Episode 17 - Leading Relentlessly with Stan Partlow

Welcome to Outside the Line - the podcast for cops who are learning to stay anchored to the real world.

This week I'm joined by Stan Partlow - retired Commander of the City of Columbus, Ohio Police Department, board member of First Responders Bridge, and author of the book Leading Relentlessly.

Stan talks about the legacy of service that runs in his family - starting with his father, then himself, and now his daughter - why he chose his family over a potential career path, and how the lessons he learned throughout his career led him to write his book.

Connect with Stan:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stan-partlow-cpp

https://a.co/d/064fQLJS

https://firstrespondersbridge.org/

Connect with me:

https://www.instagram.com/outsidethelinepod

https://www.facebook.com/outsidethelinepodcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Outside the Line, a podcast with conversations about keeping cops anchor to what really matters, life outside the line. I'm your host, David Campbell, an active duty NYPD detective on a mission to normalize conversations around resilience and mental health and help cops develop self-awareness and an identity outside their career so they can enjoy life and thrive in the real world outside the line. Welcome back to another episode of Outside the Line, the podcast for cops who are learning how to stay anchored to the real world. This week I'm joined by a special guest, Stan Partlow. He's a retired police commander, a board member of First Responders Bridge, and the author of Leading Relentlessly. Stan, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Thank you, Dina. I'm really excited to be with you today and I'm literally looking forward to the conversation.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Same. If you wouldn't mind starting us off by telling everybody how you got into first responder work.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Okay. So I'm an old guy. I started in 1980, which for many of your uh members of your audience is a hear that they probably weren't even on the planet then. Um I'm actually the son of a police officer, and I'm the father of a police officer, and um my oldest daughter and her husband are both uh with the agency that that I retired from. So I'm the middle of three generations of Columbus police officers. I started in uh um in the police academy in 1980 after I graduated from college and uh worked uh you know, patrol and uh did a little stint in narcotics during that uh first kind of four years I was there, and then I had an opportunity to become a special agent with the FBI, and I uh left Columbus PD and joined the Bureau, uh, was stationed in Raleigh, North Carolina for four years and then decided that uh the the pending move that I was gonna have to make uh to a big city was gonna be really traumatic for my family, really difficult. And so my wife and I had two little girls at that point, and we decided to go back home. So I came back to Columbus and rejoined the PD and um ended up uh spending the next about 17 plus years there, rose through the ranks and eventually retired as a commander, and then uh went to work in the private sector uh for 15 more years and ended up being the chief security officer at a major electric utility company, and and then finally in 2005, after 40 years, uh I called it a day. I said, I've had I've had enough. So I I retired at that point.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

I think it's fascinating that and and I love that you have this legacy of service now in your family, from your father to you and now to your daughter. What effect, if any, do you think that your father's career had on your decision to join the police department?

SPEAKER_01 3:02

So it's interesting. My father never wanted me to be a police officer. He, in fact, he always said that I was gonna go to college and I was not gonna go into law enforcement. And um, so it really wasn't anything I thought a lot about when I was young. Um, I always respected the career, his career. I loved being around the the you know, the guys, if you will. Uh weren't very many ladies in law enforcement back in those days. He started in 1961, so you know, very different era back then. And um, you know, I love being around them and their families, and we were, you know, we had some really close friends that we that I grew up with. Uh, but I really never thought about being in the career. And all of a sudden I'm a senior in college and I'm out there looking for jobs, and my dad says, Hey, they're giving the police test uh in March. And uh, and I thought, I really honestly thought he was telling me that because my best friend wanted to be a police officer. So I thought, oh well, he wants me to tell Ted that they're giving the test. I go, okay, well, I'll let Ted know. He goes, Well, you might be interested. And I'm like, okay, um, sure. So I thought, well, hey, I don't have a job yet. So I went and took the test, did well enough to get accepted into the class in July. So I graduated in June and I was in the class in July and off and running, and absolutely fell in love with it. And later I asked my dad, I said, Dad, what happened along the way? And, you know, that caused you to even encourage me to take the test. And he said, Well, you grew up. And I said, Okay, you'll have to help me understand what that meant. He said, Well, when I was telling you you weren't going to be a police officer, you were this little kid, and I couldn't wrap my mind around you being out there, and all of a sudden you were this grown man, and I was looking at you like, well, maybe you could do this job, and maybe it would be something that you would enjoy. So, and he was he was absolutely right. Um, I never regretted that uh decision. I had a great run, uh, had the opportunity to do a lot of really fun things, cool things. Uh, I was a hostage negotiator when I was in the bureau, I was on the SWAT team, and I went to sniper school and and I was on the underwater recovery team with the city and um you know worked investigations, worked patrol, uh, and just I mean, I had a wonderful, wonderful career. So um unfortunately, my dad only got to see me get promoted to lieutenant, and he passed away before I got promoted to commander, but I know he was there with me, and and uh I'm I'm certain you know he he would have he was very proud that that I'd continue the legacy. He never got to see his granddaughter graduate from the academy. And you'll appreciate this. Uh we were able to pass my dad's badge down to my son-in-law, and my daughter got mine. So we were able to keep the badge numbers in the family, and and for you know, for your listeners that are in the in the career, they understand how important that is. And so that was a really uh really special thing for us to be able to do.

SPEAKER_00 6:06

That is so special. Did anybody else have your your shield number or your father's shield number? And then they gave it up because I know sometimes in my department it's already assigned, and the person's like, yeah, that's fine, they can have it, I'll take a new one.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Yeah, they did, and and and that happened with me. Um, because when and probably like you guys, when we get promoted, you know, you start over again, right? With a new rank and and a new shield and all that kind of stuff. And so my my number had been given to another guy, and um one of uh actually one of the deputy chiefs said to them, Hey, you know, this is Stan's daughter. Do you mind giving? He goes, No, that's fine. And it was funny because he had actually given his badge up to his son who came on the department, and so he took mine. So he was like, Yeah, this wasn't the one I came on with. I totally get it. So the the it worked out really well for all of us, but he was very gracious, and I wrote him a really nice note and said how much I appreciated him doing that. So yeah, that was kind of special that we got to do that.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

That's very special. When you left the first time for the bureau, were you a supervisor already at that point?

