fellow member of the First Responder Psychology Club, I I can't wait to hear about your story. Um, I feel like we talk a lot about first responders retiring and becoming therapists, but we don't have a lot of people in the psych world who then became first responders or vice versa. So it would be great to hear your story on that.

SPEAKER_04 4:06

Absolutely. You know, I had uh just graduated from high school and you know, me knowing everything in life, I'd passed up on a scholarship in journalism. And was pretty much given a couple weeks to go find a job of my own, go to college, went to the military. And if I didn't uh produce those results in two weeks, then I was pretty much out of my house. So, you know, as fate would have it. You know, I ended up applying at the state of Colorado. At a job I really didn't even know what it was. I just actually was kind of stranded in a parking lot, went in, walked into this lobby and applied just so I could uh be welcomed back in my home and kind of have my parents off my case for a bit. And little did I know that I was working at the institution uh for the severe development when I disabled at age 18. You know, was I ill-equipped? Absolutely. Mentally, I was ill-equipped. You know, I I was invincible and I, you know, had all my friends were out there doing what 18-year-old, you know, young men do. I was put into a place where it just really really just made me so aware of human interaction, being able to be very, very sensitive to auditory and visual uh stimulus and overload. And uh it was it was a lot to take in at age eighteen, but I'm so grateful that it happened that way. Uh as it did help me transition into the fire service and just gave me just an overall heightened level of situational awareness and ability to read people and ability to relate to people. Because for so many years I had related to individuals that were nonverbal. So I had to learn how to pick up on nonverbal communication, reading the environmental, as we called it uh still called the milieu and uh just being able to maintain calmness, steadiness, and just find alternative approaches and how to relate to people.

Voiceover 6:03

Yeah, I love the uh the common ground between doing your job as a psychiatric nurse and then uh becoming a firefighter and ultimately a uh you know a leader in the department. Can you go a little deeper into how those skills transferred and how you might have used them in different leadership positions to uh to work with your crews?

SPEAKER_04 6:24

You know, I had come into the fire service fairly equipped, more than the my classmates, you know. Like I said, I had been around a lot of, as I call it, institutional trauma, things that I didn't even know that would would come back to shape me, and be able to forewarn me, so to speak, in a way I'd be in environments as a firefighter. I'm like, Wait, I've been here before. And I would start to get a little a little nervous, a little anxious, and then I'd have to go back to where did this come from? Well, a lot of it came from the institution. So I learned how to channel that into being able to go into environments and use it as a like a uh a heightened mechanism of ability to read uh situations and scenarios and to, as we call it, scene safety. And you know, I I I didn't really understand it until I got uh well into it into my career. And so that's when I really started to kind of morph into how did this prepare me and what skills did this give me, and was able to, you know, uh navigate through some of these scenarios that we've all been through and to learn and to delve in deep to like what do they mean? And that's when I really started to understand that I came into the fire service with trauma. You know, and I I learned that not everything came as a result of being a firefighter, a lot of it came from my experience in being a psychiatric registered nurse and being a uh before that a licensed psychiatric technician in the institutional setting. So a lot of that would just give me just kind of a template on how to move forward in the fire service and to start building mechanisms and how to start developing protective factors and resiliency to what I already had brought into the fire service.

Bonnie Rumilly 8:13

It's really interesting because the skills that you need to handle yourself, but also to read the population when you're in an inpatient facility is really unique. Yeah, I did it for one summer only, but you had years and years of this experience. So I would imagine coming into a department or going on scene, you can read body language, you can read behaviors, you might even be able to notice when something will happen before it happens at that escalation point that other people I think would miss. Could you speak to that a little bit?

SPEAKER_04 8:48

Yes, you know, it was actually I was such on a heightened, hyper-vigilant level of always assuming that something was around the corner. You know, when you work mainly in a psychiatric setting, you know, and I worked on a on a assaulted unit and I worked on a behavior modification unit where everything was tied to consequences and reinforcement and very very uh detailed treatment plans around assaulted behavior. So I I came into the fire service with this heightened level, like something is always gonna happen. My mind just never was able to rest. It was always heightened, like, okay, you know, if somebody around the corner, somebody's gonna come bursting out of the door. I'd go into people's homes on a medical call, and you're just always just kind of waiting. And I had to learn that it wasn't always that way. It sure gave me a a new skill in the fire service, which I thought was more advanced than than most people I was working with. But I also had to train myself on to being able to come in and focus on my job, providing patient care, communicating with patients, and still be in tune to what's going on around me, but not so focused on okay, something is going to happen that's that's going to make me feel threatened.

