What Happens When Your Job Is Your Identity (And Then It’s Gone) - with Patrick Faulkner (Part 1)

What happens when the job that shaped your identity disappears overnight?

In Part 1 of this conversation, Patrick Faulkner shares the moment his law enforcement career ended — not with ceremony, but with a quiet reality check. After being cleared to return to work following an off-duty injury, he was told his sergeant stripes had been given away, his K9 reassigned, and there was no position waiting for him.

What followed was a decade-long reckoning.

Patrick walks through the identity loss many first responders experience after leaving law enforcement or military service, the overwork mentality reinforced by first responder culture, and how habits built for survival don’t simply disappear when the uniform comes off. We talk about reinvention through entrepreneurship, the illusion of freedom in hustle culture, and how unprocessed experiences from military and law enforcement careers often surface years later — quietly and destructively.

This episode explores:

• Identity loss after leaving law enforcement or first responder careers
• Why overwork is rewarded in high-stress professions
• Hustle culture inside military, law enforcement, and EMS
• Entrepreneurship as a second grind
• What happens when identity is stripped before you’re ready

This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation.
Part 2 continues tomorrow, diving deeper into leadership failures, inherited beliefs about work, questioning authority, and what rebuilding actually looks like after being forced to pivot.

Guest & Links

Guest: Patrick Faulkner
Former LEO | USAF Veteran | Podcaster | Small Business Operator

• 🎙 Podcast: Knock and Talk Show - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/knock-and-talk-show/id1589492648
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/knock-and-talk-show/posts/?feedView=all
• 🔗 LinkedIn: Charles Patrick Faulkner - https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlespatrickfaulkner/
• 🏢 Business: Faulkner Endeavor Group - https://www.linkedin.com/company/faulkner-endeavor-group/

Transcript

From Clearance To Castoff

SPEAKER_01 0:00

But the moment the doctor handed me the you're good to go back to work letter, the agency said, Well, we gave your sergeant stripes to somebody and we gave your dog to somebody else. We don't have a canine sergeant position available. Good luck to you. So that started a 10-year journey to try to figure out who Patrick was supposed to be since I was no longer Sergeant Faulkner or Officer Faulkner or Detective Faulkner. That was a long, dark journey. In that journey, I learned that I had a lot of unprocessed trauma from my military days and my law enforcement days.

Show Opens And Guest Framing

Patrick’s Path: Air Force To Police

SPEAKER_00 0:43

This is Hustle Rebels, a podcast for people who know how to grind but are starting to question the cost. I'm Renee. And here we talk about success, burnout, and nervous system regulation without glorifying exhaustion or sacrificing your health, relationships, or your sense of self. And without pretending ambition is the problem. Let's get into it. This is a big one for me because today's episode is the very first guest conversation on the show. And honestly, I couldn't think of a better person to start with. Patrick and I share a mutual background as first responders and also a similar, less talked-about experience of kind of being pushed out of that world after off-duty injuries forced major career pivots. That kind of transition doesn't just change your job, it challenges your identity, your habits, and the stories you tell yourself about worth, work, and who you're allowed to be next. Patrick is a former law enforcement officer, a U.S. Air Force veteran, and the host of a podcast show called The Knock and Talk Show. He's also a small business owner and a fractional director of operations for an EMS technology company. In this conversation, we talk honestly about identity loss, reinvention, hustle culture inside the first responder world, and what happens when the system just moves on, whether you're ready for it or not. This is part one of that conversation. So let's get into it. All right. Thank you again for joining me. Like I said, you're popping the cherry for being the first guest, and this is Patrick. Um, why don't you, like I said, we already introduced you, but why don't you go ahead and you know tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, and where you're coming from.