SPEAKER_01 7:18

No, no, I was working uh working patrol, and um, I was like 25 years old and um had an opportunity to to go and and you know really um just wanted to give that a try. And it was a great job. I absolutely love being in the bureau. Um the bureau was way different back then in the 80s than it is today. Uh we didn't uh have all the drama with all the political stuff, at least that I ever knew of. We were out there chasing bad guys, and you know, and I absolutely love that, working bank robberies and fugitives and drug cases and stuff like that. So but the one thing I learned in that in that experience was that it was really, really difficult for my wife to be away from home. Um, we grew up in the same community, she had a big family, they were they owned a dairy farm right outside of town, so all of her brothers and sisters were here in Columbus, and um she was she went, but it was tough. And then during that four-year window of time, we had two little girls, and now I'm kind of sitting there thinking to myself, if we make this move, um, and back then it unlike today, the agents moved around a lot. So I, you know, this is gonna be the first of several moves, um, almost like being in the military. You know, if we do that, that's gonna be our life. And um, she said, you know, I will go with you, but I knew it was really hard for her, and I had an opportunity to come back home, and I thought I didn't want to get out of law enforcement, so I said, I'm gonna do it. And so back I came and rejoined the department. And um, so yeah, it was uh it was an interesting adventure, and then just you know, just kept rocking and rolling and enjoyed the rest of my career.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

And I think that's extremely commendable that you realized what was really important. As amazing as these opportunities, I'm sure were, and who knows what may have been, it sounds like your priority was always to your wife and your children first. And again, I really commend you for that.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

Well, though, you know, the one thing that I know looking back, I know that was the right decision. And I actually talk about this in my book. Um, after my wife passed away, um, my oldest daughter found a a like a random notebook, really. And it wasn't a fancy journal or anything, it was just a notebook that was in a stack of books. And in that book, she wrote a letter to each one of us, to me and my three daughters. And um in the letter that she wrote to me, um she talked about how much she appreciated the decision to come back home because she was always worried that I would resent that, right? That I would say, I gave up, you know, this career to come back home. I never looked at it like that. I looked at it like, hey, you know, my number one priority in the universe is my family. Let me find something I can still do, still feel fulfilled at, still enjoy, but take care of my family first. And it was by far the best decision we ever made. And when I saw that letter um after she had passed away, I mean, I and I talk about it in the book. I mean, I was an absolute disaster. I was bawling my head off and reading this and thinking to myself, okay, you got at least one right. You got one right there, you did the right thing and for all the right reasons. And my kids flourished, they never had to move, they grew up in a little community outside of Columbus, and you know, they they all still live here, and I'm glad I'm grateful for that. So my grandkids are here with me, and you know, it and and but you know, but everybody makes their own choice, right? Depending upon what their life tells them that they need to do. But for us, that was the right decision to make.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

And that's a great point. It really is all a matter of perspective because sometimes you we just tend to look at it as, oh, I'm turning this opportunity down. But saying no to something really means saying yes to something else. So saying no to that career meant saying yes to your family and yes to putting down roots. And you still, like you said, you still got to be in the field doing the work that you loved.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Absolutely. And let's be honest, I mean, we know that being um a law enforcement family is a hard, hard, hard thing to do. I mean, it's very difficult. And uh, you know, I think kind of to your the you know, the the purpose of your podcast and the purpose of your gift to all of us, that idea of keeping us grounded um is really important and remembering the important things because let's just face it, as you grow older, you figure this stuff out along the way, that the job is gonna come and go. The people are gonna come and go. But at the end, what do you have left? You have your family, um, and you have your close dear friends, some of which may be from work, some of them which may be from outside, you know, your your childhood or whatever. But at the end, that's all you have left. Um, you know, because the job is gonna keep on going on, whether you're there or not. And I've been retired now from Columbus PD for uh for 20 years. It's still out there, they're still out there fighting crime and suppressing evil, chasing bad guys. I'm not there anymore. Uh, but you know, the job is still continuing on, and I'm to the point now where you know, when I go to functions, I don't I know very few people. In fact, most of the people I know now are through my daughter and her husband, because all of my uh colleagues and peers and contemporaries, they're all retired, and sadly some of them have already passed on. So um, so yeah, but at the end, what do you have left? You have your family left.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

That's such a great point. If we could back up a little bit. So you were in your early 20s when you first became a cop.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Yeah, 22 years old. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

How do you think, or do you think you did a good job of having an identity outside of work and staying, as I like to call it, anchored to the real world? Or do you think you kind of just got thrown into the first responder world and got absorbed into it?

SPEAKER_01 13:31

Definitely the latter. It took me a while to figure out the former, so in my journey. Um, you know, the one thing that um, you know, when I started off, like probably most of the people that um, you know, are listening to this, I was eating, sleeping it, breathing it, drinking it, living it, you know, 24-7 almost it seemed, um, and loved every second of it. Um, you know, everything else seemed to be sort of a distraction, right? It was the I was so in, you know, embedded in it um that uh I I I think I, you know, I were I really got sucked in. Um as I got a little bit older though, one of the things that I did uh was I went back to school. And when I came back to Columbus in 1988, I kept thinking to myself, okay, if I'm gonna now figure out how to make the best out of this career that I possibly can, what do I need to do to do that? So it occurred to me, and I we were very blessed, Columbus PD has a 100% tuition reimbursement program, which is awesome.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

Oh wow, that's great.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

They pay for everything. So originally I wanted to go to law school. I'd been out of college about 10 years, and I thought, well, I'm not smart enough to go to law school, so I'll go get a master's degree. That has to be so much easier, right? I don't know why I thought that would be so much easier, but that's what I did. And I'll tell you, Dina, that one of the things that I think helped me create some balance in my universe was getting away from the cops. So I go back to school, and this was not an online thing. This was still back in the day where it was butts and chairs, right? So every weekend uh for about a year and a half, um, I went to this weekend program Friday night and all day Saturday. And there were no other police officers in my class. There were school teachers, there were accountants, there were, you know, people from all different walks of life in there. And it was great for me because it let me sort of reset myself to think, wow, there is life after PD, right? There are other people out here in the world that are not just good guys and bad guys.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