Bonnie Rumilly 10:10

No, that's a great point that you came out of that environment with hypervigilance, really, is what you're describing. So it's great that you're able to recognize it, learn strategies. Maybe we can circle back on that a little bit more. I know David has another question for you.

Voiceover 10:26

Well, just to kind of tag along with the theme, um, if you were meeting a captain who's never heard the term psychological safety before, how would you explain it to him? How would you define it?

SPEAKER_04 10:39

That's a great question. It's in a setting, any setting, but many with other settings where there's a lot of dynamic and changing environments and some volatile environments. Psychological safety, I would explain to this captain is do you have my back? And that is, do you offer me an environment where I feel safe, protected, and and be and and and having the permission to be courageous and vulnerable to speak what's on my mind. And it's whether I'm having, you know, the best day of my life, it's on I'm having the worst day of of my life. And a lot of that comes with, you know, having been in those settings for so long. Uh, and I talk about the institutional settings, and a lot of it, unfortunately, was groundhog day, you know, and a lot of it could be uh based upon, you know, days where I would come in and say, you know what, there's really going to be no progress. You know, I'm coming in here and um basically taking care of people, and I'll come in five years later, and it'll pretty much be the same treatment plan. And so I had to train myself into looking at, okay, what are the positive outcomes when when working with people? And a lot of that comes to is how do we lift each other up? How do we empower people? How do we take care of each other? How do we provide opportunities for growth? And all that I believe encompasses psychological safety. Do you have my back? Do you do I feel I can come to you and uh in those moments of triumph and of crisis?

Voiceover 12:13

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Bonnie Rumilly 13:04

Now we talk a lot about leadership and building this kind of awareness and trying to teach leaders how to get in touch with their personnel, how to provide this safety. Can you give some tangible thoughts or steps that a leader could take if if they don't have your background to build that kind of safety in their department underneath them?

SPEAKER_04 13:26

Sure. You know, when I started 15 years ago and having these conversations and building programs around mental health, resiliency, wellness, we really focused a lot on data. And sure that back then it had a lot of the shock factor, a lot of the wow factor. And we started to roll out these programs and people would understand, like, okay, number one, I'm not alone. But as we started to navigate through a lot of these training programs, you realize the most key element is trust. And it's not, you know, we in the fire service and the first responder community, if we even sniff something that we feel is a check-in-the-box type program, you already kind of see this retract and become defensive. But if you come in as a leader and you start to develop trust, and a lot of that comes with, and I mentioned this in some of the uh conversations and conferences I speak at, is having an eye storage. How do you relate to the people that you lead? You know, we have we have software programs that we that you know uh are part of our staffing. We have software programs that uh we enter our incident management runs and we have software programs on just about everything in the fire service. Well, we all go, we do a QA, QI, we audit those programs for efficiency. But I as as leaders, I I I really believe we need a lot more work to do in doing some auditing of the resources and the programs that are there for our most valuable asset, our people. And so as a leader to develop trust, I really believe go out there and start having these conversations with resources in your community, community groups that are centered on building mental health programs or or or long-term or short-term recovery. And when you go and you sit down with one with a with a member of your crew or a member of your organization, and rather than handing them a pamphlet and saying, call this number because I I sense that you're going through something, it's it's it's such a powerful message to tell them, you know, I've called this program, I've called 988. Here's how it goes. You know, there's uh there's different types of avenues that you can go, whether you're in a crisis or whether you just need some guidance. Here are the pros that I I saw, or I I you know, that I um I I I took away from the conversation. Here's some of the things that they could possibly build on. And you kind of tailor it towards your members and audience that you're that you're um speaking with. And I believe that is probably the most effective tool that us as leaders have is to have that eye story and establishing trust with the people that you lead.

Voiceover 16:21

That's so important. And uh I heard you speak at the first responder center for excellence uh mental wellness symposium in Iowa a couple of months ago, and uh you covered all some of some of this really well. And one of the things that you mentioned that I really took note of was uh something you call the kick the tires audit. And I think it relates to what you're describing. Um when you do that, who are you making contact with? Who picks up the phone, and what are you listening for? What are you trying to get from that conversation so that you can show up as a leader when one of your members needs a resource?