Roles, Purpose, And Sudden Exit

Corporate Detour And Entrepreneurship

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Sure. Okay. Uh, first off, excited to be uh guest number one. I I don't take that honor lightly as a fellow podcaster. It is it sometimes can be difficult to find people willing to come on camera and tell a story or answer questions to potentially be out in front of, in my case, dozens of people. In your case, I know it's going to be thousands of people. I I am extremely honored to sit on this side of the camera and the questions a little bit about me. I uh currently live in in Atlanta. I am a US Air Force veteran. So I was I served in the Air Force in the mid to late 90s, back in a time where nobody cared if you were a veteran or not, they're like, cool, you chose to wear a uniform and drink on a base versus wearing sweatpants and drink in a dorm room. Cool, good choice. So when I got out of the Air Force, I had three options really for a career, because everything I interviewed for in the avionics world, because I was an avionics specialist on the F-16, I was told I was too military specific and I was overqualified for everything. And as a a 24-year-old young man who went into the Air Force to pause life because I had no idea what I wanted to do when I quote grew up, that was it was difficult to hear because I was always told, like, when you come out, you'll have a job, you'll be easy, you'll land on your feet. And so my three career options were garbagemen, firemen, or policemen. And garbage stinks, and I didn't see myself riding on the back of a truck as a career, although in retrospect, those dudes make a crap ton of money. Um think about trades kids as you're writing out your to-do list. And the second option was the firemen, and those those people run into burning buildings on purpose. And to me, that's ludicrous, nuts even. So I I chose law enforcement because where else can you drive fast, carry a gun, and help people? And back in the 90s and early 2000s, when I began that career, that's what we did. Like we we drove fast, get out of our way, we have somewhere to be to go help people. And I I believe law enforcement has lost its way, but that's probably discussion for a whole different and and the society as a whole has lost their understanding. Like, like we need to go back to Norman Rockwell with the with the the the cop sitting at the ice cream parlor hand handing the kid some ice cream. Anyway, I spent the better part of 15 years in Polyester and Kevlar, and I worked at four different agencies. I left for about 11 months in the 2006-2007 calendar year to try my my hand, my first attempt at entrepreneurialism, and that wasn't a super great time if you are a student of history. And uh remember the uh the housing crash and the bubble burst of 2007-2008. So I was pushed back into law enforcement. I did everything you can do in polyester and Kevlar, but ride a horse or ride a motorcycle. So it was uniform patrol, narcotics interdiction, traffic enforcement, investigations, both burglary unit and special victims unit. I was a canine handler, I was a patrol sergeant, I was a canine sergeant, special operations supervisor. And then in 2014, I tore my rotator cuff off duty. And that ended my career because my last day of FMLA protection was the day of my rotator cuff surgery. So the agency kept me on long enough for for me to get through rehab, but the moment the doctor handed me the you're good to go back to work letter, the agency said, Well, we gave your sergeant stripes to somebody and we gave your dog to somebody else. We don't have a canine sergeant position available. Good luck to you. So that started a 10-year journey to try to figure out who Patrick was supposed to be, since I was no longer Sergeant Faulkner or Officer Faulkner or Detective Faulkner. That was a long, dark journey. I I went into corporate America for a little bit. I was the um regional manager for a security company, not the assistant to the regional manager. No, no, the actual regional manager. A nod to the office. And I did that for like two years. The company was moving my region's headquarters from Atlanta to Savannah, and I was not in a position to move with that change of location because I had just bought a house. And my wife at the time had just gotten promoted to controller of a international hospital company, healthcare company. So we couldn't move. So then that started my second attempt at entrepreneurialism, and I did a couple of different things. I started, sold, and closed four different businesses over the next eight years to make a grand total of five. And each time I learned a new lesson that I didn't know before, and it was always something out of the blue that I had not thought of because I did not have a mentor, I didn't have somebody giving me direction. I I would sometimes reach out to my dad, who was a very successful businessman in Motorola, spent his entire adult career in Motorola, made his way up to VP. But, you know, there's only so much that you want to go to your dad for, right? Um, you know, as just the hat that I was wearing at the time, as a as a newly wedded young man still in my in my 30s, I wanted to prove I could do it. So I tried. And then I would fail, and then I would try, and then I'd fail. And the great thing about entrepreneurialism is you trade a 40-hour work week with a steady paycheck and benefits to an 80-hour work week. No idea where the money's gonna come, when the money is gonna come, and no benefits at all, other than you you know you're gonna have to burn the midnight oil and both sides of the candle. So that led to, as you can imagine, a divorce. So I it cost me quite a bit. And in that journey, I learned that I had a lot of unprocessed trauma from my military days and my law enforcement days. And that's what I mean by very dark journey. I didn't realize that I was depressed or that I had depression or that I had trauma, because you know, in in law enforcement, we handle all kinds of calls, and I I've I've seen figures and stats put out that the average person in their lifetime might encounter two to three traumatic events in their life, and first responders typically run 200 plus in their career. And for us, and you know this, it's just Tuesday's shift, right? You handled it on Monday, you've got you've got more coming on Wednesday, and you just handle them one call at a time, one alert tone at a time, and they're just it's just a call, and we don't realize that our brains and our bodies are filing that trauma away for us to uh stumble into inadvertently later on in life and not realize where the hell that train's coming from. But bam, does it hit us? So currently now, fast forward, I've re-entered the corporate workspace and I work for an EMS technology training company. And we can get into that later if you want. But that's the long, that's not me in a nutshell. That's the long, that's the long answer. I I guess I should have asked you if you wanted the Reader's Digest version or the Time Life magazine version.