It let me listen to points of view that I probably didn't really listen to, especially early in my career, because I got kind of sucked into the you know police mentality. And all of a sudden I'm listening to people and I'm like, well, that's not a bad idea. Or I, you know, I understand where you're coming from. May not agree with it, but I respect it and I understand it. And when I finished that experience, then I said, Well, I can do this. So I went straight to law school. So for about six years, I was going to school um at night um while my incredible wife was making sure everything was happening at home. I always tell people the real person that earned both of those degrees was her, not me. But I think that experience really helped break me out of, you know, I'm more than just a police officer. I I'm I I'm a I'm someone who can do other things. Um and I think that helped me in my private sector career because I wasn't so sucked into the police mentality um that it was hard, it was difficult to transition, but it wasn't as difficult as some of my peers have experienced. And I think that going back to school really helped me a lot. So, you know, one of the things I always share with people is, you know, you should start planning for your next job when you get the first one. And that sounds really counterintuitive, and but I it took me a while to figure that out. But I tell young police officers, I said, think about it this way. This job may not be forever. You could get hurt tomorrow. And, you know, do you want to be able to pick the job that you want to pick, or do you want to pick the one that you're given? And if you want to pick the one you want to pick that you're really interested in, maybe it requires you to go back to school and get a degree and those kind of things. So why not start working on that early on in your career and getting yourself ready for whatever the next thing looks like? Um, you know, and and so I I think um, you know, we could have the argument all day about whether going to college makes you a better police officer. And I don't presuppose that you can't be a great police officer without a college degree. I believe that you can. But what I do know is that it improves your critical thinking, it definitely makes you a better communicator, um, and it makes you a better collaborator because those are things that you have to do during that process, and you're exercising those muscles that you wouldn't normally do. And it exposes you to other people outside of that police world. And I think kind of to your tagline, it helps anchor you to the real world as opposed to getting anchored in the cop world, which I don't think you know, I I love police officers. I've been around them my whole life. My dad started when I was three years old. I know I've been around them, I love them, but that thinking can really, really, really punish you and punish your family over time if you can't manage it. And one of the ways I think we can manage it is to recognize that there's more out there to the world than that little microcosm of you know going to work every day and just thinking about things in terms of good guys and bad guys, and that's kind of the way we we end up being, uh, especially when we're young. And I was that way, so no, no doubt about it. I mean, there were only two kinds of people in the universe, good guys and bad guys. Um, and now I realize that that's probably not the most um the most realistic way to look at the world. There's a lot of gray in between, but when you're 22, 23, 25 years old and you're doing this stuff every day, you don't look, you don't see it that way.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

Of course, and even if you come on and you're old, you're not old, quote unquote, older in your early 30s, um, even after doing this work for long enough, you our worldviews do tend to get narrow because we see people on their worst day every day all the time, and we're managing all of this chaos and all of the emotions of the people at the scenes, and we're expected to have all the answers. And and there's just not enough time to actively listen to understand, because we're already, you know, that we have the boss in our ear, like you're holding all these jobs and you have to clear the queue. So we listen just enough to figure out what's going on, give somebody an answer, or try to solve the problem as best we can, and then move along, because that's really all we have time for. So when you talk about going to school and exercising these other muscles, your active listening skills, and coming into contact with people who they're not a good guy or a bad guy, they're just a regular person living their life and having these meaningful conversations that have nothing to do with police work. It really sounds like it made such an impact on keeping your worldview broad and keeping you anchored in the real world.

SPEAKER_01 20:38

I think that's fair. I although I will tell you, my cop mindset comes back to haunt me every now and then, even now, as an old guy, you know, I'll sit there and think, oh no, no, no, no, no. But but yeah, I I agree with you 100%. It's it's um and it's interesting you brought up that decision-making process. Somebody asked me the other day, what was the hardest thing that happened to me from a transition perspective to go from you know being a law enforcement leader to corporate America? And it was that exact issue you just described. The decision-making process that we learned is very, very effective in our universe, not so much in the rest of the world.

SPEAKER_03 21:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:21

What I learned was so I go to work for this huge utility company, one of the biggest um electric utility companies in the United States. It's got companies in 11 states, the largest transmission backbone, and it's full of engineers. And what I learned about engineers is they want the number one, they're decision averse. Number two, they want massive amounts of data to make a decision when they decide it's finally time to make one. And I'm the guy that you just described that I'm like, okay, give me about 50 60% of the information here. Right. I've made a decision. We've moved. On and I can kind of check and adjust if that doesn't turn out to be the best decision, and I'm on down the road because I've learned over my career in law enforcement, I don't have time to sit back and ponder all this stuff and you know get the next spreadsheet in. So when I first started going to meetings when I became the security director at this big company, and I'm listening to these people, I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. We should have made that decision six months ago. I mean, we should have already been, you know, and they're like, well, we needed the and I'm like, oh my gosh. And I will tell you, that was a massive, massive, massive struggle for me to recognize that I, while my my ability to make those those decisions quickly and and live them, stick with them, and move on was uh was a huge benefit in my law enforcement career. It didn't really translate well at all. And I had to really retrain myself to think through okay, how do I give them what they need to make a decision to feel comfortable with it? Because I can make that decision in a minute, but I've got to have their buy-in to make it work across the corporation. Because when I started there, there's like 24,000 people in this company spread across 11 states, so it's a big organization. You know, just and you don't just make the decision and move on, right? I mean, you've got to get buy-in from lots of stakeholders, and so that was a real process for me to learn how to do that, and so it's one of those things where something that became um very important in my law enforcement career and really works well in that environment doesn't always translate into something else. And I think a lot of us that make that transition struggle with that. So you've got to, so that's where you've got to sit back and think, what are those other life experiences that I've had? And for me, it was going back to school where I could go back and go, okay, wait a minute, I've done this before. I was on a project when I was in graduate school, and I had a bunch of people that couldn't make a decision, and so I had to learn how to work with them to get the project done, right? Because I couldn't walk in and say, we're gonna do this, this, this, and this, and move on because then I've lost all of them.

SPEAKER_00 24:08

Right.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

Where if I had had a whole, if I'd had a team of cops, everybody would have looked at me and go, yep, I got that, let's move on. And you know, so it's interesting how your brain um kind of uh you know um absorbs those things that are really that really work well for you in that environment. And then all when you think about all the stress and all those high, those difficult, high stress decisions you have to make. Now, then you get in an environment where you don't need that, and that's what you want to do because that comes natural. Now, I will say on the other side of that balance, if you will, one of the things they loved about me was when the bad thing happened, I had no problem making a decision. When they were all standing around looking at their shoes, I was the one going, okay, here's what we're gonna do. And they were all like, Thank you. So you had to figure out when it was okay to use that, and you couldn't use it every time. But there were a few times during my career where something really went sideways, and I was the, you know, in fact, I remember my boss saying that he got so many compliments from the senior executives because they I forget exactly how he worded it, but it was something like you had the coolest head in the room, you never panicked, you made great decisions, and you walked us through, you know, a successful hound strategy. And I'm like, well, yeah, I did that every day for 25 years, right? So I know how to do that.

SPEAKER_00 25:32

But it's and that's something. Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 25:34

No, go ahead. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

That's something like people, especially cops who think they're quote unquote just a cop, they have no translatable skills. We don't realize that we're constantly in these high pressure situations making split-second critical decisions all the time, and how those skills can translate outside of police work.

SPEAKER_01 25:56

You're exactly right. You just have to figure out the balance, right? Because you can't use that every time.

unknown 26:03

Right.