SPEAKER_04 16:57

Yeah, great question. So it it's a matter of, you know, uh I I call 988 and I say, you know, I'm I'm a first responder. I've been with my department for you know XYZ years. You know, I just want to know, can you run me through a trial run of what it would be like if I called in, you know, not quite sure what I need. And emails they're so they're so welcoming and they're so gracious, and they're just so happy to share this information with you. So they'll share with you, you know, what would you what this looks like if you just need to kind of find some outlet or some community resources that maybe they can help you find. Then I've also said, okay, I am in a crisis and I have nobody uh in my support network. I am calling you because I am at a set uh at a stage of full test and helplessness. And I and I do have a plan. You know, so we go that route. I've always, you know, I I lost my little sister to to the effects of alcoholism a couple years ago, and I and I never really understood why she wouldn't go to uh long-term recovery such as Alcoholics Anonymous. And I've had members uh in my career who I've worked with who have struggled with alcohol addiction. So rather than just assume this was a big mystery, I just picked up the phone and I um called a local Alcoholics Anonymous and went on a virtual uh meeting and and attended one in person. And they're just so grateful that you know somebody who's an a a non-uh alcoholic is willing to come in, sit in that space with them to learn about the struggles that they're uh going through, to learn about their their their progress. And you know, those takeaways, the next time I sit down with somebody who's having any um issues with addiction alcoholism, it it's just it just bridges the gap. And it just and it's just it's just a powerful conversation to know that you at least have an idea of of what these services and programs offer to the people who are in the most vulnerable states.

Voiceover 19:08

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Bonnie Rumilly 19:52

I observe that people don't call these facilities or programs out of fear. I mean, even someone who doesn't have the problem has fear sometimes to make a call or to find out about a program. And I think it's really inspiring that you're talking about picking up the phone and getting it done, just like we would do to get the tires changed or to get something done in the station. Um, this shouldn't be hard in a way, right? So I guess there's a couple of questions there, but how do we help people overcome that fear of the unknown? Because I think we're fighting the stigma, we're doing a great job, but there is still some unknown, I think, that causes that fear. What do you recommend in that realm?

SPEAKER_04 20:38

Well, you know, I think the stigma of the unknown and the fear of reaching out to resources has a lot to do with the messaging that's coming from from the top. And if it it's if it's an environment where it's supportive, it's empathetic, and it it is not in any way related to performance or discipline or or labeling, then I believe people will start taking those steps. And I would say that it's a matter of it starting at the top, going down to your command officers, going down to your supervisors. And then as I mentioned, in Iowa, everybody should be functioning at a basic mental health competency level, just like we have CPR. All of us in the fire service can perform CPR, we know the ABCs. Everybody should know the ABCs of mental health competency and how to read your coworker, how to have those conversations with your co worker, uh have uh at least a few resources that you can chat with them about, uh be a buddy with them uh during uh the time that they're going through. And then We also need to know, like, okay, well, where do I go after I hand off a patient we we've just performed CPR? And will they go to the paramedics? Well, the paramedics in the first responder community would be your social workers, they would be well your clinicians. And then ultimately they go to the emergency room doctor. And then that would be our psychiatrists, our psychologists. So we're not asking everybody to be the saviors and our brothers and sisters keeper when it comes to recognizing, you know, when they're in a crisis, but everybody should have the basic mental health competency. And when you start saturating that in an organization, and people know that people one day they could be the engineer, the next day it could be the senior firefighter. And you know, the more options and the more people you know that are in this with you, I think that's where you start alleviating the stress and the anxiety and the fear and developing that culture where it's safe to openly reach out.

Voiceover 23:02

Yeah, I love the comparison to uh CPR in the sense that you know we do all these things as firefighters to stay you know current in our skill set. Or if we're gonna vet a new piece of equipment, you know, we'll do a like a half a day shootout on thermal imaging cameras and you know, roll out all the gear, all the apparatus. But when it comes to mental health, we don't tend to go that distance. But you're talking you're describing vetting these resources in advance and giving people a skill set, um, just like we would any other EMS or fire skill that's that's so huge. And uh you really I can see how it is a culture changer. Um getting back to the vetting of resources, because I imagine not every resource you called was one that you would call a keeper. Um the ones that didn't quite make the mark, what what do they teach you and what what you'd be asking as a chief before you recommend a resource to somebody who's struggling?