Trauma, Isolation, And Identity Loss

SPEAKER_00 11:22

No, it's great. Whatever you gave was uh was on the docket, whatever you felt like giving. Okay. Well, it's funny listening to you because I feel like you gave the two versions of the hustle in itself, right? So you gave the hustle of working for a corporation or an organization where it felt like I can relate very much to that because it's almost like you gave yourself to the law enforcement organization you're working for, and then you had your rotator cuff issue. And then when you're like, oh, I can go back, or however it might have happened, it's like, oh yeah, so we gave everything away. And you're like, oh, great, awesome. And then you have like that loss of identity, you know, and so many people can relate to that, whether it's retirees or, you know, I went out on injury. So it's like all these different people in the first responder world, something catastrophic happens. You gave yourself not only to the organization, but to the the people of the community, and all of a sudden, this job that was your identity is just ripped from you as if it was a Tuesday, and you're just like, What just happened? What do I do? You know, this was my whole life for the last 10, 20 years, and now I'm lost. And then they were like, We can't even help you. And so you have to reinvent yourself. And so many people either reinvent themselves or go to a dark place, and or both. So I was actually talking to my boyfriend not too long ago about how it's interesting when someone is to a point where there's in a dark place what they do in that dark place, how strong you are that or like when you reinvent yourself, and um, then you said about the other hustle side of the entrepreneur. So you then had a divorce and you overworked yourself and you were working 80 hours a week. So it's like there's no balance, right? So you don't know how to balance yourself when you're working so hard. So, with that said, how do you explain the parts of yourself to the people who knew who you were beforehand to who you are now?

Two Hustles And No Balance

SPEAKER_01 13:28

Oh gosh, I I feel like I tried giving that explanation multiple times as I tried to reinvent myself, as I tried to figure out what Patrick was going to do next, who Patrick was supposed to be, but as a big picture, who Patrick was supposed to be, but also who Patrick needs to be now to get through this thing. So there were there were multiple times where I would start a new company and try something new, and I would run that to its course, and I'm always one to wait till the the very last straw to land on the camel's back to say, okay, this isn't working, right? I I should have made the left-hand turn in Albuquerque and I kept going. I'm notorious for that because success is around a corner. Which corner we never know, but you got to keep going and you got to turn the corner, you got to keep turning corners, and hopefully you land in the success and and the great uh but I never found that. So I would come back to my friends and my family and say, Okay, all right, here's what I'm doing now. And it got old for them. It was almost like that cousin, cousin Bobby that's always in the MLM get quick, get rich quick scheme, right? You know, that every family has. There's always a new thing that they're selling, right? Yes. And I felt like that was the trap that I had fallen in as I was trying to figure out who in the world I one needed to be and two, who I could be. And the one of who I wanted to be was such a far-off prayer and dream that in my head it was unattainable. It was that lofty goal that we set to hopefully one day we get there, like climbing Mount Everest before you've hiked the Appalachian Trail, right? I kept focusing on the here and the now, which is, you know, some people say that's all you gotta put the right foot first, right? You gotta do today because tomorrow isn't promised in yesterday's history. Worry about today. That's all well and good, and there's benefits to that, but also you do need to have goals and plans because I and I think it I think it was patented, and I could be wrong. Fact checkers will obviously tell me if I was wrong. But patent said something to the effect of you always have to have a plan. Life is never gonna go to plan, but without a plan, you're planning to fail, or something to that effect. Every time I would I would try something new, I always felt that when I would go to like my dad or my cousins or friends, close friends that were still wearing polyester, still going to shift. And as you know, when we leave the first responder world, we have six months of viability. After that, we're out of sight, out of mind. That wheel and those cogs are still turning and we have been replaced. Not on purpose, not because they don't want us anymore, not because they didn't like us, not because they don't love us, but because their world has to keep going. Right.