SPEAKER_01 26:03

But when it but when you need it, it's great to have it. Because let's just be honest, there aren't that many people in the world that know how to do that. People in the military know how to do it, people in public safety know how to do it, people in the emergency medicine field know how to do it, and that's probably about it. Pilots maybe know how to do it. So you're talking about a pretty small subsection of the you know of the world that actually are comfortable in that space. I mean, we thrive in chaos, right? That's what we do. Yes. They don't thrive in chaos at all. In fact, chaos a lot of times causes them to completely shut down because they don't know how to do it. So they're scared that they're gonna make the wrong decision. They just shut down, and you can be that you're exactly right, you can use that skill set to move you forward. You just have to find a way to temper it with the other times where you don't really need it. Now you have to back off and kind of make the decisions their way and make it make sense for them.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

Now, pivoting back to your law enforcement career, because the peer supporter in me has to know, this is kind of a two-question question. What was the the culture around mental health when you were in the department? And what was the did you guys have any like critical incident debriefing programs or any like any sort of officer wellness programs while you were on the job?

SPEAKER_01 27:22

Yeah, great question. And and I'm so um thrilled that you know that you're in that space, and I congratulate you for being the champion there. Um when I started in 1980, one of the things that my department, so my department um is not not as big as NYPD, but for a municipal, regular municipal department, around 1800, 1900 sworn, so fairly good size support.

SPEAKER_03 27:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

Um, so we were very blessed that we had what we called an officer support team, and that probably started in the late 70s, maybe three, four, or five years before I came on. I came on in 80s, so maybe 75, 76. And so what we did was we had officers that had been through traumatic incidents that were had a little bit of training, and when you went through a traumatic incident, they were paired with you and they became sort of your buddy, if you will, while you were working your way through that. So two thumbs up, a big plus that we had that, but with that said, the limitation on that was the fact that it only applied to a handful of scenarios. Number one was a police involved shooting. So if you were involved in a police involved shooting, you were automatically going to get officer support. And the other thing that our department did, late 70s, which was very forward-leaning at the time, is we mandated a visit with the police psychologist. You could not get cleared for duty to go back to your job until you met at least one time with the police psychologist, which I think back in those days was pretty forward-leaning. I don't think a lot of agencies were doing that. But with that said, the limitation was it didn't do uh it didn't deal with what I call the death of a thousand cuts. That I've gone on the same run week after week after week after week over my career, and it is I I love the analogy that I heard a a uh um uh an LASW, a licensed social worker, use and she talked about trauma, thinking about trauma in terms of putting rocks in your backpack. And so, you know, every time you went on that that you know, that fatal crash or that child death, or you had to do a death notification, or you went on whatever the runs were that impacted you personally, you're putting a rock in that backpack, right? And over time, that backpack gets really heavy. It wasn't just one incident, it was a cumulative effect. So that was the place that we didn't do much to help people. So in my mind, you know, we were we were really kind of probably out front on the critical incident piece, but we lacked on the what I would now call the peer support. So back in maybe late 90s, we started thinking about peer support. And and I'll be honest with you, where we stole it from was the fire department. So our fire department had a really good program that was started by a couple of their officers and a social worker who helped them with some debriefing. And this was really, I mean, like probably mid-yeah, probably mid-90s, 93, 94, 95, somewhere in that in that time frame. And what I saw the fire department do that we didn't do was when they got done with the bad run, they all went back to this to the station. And they could sit around and they could talk to each other. And you know, as you described earlier, we never got to do that because we had another run in the queue. So we cleared whatever that bad run was, and then we're gone on to the next one. And then by the time we get done, several hours later, we're all sort of walking into the station, you know. All we want to do is get our gear off and you know, get home or go drink a beer or whatever it was. But we didn't have that side, that kind of debriefing time where we were all sitting around talking to each other. So we ended up sort of stealing some of their ideas, and I was blessed to be part of sort of the initial approach to peer support. We didn't really get it off the ground to the level that I would have liked it to. Um, and then I retired, and now it's become a huge thing, and we have well over 100 people trained in the department um on peer support, plus, we still have the officer support group that does the critical incidents. So now they're doing both, and they actually even created a wellness center where uh people can go. So they've come a long way in the last uh 20-some years with peer support. But uh I am a I'm a firm believer in the power of peer support because what I found as a an old guy is that this stuff never really leaves you, you know, and and what I think is happening out there in the world is that we now have people that are leaving the profession much earlier than ever before. Like in my era, the only way that you ever left before you got your pension was you either got hurt or you got fired. People just didn't walk away. Nobody walked away at you know, 10 years to go sell life insurance or go become a teacher, and we just didn't do that. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. But what I think is happening is we have a younger uh group of officers out there that have now realized, hey, number one, this career is hard. Uh my my one of my dear friends called us up, calls it the hardest job in America, and I fully I firmly believe that. Number two, it's very difficult for your family. Number three, it can be very difficult for you uh emotionally and psychologically, physically. And so we're seeing people walk away saying, hey, I tried it and this isn't what I want to do for the rest of my life, I'm gonna go do something else. My opinion is that I believe that they think that's a lot of words there, but I think they think that they're gonna walk away from the trauma. And my belief is that that's not true because I know even as a retired guy who's been retired for 20 years, I still can wake up in the night and see things that happened to me in 1983, 84, 85, 88, 93, whatever. Now, I've dealt with them, so they don't bother me a lot, but they have never gone away. And there are triggers that happen to me that I'll start thinking about a case that I was involved in that happened 40 years ago. So the idea of leaving the career to go do something else, great. If that's what you need to do, do it. But make sure you deal with your trauma because your backpack is still on your back. When you retire, same thing. You don't walk away from your backpack. And here's the other thing that happens once you leave the career. You leave your support network. It's never going to be the same. For me, you know, now my my colleagues, my peers, my you know, my group, we meet once a month for lunch and we tell lies. And the lies get better and better every year, right? I mean, the the cases get bigger and the bad guys are faster and bigger and whatever. I mean, it's just it is fun. I mean, we have a great time, but it's not like being in the work environment where you're going to work every day, you're looking across the table at somebody who knows exactly what you're thinking about, what you're feeling. Those days are gone. So I still have my backpack. And what I what I really encourage people to think about is if you're gonna leave the profession or you're gonna retire, you got to make sure that you're still dealing with your trauma because it doesn't just disappear because you walked away from it. And here's the other thing I learned. All of us have other trauma in our lives. I lost my wife to cancer. We were together 42 years. You talk about a traumatic event. Everybody in the world goes through that kind of stuff. We're not unique there. But where we are unique, in my humble opinion, is that we are already predisposed to stress at a different level because of the things that we did in our career. So that event to me was different than the event to the guy who was an accountant or the person who was a teacher or whatever because of my life experience. So, you know, again, we're all none of us are immune from this stuff, but you got to recognize that it may affect you differently because you're already hyper-vigilant, you've already had all of this other trauma that other people haven't had. And so it may impact you in a different way than it does the next person that goes through the same kind of trauma process, grief process, or whatever. So I am a huge, huge supporter of peer support. Even after you leave the profession, find a way to continue to deal with that trauma because it doesn't just disappear because you quit and moved on to something else, or you retired and moved on to something else.