SPEAKER_04 24:00

That's that's a great question. You know, one time, I probably was a few months ago, I looked at how many applications there were on your phone or on your computer that are centered on mental wellness and resiliency and support groups. And I think I stopped counting around 40,000. Just no way you can vet all of those applications. And so there's a there's a term that's used in the mental health world now. It's a wild west out there. 15 years ago, we had maybe if it was maybe if it was maybe five to ten resources we would be able to reach out to, and you know, where it gave you a little bit more of an opportunity to vet those resources, start having conversations. Now it's everywhere, it's in it's in uh AI, it's on our phones, it's in our computers, you know, and it's some of these uh apps are turning into brick and mortar. There's setting up shop in your in your local community. And so how do you vet those? And I and I believe that you start doing some research on what had actually already been vetted, and then you start having those conversations. And a lot of those are centered on first responders, veterans, and then you start there, and then you start looking at some of those little subsets of okay, I'm gonna look at uh these types of support groups that are dealing with financial distress. Then I start looking at these that are dealing with, you know, um relationships, then I start looking at these that are dealing with, you know, uh more uh family-based. So, you know, it takes it, it's not something that it's it's actually fingertips, but it takes a little bit of siphoning and knowing your people, and and that's where knowing the topics that your people in your organization are reaching out to. And that could be either contacting your peer support team, that could be contacting your department psychologist or the psychologists that are that are in your network, and that's where you start having these conversations like you know, can you send me some data on what firefighters, first responders are reaching out to speak with their uh social workers or I mean or their uh therapists on, and they'll give you a list, okay. You know, 80% are reaching out on family issues, 20% are reaching out on substance abuse issues. That's when you start kind of coming up with your little tree and say, okay, you know what, I'm gonna start looking at the resources offered here. I'm gonna start looking at the resources offered here, and that's when you start making your calls. And uh, you know, and like I said, I I know probably first responder applications. I I think probably I I know about 10 to 15 that are actually vetted, have actually, you know, um uh have licensed staff, you know, no first responders well, no veterans well. And it's just you'll know right away when you start having these conversations, you know, if they've done their work and if they've had, you know, uh people who have come through their door with the same types of you know situations that you have already kind of looked into.

Voiceover 27:14

Right. That's uh you're alluding to the fact that um this become very fashionable if you will, to work with first responders. And so you know, we've seen in our world a lot of people jumping on this opportunity bandwagon, whatever they do, whether they're clinicians or doing an app or doing some uh some kind of uh let's even uh say residential treatment center, first responders are like a hot ticket item as a you know client. And so kind of have to weed through all of that at the same time, right? Try to figure out who's really in this for the right reasons.

SPEAKER_04 27:48

That's a great point. 15 years ago, when uh uh we in the Denver Fire Department had lost a command officer to suicide. And at that time we were going through our own training program on it so it was pretty basic 15 years ago. And during this time we're going through this training program on mental wellness and suicide prevention. You know, we lost one of our own under our noses. And so at that time I was, well, I still am, I was with an employee group, and we basically said, okay, this is enough. You know, we we can't lose anymore. Because at that time we had lost like 15 members of my organization uh in 15 years. And so we started going out like, okay, this is almost like a grassroots grassroots type of um project we're taking on here. We started going out, knocking door to door at some of the local resources we knew. And people would bring us in and say, Let's have this conversation. You know, you're men, you know, obviously you're broken. What do you do again? Well, we're firefighters, and it's when you would start to see people back away. Because the stigma, as you know, it was just so strong uh 15, 20 years ago. And to see it where it is today, like like you say, David, where it's just it's it's it's just like this, it's got all this sex appeal and the bright lights. And the selling point back then, when we started rolling out these these programs, where it made its way into corporate America, was listen, if these tough firefighters can come forward and tell you their stories uh being broken and seeking therapy, anybody can. So it's it's fascinating to see, and and I'm grateful that it's a good problem to have, to have all of these resources. But then again, it takes some legwork to actually go there and start betting these out.

Voiceover 29:45

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Bonnie Rumilly 30:44

Yeah, you're right. I also think in the first responder world, we work in silos in our department. And it it would be great if people would reach out to other departments more and say, hey, what are you doing for this? Or what kind of an agency or organization do you use for this problem? And just talking more, asking each other, sharing the resources, because even if David and I think of the team that we're on, there might be a department in the state that isn't aware of the work that we do with first responders. But if they ask a neighboring department, that department might say, Oh, we use them all the time. Call this number, call so and so. Um, so there's so many resources I think that we can be aware of that we don't always share efficiently with each other the way that we share about fire training programs or oh, I know this great instructor who can come to a ropes course for you. Well, that's great. So why don't you share the information on all of this stuff too? It seems so obvious, but I think even just someone listening, why not ask other departments what their experiences are? You'll probably find some more answers.

SPEAKER_04 31:54

Absolutely. That's a great point. You need even within your own department, you know, there there are people who have, you know, uh, like you say, kind of taking what they've they've accumulated over the years and kind of keep it close to their vest. And then it becomes kind of like competition, who gets credit for this, who gets credit for this. But at the end of the day, it's about our people, it's about the fire service. And why wouldn't you want to share? And like like you say, why wouldn't you want to share the latest and the greatest technique or piece of equipment to save lives? It's no different. Why don't you offer the lessons that we've learned, you know, and I and I say this you know, when you have a near miss or you have uh, you know, um, you know, unfortunately a line of duty death, all hands are on deck. You know, and you come up with these after action reports. Well, we don't have anything when we have a near miss of people in our department who are in a crisis and maybe have an attempt on their life. And it's so hush-hush. And we don't take those lessons that we learn, and we don't share them even internally yet alone with other organizations.

Bonnie Rumilly 33:08

Dan?

Voiceover 33:09

Yeah, it's huge. Uh I mean, I I think I still take some of those lessons from the adverse situations in my department and apply them many different ways. But at the time, there was no formal way to, as you're alluding to, kind of use it as um, you know, like we would in terms of how we train, right? We watch um, you know, close calls and we try to use that as a a training tool to do our next uh training evolution, how we're gonna avoid making the same you know, mistakes that might have hurt or killed firefighters. And that in this case, it seems like that could be used in some de-identified fashion to help, you know, help us all get better.

Bonnie Rumilly 33:54

I don't know. I think there's a lot of fear, and we haven't really said this before, but I think there's also a lot of fear and the liability of all of these things. And no one wants to really come out and say that. Um but I think there's a lot of fear of the blame and the finger pointing and whose shoulders is this going to be placed on. You know, is it leadership? Like it gets very, very complicated, and I think that's when you see people's psychological processes, shall we say, um, come out. You know, the people and their personalities come out in the hardest of times. And I just can't help to wonder if that's a good part of this.

Voiceover 34:37

Possibly, yeah. Uh I want to move on to this piece that I'm really, really uh interested to hear what your thoughts are, Chief. And that's you used the term I don't think I'd heard it before uh when I heard you speak, you use the term cultural empathy. And if we look at that versus cultural competency, why does that distinction matter? And if we're gonna do a train a traitor, you know, what does that actually look like in practice to to impart on them cultural empathy?

SPEAKER_04 35:08

Yeah, so cultural competency and this is first hand experience, and it and it's all of the best intentions from from you know the the programs that have been you know set. So I I really started to learn more about cultural competency versus cultural empathy when I was going through the department training 15 years ago. And as you know, you know, you bring anybody into the fire service or first responder community with all this alphabet soup after their name. You're kind of thinking you're gonna get some pushback or you're gonna get some call-ins that day, you know, or you're gonna have some people posturing, and you, you know, it's gonna be a lot of negative naysaying. So, you know, but you know, you sometimes you have to sit through and learn. And uh, you know, uh bless their heart, a group came in 15 years ago and you know, said, okay, you know, we're gonna develop a training program for Denver firefighters on suicide prevention and mental wellness. And we're gonna roll out this program after we get the data from these focus groups that we're going to be speaking. Uh so we're gonna basically come up with the strengths in each assessment, and we're gonna roll out this training. So they took all of our information, you know, we we we sat in these focus groups, you know, we were we were pretty it was pretty glaring, and it was it was so hard to sit through these little groups and you know, thinking that I really thought I knew my my my coworker, but I really didn't know them at all. And so you you just lay your hour out, you lay everything out on it, and then this group comes in and they take it and they start to develop this curriculum based upon their well-deserved you know, experience, expertise, and on all their education. And then, you know, we had a conversation saying, wait a minute here, you're telling me what's best for me just based upon some information I gave you, which I think is cultural competency. And they use it in so many different ways. It's not just mental health, it's a lot of organizations really teaching you something new. And so cultural empathy is a group coming in or an organization coming to a group of people saying, you know what, I admit I may have the education, I may have the background, but I'm gonna tell you I don't know everything that you have gone through, you're going through, or you will go through. And I want to have you at the seat of uh have a seat at the table, have a voice, and help us help you. And that's where cultural empathy comes in. It's just a matter of just kind of acknowledging who's in the room, recognizing their experience, and and just together collaborating to put out the best product for its members. Because the success we had in 2013 when we rolled out at that time was pretty un unheard of, a mental health suicide prevention training program to over 1,100 members. You know, it was it it it it it took some courage, but at the same time, we knew it had to be bias for us. And a lot of that came from an organization saying, okay, you're right, let's develop this program with some cultural empathy of the people we have in this room. That's and that that to me is is the difference.