SPEAKER_00 36:27

I really love that analogy. First of all, the death by a thousand cuts, and especially the backpack with the rocks, because you're right, after you leave the job, you're always going to be wearing that backpack. And we don't always think about, and as you attested to before, it wasn't always part of the culture to recognize the fact that all of these jobs over time do accumulate. And yes, we're we we're potentially predisposed to not just physical health uh challenges, but mental health challenges because of the nature of our work and all the things that we see. But we're not powerless, and that's why it's so important to me to remind people that they are human beings outside of the work that they do, because one day the uniform may come off for the last time, God willing, at the end of a very long career, and that person gets to go out on their own terms. But we we all know that doesn't always happen.

SPEAKER_01 37:21

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 37:23

So, speaking of retirement, you know what? I want to get into the retirement in a second. I want to talk about what influenced your decision to become a supervisor.

SPEAKER_01 37:35

Oh, so my dad was a sergeant. Um, and of course, you know, so it shouldn't be a surprise to me now that I look back on it, that I'm a police officer. So I was born on my father's birthday. I have my father's name. Um, I'm a junior, and so I guess I would and I'm the number one son, the first son. So there was a little bit of pressure there.

SPEAKER_00 37:57

Yeah, no pressure.

SPEAKER_01 37:58

Yeah, right. But my dad was a sergeant, so I guess I always thought that that was just something that I needed to do, you know, to move into a supervisory role. And um once I did it, once I got to the first rank, I realized that I really enjoyed the idea of building a team and leading a team. That was um, I mean, the running and gunning stuff was fun for me. I loved working the cases, I loved, you know, going on the runs. But when I had a team and I recognized that I could help shape that team, that was really cool. I mean, that was something I was like, that was that was really, really intriguing to me. And so when I got promoted to sergeant, I was like, well, you know, let's just keep on going. I mean, right? Let's just keep on moving. So then I got promoted to lieutenant, then commander, and probably would have stayed in the career past my 25 because I really wanted to get promoted again to deputy chief, or maybe even have a shot at the chief job. But what happened to me was timing. So I had been a commander for five years. I was the commander of the Detective Bureau, so I had all of the felony crimes except for narcotics and juvenile. So robbery, sexual abuse, homicide, crime scene search unit, the crime lab, burglary, all that stuff. About 300 people kind of in my group uh that I was responsible for. Great job. I mean, I absolutely loved it. Um but they they put a program in place called the Deferred Retirement Option Program. I don't think you guys have that in New York, but basically the the upshot of it is this you can work eight more years, you draw your salary, they take your pension that you would have been drawing, they freeze your pension at that level, they take your pension that you would have been drawing and put it into an account for you with interest.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_01 39:59

Yeah, so the deputy chiefs that were the five deputy chiefs that were above me, they all signed up for that program. And I don't blame them a bit. I mean, I would have done the exact same thing if had I been in their shoes. So I'm sitting there realizing I'm gonna be in this role for or at least a commander slot for eight more years before any of them are even gonna leave. And then the private sector job came along, and Cheryl and I talked it through, and I said, well, you know, let's jump. And so that's what I ended up doing. But the supervisory thing, um, I absolutely I really enjoyed it. I really did. Now I will say this the one thing that we oftentimes forget about is we think that trauma only applies to the street cops, to the line investigators. There's a different kind of trauma, in my humble opinion, that applies to leadership. You may not be out running and gunning anymore, but you're getting what I call vicarious trauma from make if you're doing it right and you're trying to take care of your team, you're getting vicarious trauma from the things that they're experiencing. You're getting that vicarious trauma when you have to go to the hospital to visit that officer who's injured. Or, God forbid, you're the one that has to go make the death notification to their family when they are killed in line of duty. Or you have to present the flag at the funeral. I mean, that there's, you know, that a lot of people that aren't in management don't ever think about the impact that that has. And guess what? You're still carrying your backpack around from the stuff that you did early on in your career. So getting promoted into a leadership role is not something where you just wipe the slate clean and go, okay, I don't have any more trauma to worry about because whatever you collected along the way is still in your backpack. And then you may not be out there being the first responder anymore, but you're out there, you know, taking care of your folks. And I'll be honest with you, you know, I I was I that always um the number one thing that I worried about was the health, welfare, and safety of my team. And you know, I I was fortunate that I never had anyone that um that was killed on my watch um that I was responsible for. Now I had two, I had to lead two investigations on police officers that were murdered when I was the commander of the detective bureau. We were responsible for all police involved shootings and all injuries to officers. We did those investigations. I had what they called the cert team that was a bunch of seasoned homicide detectives who were fantastic, but ultimately that responsibility rolled up to me. And um, so you know, that had its own level of trauma, right? I mean, it's it's it's different. You're not out there in the middle of it, but you you still suffer from it. So, you know, people think that, at least for me, if people think that they're gonna get away from it by getting promoted, I would argue that it's it's just different, a different kind of trauma. But I absolutely enjoyed the opportunity to lead. Um, I I loved it. I mean, I really did. I really enjoyed that.

SPEAKER_00 43:12

That's a really great point. And I was talking to somebody in a different interview who's retired from uh from Dallas PD, and he said the higher up you go, there is an element of this that of truth to the saying it's lonely at the top, because you know, the people that you used to work alongside, you're now leading, and you can't lean on them for support the way they lean on you for support. So, how did you find people in your circle? And did you find people on the job or off the job to lean on?

SPEAKER_01 43:46

So, yes, a little bit of both. Um, one of the things that I always encourage leaders to do is as much as you can get out there and network with other leaders from other agencies, right? So if you can go to You know, the FBINA, or you can go to Northwestern or SPI or any of those kind of programs. It gives you an opportunity to network with people that are outside your agency. Now you have that sounding board that I can call somebody who works in another city and say, hey, I'm dealing with XYZ. Have you ever dealt with that before? How do you feel? Because your your friend from Dallas is absolutely right. You can't share a lot of that stuff with your team because that would be inappropriate, right? You can you can't do it. Um the other thing that I think you got to do is strengthen those relationships outside uh of your law enforcement career, whether it's through church or through maybe your kids' school, your neighbors, you know, but then you even have to be careful about what you can say to them because some of this stuff is very confidential.

SPEAKER_03 44:57

Right.