Bonnie Rumilly 38:43

I think I think you're making such a good point. And from my observation, yes, being a first responder, but also I think the first responder population needs that more than any other population. I would argue veterans do as well, but they need to be involved in the education process because that's also how they build trust in that therapy or in that entity. So if they are asked for feedback, it it's not just a learning to build the cultural competency or empathy, it's to build the trust. And I think that's the part that gets really lost on people, you know, in my profession, Stacey's profession, who mean well and come in and, you know, they have big names, like you said, but it doesn't always translate properly with this population. So I think that's such a good point that you made. And hopefully if there are therapists listening today, which sometimes there are, um, they'll think about that too and just consider the input from your population.

SPEAKER_04 39:45

Yes, absolutely. One of the best stories I have that came out of this developing this training curriculum is it really started with around five of us in this focus group. And one of the members of this employee group who also worked directly with the captain that took his life, we brought him in. He was in a bad place. And he brought him in and he's really started to open up. And we could see before our eyes that this was a form of therapy and recovery for him and being a part of this process. And to come out to where he's at now, where he's he's gone on to tell his story across the country and has put a face to vulnerability, it was a win-win for him and a win-win for the fire service and the first responder community.

Voiceover 40:40

In terms of being a manager in the fire service and having some literacy with mental health or let's say situational awareness with mental health, what would a battalion chief or company officer need to know at a minimum to catch something early with one of their members?

SPEAKER_04 40:59

Yes, it's it's what we've been taught since the day we enter the fire academy. You know, we are told you are a safety officer, regardless of your rank, and regardless if you are the lowest seniority member of your organization. You see something unsafe on the fire ground, you have the latitude to tap the incident commander on their shoulder and say, Hey, I have a spongy roast. Hey, I have a sinking floor. That's the mentality we need to have from our first rate firefighters, our recruit firefighters, up to our first level supervisors to our command officers. It's being able to recognize before an imminent hazard on those environments or or those or those signs where somebody is not themselves and having the courage and this minimal skill set to intervene. And that starts with having conversations. And I and I and I, you know, we've been there 15, 20 years ago, we didn't even dare speak about these things at the dinner table, coffee table. Today, I can walk into the firehouse and you can hear it. It's in its own way, but you can hear it how somebody has said, hey, you know, this happened to me the other day, you know, and they start bouncing ideas off of each other. And there and the advice from the skills that the members have accrued during their time are so different than they were 15-20 years ago. 15-20 years ago, you came in and you had an issue at home with your spouse. You had the firehouse divorce lawyer telling you, you know, not the best advice. Now it's free. Yeah, it's free. Now with the training, now with the awareness, now with the expansive conversations we have, not just in the fire service, but in our in our households, in our communities. Now you can start to see, and it's so refreshing to see the advice and the guidance and the support that's there for people in the fire service. So my advice to new officers, tenure officers, is to embrace that, build on it, and start baking that in into your culture where it becomes part of the norm. And it's not such a big mystery, and it doesn't have this fear and anxiety tied to it. Well, great answer.

Bonnie Rumilly 43:40

It's really been great talking to you. It's wonderful for us because every guest brings their own unique approach, and you certainly have yours. It's like a signature. Um, and you have such a calming way about you that I think is a presence a lot of people aren't used to in our world. So I really, really appreciated hearing everything you said, but also just your demeanor and your delivery and how you gave us all of these great nuggets today. I want to thank you so much for your time.

SPEAKER_04 44:11

Absolutely. It's been such a pleasure. I just applaud you on the work that you're doing in bringing the message of healing, recovery, and lived experience storytelling to the audience.

Voiceover 44:24

I want to say thank you also. Um we've really started to try to bring the voices of chief level officers to our conversations here because for for various for various reasons, but most importantly, that um, you know, you are leading departments, and in your case, a large department that is um, you know, we're going through changes together as a fire service, but we really need to see leaders like yourself who are embracing the change, embracing this new conversation, embracing new ways of doing things that have not in the past served us uh terribly well. So I want to thank you for all that you do and for being here with us today to have this conversation. Thank you so much. It means the world to me. Remember to like and subscribe. YouTube respond resilience, Facebook Responder TV, we're a LinkedIn Apple Podcast on Spotify, and our website is respondertv.com. Till the next time, stay safe, be kind to yourself, take care of the city.