SPEAKER_01 44:57

Um, you know, you you probably have a lot of trust in those other police people that come from a different agency, but you're probably not going to want to share a story with your next door neighbor about something that's going on in your agency, right? Because there's a lot of confidentiality issues. So they're absolutely right. Um, being in a command position, again, and the higher you go, the lonelier it gets. Um, Colin Powell once said that command is very lonely. Um, you know, it that that's it's difficult. It really is because you don't have that, you it you have a different kind of camaraderie, um, and you've got to really be careful about you know how you're seen by your team, um, because sometimes you have to have the hard conversations with them, right? So you the the best way that I ever heard it phrased was I had a really dear friend of mine who was also a commander, and he said, There's business and there's personal. And he said, being a supervisor in law enforcement is a lot like being a parent. I'm never gonna stop loving you, but I'm gonna have to have the hard conversation with you. So I'm gonna tell you right up front whether this conversation is personal or whether this is business. And if it's business, then you have to get your mind right and understand that what I'm getting ready to share with you is about your career. And it's not it's not that I don't care about you, it's not that I don't love you, it's not that I don't want to hear about what your kids are doing, but this is business. And I think that was fair. So I always try to maintain those relationships with people, but you have to be careful how you do it, and you certainly can't um, you know, confide in them about certain things that are happening within the organization uh that involve other people that they know or they they work with, or um, you know, the I mean, you know, that would be inappropriate. So you've got to, yeah, he or he or she is absolutely right. It's a difficult, it gets more difficult the higher you go.

SPEAKER_00 46:52

That's a that's a really good point. You're right. It's almost I I can appreciate the analogy being a parent myself of because I'm I'm not in a management position, but the analogy of being a parent and loving somebody, but still having to like you know have that separation and put up that boundary because ultimately you are in charge of them, and it's because you care that you have to have the hard conversations.

SPEAKER_01 47:18

Yeah, and and law enforcement is one of those interesting um jobs where everybody started at the bottom. You know, there aren't a lot of careers like that. If you think about it, like business is not like that. You know, you don't you don't see the CEO of the company very rarely started on the shop floor.

SPEAKER_00 47:38

Not at all.

SPEAKER_01 47:39

They came in from business school and they sort of came in to the middle level or even the upper level of the company. But in law enforcement and fire service, everybody that's a chief was pushing that car around at some point in their career. So we've all been there. Now that's a good thing from the perspective that you understand what people are going through, and you've certainly, you know, lived that part of the life. And one thing my dad drilled into me all the time was you know, he said, son, no matter how you go, don't ever forget where you came from. And I think there was a lot of wisdom in that. But the other side of that, kind of that coin, is that everybody knows you, they know who you are, they know the skeletons in your closet, and now as you get promoted and you go up through the ranks, you have to take on a different persona. You're not quote unquote one of the guys or gals anymore. Um, you've gotta you've gotta maintain some some level of separation so that you can't have that hard conversation with them. And that's not an easy thing to do.

SPEAKER_00 48:40

No, and sometimes the perception from the people on the front lines is that the people making the decisions, since they're no longer on the front lines, are so far removed from what's actually going on that they're making decisions and have no clue how it's going to play out. You know, like in theory is one way, and then in reality is another way. So, what were some ways that you, to use my analogy, stayed anchored to like to put have your finger on the pulse of what was going on in the department?

SPEAKER_01 49:12

Yeah, so one of the things that I did was I practiced the concept that Sam Walton coined when he ran Walmart. It was called MBWA, management by walking around. And Sam Walton was famous for taking his old pickup truck and his overall bib overalls and driving to a Walmart somewhere, no fanfare, no staff, walking in the front door, walking up to the greeter and saying, Hey, I'm Sam Walton. What do you do here? You know, that kind of relationship. So that really became um sort of my secret sauce, if you will, or my superpower was I was the person that would go out and and make sure that I was out there with the troops. Um, you've got to be careful though, even how you do that, because you don't want them to feel like you don't trust them to do their job. And sometimes if you're there, people will automatically look to you and expect you to make the decision. So when I'm a like, say a zone lieutenant and I go out to a shooting scene, I want my sergeants to run that scene. I don't want to run it, and I don't want them looking to me to run it. I'm just there and I'm gonna acknowledge that they're in charge, and I'm gonna say, hey, if you guys need something, you let me know what you need. But I'm here in the background. I just want to make sure everybody's okay. I want to make sure you have what you need. And then oftentimes I would leave. And it was just the fact that I showed up, you know, that created that, okay, you know, the boss does care. He's out here, he's paying attention to what's going on. Um, one of the things I used to do when I was a patrol commander is I had 24 by seven responsibility for my zone. There were five zones in the city. I'd go to roll call at third shift. Show up, you know, and it wasn't anything formal. It wasn't like I, you know, I would just go show up. Um, and I would talk to the to the group, you know. Um, I would uh make sure that they saw me out there. One of the things that we did that used to really frustrate me was our command staff, so the commanders, deputy chiefs, and the chief, they had a special firearms thing where they would go one time a year and they would go through all four phases of the firearms qualification. We had to qualify four times a year. Okay, and I always hated that. I thought that was garbage. And so when I got promoted to commander, I get a call from my deputy chief saying, Hey, Stan, you have to schedule your firearms. And we always did it in January, so we recovered, you know, we were taken care of for the year. And I said, Well, sir, I'm not gonna go. And he goes, What do you mean you're not gonna go? I said, I'm gonna go out with the team. And he goes, Well, you can't do that. I said, Well, unless you give me a direct order not to do it, that's what I'm gonna do. So that's what I did. So I would go schedule my firearms on second and third shift, and I would go out and I just show up and I would go shoot right next to them, clean my gun, and they were blown away. People be like, I've never seen a commander out here ever in my whole career. You know, it made me able to be one of the guys, if you will, to a degree, but not to a degree where it compromised my ability to be able to do my work. But they knew that I cared about them because I made the effort to go out and be with them and participate in a way that, you know, when they went through in-service training, I went through in-service training with them. I didn't do any of the special stuff that was just for the command. I hated that. I thought it was, and it was funny after I did it for a little while, there were a few other commanders that saw the light, if you will, and decided to do the same thing. And then there were three or four of us that kind of routinely did it. And but even to this day, if I run into somebody 20 some years later, they'll say, You know what? I remember about you, and I'm like, I'm thinking, I hope it's nothing bad. And they'll say, You came out to firearms on third shift and you shot with us. And I'm like, Yeah, and he said that made an impression on me. So I'm like, okay, this, you know, that's the kind of things, those little tiny things are the things that people recognize. So I think they looked at me a little differently and didn't think that I had been corrupted by the Ivory Tower because I was still willing to get out there and do the police things with them. But with all that said, the other side of that is, you know, when when you're when you're the one that is comparing their actions to the policies, it's not about being in touch with what's going on out there. Sometimes it's about you ain't getting it done right. You're not doing it right. You know, I mean, the policy says you got to do this, and you didn't do that. Um, so sometimes it's holding people accountable to things that are difficult, and they their immediate response is, well, you don't know what you're, you know, you've lost touch with what's going on on the street. And my response was, Well, here's what I know. What you told me you did, what the chain of command recommended that said that you did doesn't match with the policy. So one of two things has to happen. One, I've got to hold you accountable for that. But two, if you don't think the policy is right, then we should go change the policy. Because it's not about me being out of touch, it's about this is what the directive says. I I didn't make the directive. You knew what the directive said, you made a decision to do it differently. Maybe your way is better. Okay, I'm I'm open to the conversation. I'm open to that conversation. But, you know, we've got to hold people accountable to the directive. So sometimes it's easy for them to go, oh, you know, the bosses, they don't know what they're doing. They forgot what it's all about to be out here. Um, but at the end of the day, the bosses are responsible for holding people to a standard. And when they're not meeting the standard, then you know, they don't really have a lot of leeway because once you start not holding people to that standard, then you might as well give up because you've got no standards left, right? I mean, it's then it becomes chaos.

SPEAKER_00 55:13

Great point. And this actually brings me to what I want to talk about next is your book. So I really I have it on the Kindle. I loved it. I loved that you had personal stories that made it very relatable. And there's a there's a framework, there's self-aware, there's reflection questions, and there's also practical tools that people can take. Because, like you were saying, it's a muscle, it's a skill that you can improve. And just because you're not necessarily a supervisor, you don't hold the supervisory rank, doesn't mean you can't be a leader, because sometimes it's it's about the actions and not the position or or um even the words that we say, right? So, what led you to write the book?

SPEAKER_01 55:58

So, you know, my wife used to tease me all the time, I became a student of leadership probably pretty early on in my career, and I would read leadership books and biographies of people that I respected, um, historical figures that I thought were, you know, I I probably read five books on Abraham Lincoln alone, and probably three on Theodore Roosevelt. I mean, these are people that I was like, I love these guys. Right? Yeah, I mean, the the the things that they did, the things that they accomplished um under the circumstances in which they accomplished them, like, you know, these are the kind of things I want to think about. And so, you know, we would go on a vacation to the beach, and people are taking the you know, the trashy novels, and I've got a leadership book, right? My wife's like, you're you're a pain in the ass. You know, all you ever do is think about leadership. You should write a book. I'm like, yeah, I got time to do that. So um after I retired and she passed away, um, she passed away right as I was retiring, you know, about a year after that, I thought to myself, well, maybe that's what I should do. So I thought about, you know, if I was gonna put a book together on leadership, what might it look like? And I had written a series of articles for um my company when I was still in American Electric Power. So I had sort of some ideas on things that are topics that I wanted to cover. And and then I ended up um hiring a book coach, and she was incredible, and she helped me through the process of you know, kind of being disciplined enough to write the book, because I will tell you it's a lot harder than it looks. And then she put me in touch with an editor uh who edited who did a professional job on the book, uh editing it, and then uh another company that did the cover, and and then we published it on Amazon. And so it's been out there since uh about September of 2023. So it took me, I don't know, well, about nine, probably about nine months from start to finish to actually write it and get it, get it moving and get it published. Um, and then you know, when I get the opportunity to speak about leadership, I use that as the platform. Um and what I and I appreciate your kind feedback and your comments, one of the things I thought about when I wrote the book was um there are two sections at the back of every chapter that I wrote with the reader in mind. The first one is basically the cliff notes. So if you don't have time to read the book, you can go to the back of the chapter, and there's probably eight or ten bullet points that are sort of the highlights of the chapter. And then the other one is that self-reflection, and and that really came from a boss that I had uh when I worked for AEP that was phenomenal. And what he used to do is he used to do a book review for his team. So he was a vice president, he had directors reporting to him. I was one of those directors, and he would buy us all a book, and he would say, Okay, we're gonna take the next you know couple months and we're gonna go through this book, and at every one of the staff meetings that we have, I'm gonna assign a different chapter to a different person. And it was amazing on several levels. One, it forced us to read the book, so that was a good thing. Two, it forced us to really get prepared for the chapter that we had to present because we didn't want to be embarrassed in front of our peers. But the one thing that I never anticipated that came out of it that was really interesting was we got to know each other a lot better. Because when you would listen to one of the other people in the group talk about their view of that chapter, you were learning things about them, about their experience, about their worldview, about like all kinds of different things that I don't know that we would have ever really understood about each other. And it really brought us together as a team, it made us a lot tighter. So I thought to myself, wow, I'd love it, it would be like my dream for someone to get this book for their team and use it in that format. So I thought, well, how can I help them? So I created that list of questions. So that list of questions can either be done individually or you could do it as a group, and it would give you a place to start. And as I thought about the book, I broke it up into three kind of three themes or three sections. I thought about, you know, first thing that you need to remember about leadership is it's a lifelong self-help journey. So the first part of the book is about yourself. You know, thinking about why you react the way you react. Who do you want to be when you grow up? You know, how do you want to be remembered by the world? You know, that idea of writing your own epitaph, you know, when people are standing around at the funeral home talking to your kids and your grandkids, what do you want them to say about you? And then figuring out a way to live that, right? You know, Warren Buffett said it really well. He said, you know, it's really not that hard. You just write your epitaph and then you figure out how to live it. And I thought, yeah, I'm a pretty smart guy, right? Then the middle part of the book is about others. So one of the quotes that I love from Simon Sinek, who is an incredible thought leader in this whole leadership arena, is he said, you know, being in charge is really about caring for the ones in your charge. And I thought that's exactly right, right? You got to take care of the others, take care of the people that you're responsible for. And then the third part of it is the arena, and that's the place where you actually got to do the work. And that comes from the Teddy Roosevelt quote, the man in the arena, right? Yes, which is actually on my back wall. Um, but um, you know, that that idea of what is it that you have to do intentionally to be remembered as the leader that you want to be remembered as? And one of the things I think we fail at is we have all these thoughts in our mind about how we want to be perceived by our team or even by our kids or by our friends or our spouse, but we're not intentional. We don't say, okay, if I want people to believe this about me, what do I have to do to make sure they know that about me? Because nobody can read my mind. Nobody can read what's in my heart. And you think about that in every relationship you have, you know, I grew up with an old-time cop as a dad, right? I mean, you know, 1961 vintage kind of police officer, old school. I don't really remember my dad ever telling me that he loved me. I have no doubt in my mind that he did, but I don't ever remember him using those words. I wanted to make sure that my children, my three daughters and my grandkids and my two son-in-laws know there's no doubt in their mind that when I'm gone, they're gonna stand around and go, you know what? Pop's loved every one of us because every single time I get a chance to tell them that, either in writing or verbally, I do it. Because I don't ever want there to be any doubt in their mind that that's the way I felt about them. So when you think about that, you know we all have that in our hearts, we have it in our heads. How do I make it intentional enough that it actually becomes part of that relationship? And I think the same thing applies to leadership. If you want people to know they're appreciated, how do you show it to them? You can't just think it. You can't just say, wow, you know, I really appreciate Dina doing this really hard work. What do I do to actually make sure you know that? And that's really individual to every person, right? Everyone does it a little differently. But the thing I think leaders have to be, have to recognize is they have to be introspective enough to look in there, look inside and say, okay, I need to be more intentional about this. I need to be the person that goes out to firearms and and shoots with the team or whatever it is, and you know, and everybody's gonna do it a little differently, but you got to be intentional about it. So those are kind of the three parts of the book. Self, that sort of self-help journey, how do I take care of the others, and then what do I do intentionally to show them who I really want to be remembered as a leader and how I want to be remembered?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:07

Yeah, and that was one of the things that really stuck out to me was the epitaph. Um, before we wrap up, I do want to quickly talk about First Responder Bridge and the work you do with them.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:17

Thank you. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that we recognize is that, you know, this job is very, very difficult uh for us personally, but also for our families. And so I had two very dear friends who started an organization called the First Responders Bridge um a number of years ago, and the website is firstrespondersbridge.org. And what we've done, I'm on the board of directors. I'm proud to say I'm on the board of directors. And if you decide, if any of your listeners decide to buy my book, a percentage of the profits for the book go to the first responders bridge, because I am firmly committed in that, um, in that work. But one of the things that we do that I think is a little bit unique from other programs like Save a Warrior and some of the other first responder programs, which are all wonderful, but one of the things we focus on is the family unit, and we focus on the second responders, which is that spouse or that significant other of the first responder. So we offer four weekend retreats per year, and we uh we put you up in a Marriott Hotel in Columbus, Ohio, actually in Dublin, which is a suburb of Columbus, and we feed you. We have speakers that come in from Friday evening until about Sunday at lunchtime. The only thing you have to do is get yourself there. You can go online, look at the program. Um it is faith based, and we tell people that up front. Um, there are some speakers that have more faith based messages, and we ask those for you because we recognize that that's not everybody's cup of tea. We don't want anybody to feel uncomfortable. So if that's a Scenario where you don't feel quite as comfortable, then you don't have to go. But one of the things that you're gonna find in that experience is that number one, you're not alone because you're gonna be in a room of about a hundred first responders and their significant others who are all going through the same struggle you're going through to one degree or another. Um, you're gonna learn about some of the uh opportunities that you might have uh working with mental health professionals with things like EMDR and some of the other um therapies that are out there. Um and we talk about trauma-informed counseling and making sure that you get the right, if you decide to go down that path, you get the right counselor that understands working with first responders, which is different than working with uh other folks. Um so it's a very powerful weekend. Um we get people all the time that tell us that that we can save their relationship with their significant other. Um we also get the significant others that tell us consistently they had no idea what their first responders were going through, and they had no idea of the of the pain and the the torture, if you will, that they were carrying around. All they saw were the results. They saw the you know the distance, they saw the the short temper, they saw, you know, the sullenness, the you know, the I don't want to go do anything with these other people, and you know, all that kind of stuff that we've all experienced, and they had no idea why. They had no concept of what was driving that. So um I'm a I'm a huge fan of anybody that's in peer support. And again, Dina, thank you for all the work that you're doing with NYPD in that front. Um, and we talk a lot about peer support um, you know, in this effort. Um, but you know, if if any of your listeners are interested in coming, um, you know, we would love to have you. And it's again, it's free. The only thing you have to do is get yourself to Columbus.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:57

Um I'll link it in the show notes.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:59

I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:00

I said I'll I'll link it in the show notes so that people can find it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:04

Yeah. We've had people from about 41 states, I think, um, come to the to the weekend retreats, and we're up well over 2,000 people uh that have come. And um so you know, it's it's uh in fact we're gonna do one this weekend. Um we're we have one this weekend. So it's a really exciting thing for us uh to be able to go out and share a positive message with people and recognize that we can we can help people navigate through something that that's really difficult. And you know, for you, Dina, and some of your listeners that come from big agencies that have you know a dedicated peer support group, you're very fortunate, even though I'm sure there's still some stigma around you know people going. But for a lot of these small agencies, they don't have anything.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:48

They have nobody.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:49

I mean, they have absolutely nobody. So, you know, this is another opportunity for them to link up with some folks and create a network um, you know, of like-minded people that are that are you know maybe struggling, but but yet can lean on each other. So it's uh, you know, I I again I love I love public safety officers, police officers, firefighters. They are what makes this country great. And our military folks, and one of the things that we we oftentimes don't think about when we talk about that bag of rocks, think about how many military folks we've have in our profession that already brought a big bag of rocks with them because they've been deployed numerous times, you know, they've grown up in a wartime environment, so they come to our agencies with things that I never experienced. I mean, you know, I I didn't ever do that. Um, and they they come here from day one and they've already got a full backpack, and then we're adding a bunch more stuff to them. So, you know, we recognize that uh that our veterans um you know need all that support as well. So, you know, we're happy to take uh uh anybody from the first responder community that's open to corrections, um, police fire, EMS, and dispatch. That's the other place that we realized along the way we were terrible at is we didn't do enough for the dispatchers. So we actually invite them to come in as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:13

That's great, and I love that it's for couples because a lot of times we tend to think that we're protecting our significant others by not sharing anything when really we're just creating a rift and adding to the isolation on both sides because now we it's one less person that we can lean on for support, and it's sometimes difficult for the other person involved because they tend to internalize it and take it personally and think that maybe it's something that they did. So I'm definitely going to encourage people to check out your book. I'm gonna link first responders bridge and encourage people to look at the marriage retreat or the the uh retreats.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:52

Yeah, and you don't have to bring your significant other. You can come as a single, it's not a requirement, but certainly we we have a lot of significant others that come. So we don't want to exclude anyone. If you want to come and you come by yourself, we are happy to have you. But if you want to bring your significant other, we would enjoy that as well. And we would do our best to accommodate everybody.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:15

One last question because I always like to end on a high note. What is your favorite karaoke song?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:22

So my wife and I actually met when we both had the leads and a musical.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:27

Get out of here.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:28

Oh, so in 1978, uh, we both had the leads and a summer stock musical, and our very first date was Greece on July 3rd, uh 1978. And so I would say Summer Lovin'. Perfect, John Travolta, Olivia Newton John, and we actually sang that song a few times, karaoke, and laughed about it. So yeah, I'd say that was a that was definitely a high note.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:53

That's beautiful. I love it. Stan, this has been a great conversation. I'm so honored. Thank you for coming on my podcast. Um, and again, anybody wants to connect with Stan, I'm gonna put all the links in the notes. Please read his book, look into First Responder's Bridge and connect with him. And in case you haven't heard today, you are loved, you matter, and you are not alone. Thank you so much for stepping outside the line with me today. If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing with a friend or to your social media network. And if you do, please tag me so I can reach out. Thank you. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are personal opinions not reflective of the host or justice department. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. If you're struggling with your mental health, resources are available. You are loved, you matter, and you are not lost.