SPEAKER_00 16:49

Out of sight, out of mind.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

Yeah, we aren't part of that anymore, and they don't have the bandwidth to check on us, to to worry about us, to and I don't want to use this, but really to care. Because their world is this big, right? And now we're sitting way out here somewhere floating around. So when I would try to get back into that crowd and say, hey guys, I could use a little help, I would get this. Yeah, you know, because they don't have the time. And it's not their fault, it's just the way it is. So to answer your question to try to bring this back, I would I would try to get people to understand what I was doing now, and that was hard. That led to some of those dark times where I'm gonna admit to this, and this is an exclusive just for you, but I was doing some retrospect the other day and and I I need to do that, I do that a a lot, but I realized that I became a self prescribed and self-identified bourbon not expert, but connoisseur. Because it gave me a reason to buy the next bottle. And man, when I realized that not that long ago, that was a difficult pill to swallow. But I I found something that one I enjoyed, two I liked, three, it it gave my mind something to focus on while I was ignoring the things that I didn't want to deal with anymore. And not that I'm a drunk because I'm not, I don't go to meetings, so I'm not a quitter. I I learned how to focus that energy responsibly, like the commercials say.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

So I have Drink responsibly.

SPEAKER_01 19:02

Yes, drink responsibly. I have this certain goal that I've gotten a fitness goal right now, and in that fitness goal, there's no no alcohol. So New Year's Eve was the last drop until a certain date, and I don't have the thoughts of, you know what, I need to go pick up the bottle, I miss the taste. Were there bottles that came on sale that I would love to have gotten my hands on? Absolutely, because I'm a collector, right? But having that insight of myself was a game changer and gave me the ability to say, okay, we're not focused on that anymore. It's now fitness, it's now um getting back to being healthy again, and this is one of the things that got to drop off. So um, yeah, I don't know why I I gave that up, but it's an exclusive just for you.

Explaining Reinvention To Your People

SPEAKER_00 19:58

Oh, I appreciate you sharing that. It is interesting when you have those revelations. I had something similar recently. I mean, back in my darkest times, I wouldn't consider myself an alcoholic either, but I was definitely drinking to mask certain things. I would definitely say that. And then when you're in the first responder world, especially with firefighters, I mean, we were drinking during union meetings, we were taking shots after union meetings, and there were times where I am not proud of myself for you know things of drinking habits and stuff of that nature, but it was just you have those revelations, and then even recently I was thinking to myself how I was like, wow, I used to never drink before and I could have fun. And now I have trained my brain to think I need to drink in order to have fun. And at what point did I tell my brain that? And I don't want to think that. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with alcohol. You can drink responsibly, you can have a drink and have fun, and that's totally fine, celebration, whatever it might be. But back in my darkest times, I realized I never wanted to drink when I was sad and I made that decision. I've never done that anymore. But now I'm realizing that my brain thinks, like you said, a new revelation. I think that I only can have fun when I drink. And that's not true because I in the past, like I said, never used to drink and could still have fun. So it's interesting when you have those revelations and when you're in the culture, such as first responder, whether it's EMS, law enforcement, or firing firefighting, it's you're in this culture that accepts drinking as just normal. It's just what you do. And um, add on top of that, all of the stress that we have on top of the biology of us just not sleeping. And not eating healthy and just trying to maintain any type of normality with our physiology. It's just um it's just crazy. So it is interesting to have that revelation that you had talked about.

SPEAKER_01 22:15

Yeah, you know, because in my time, 15 years, I spent 12 of them as a vampire working the night shift. And three of my four years in the Air Force, I worked the night shift. So going to bed and being a day sleeper, it was, you know, it was easy to come home, take the uniform off, sit down, pour you a nice two-finger pour, and sort of wind down so that you could sleep during like what's going on at your house now. You've got all that all the snow and you've got plows going, you live in a neighborhood, and you've got kids that run around and play after school when you're trying to sleep, or the neighbor decides 10 a.m. is the perfect time to cut the grass and they have an acre and you get to listen to that for two hours. Um so yeah, that it's easy to train yourself to think you need something in order to do something. You need X to do Y. And muscle memory is a funny thing. You know, it only takes about 500 repetitions to create muscle memory, and it takes about 5,000 to start to change, to start, not to change, but to start to change that muscle memory. It takes 10 times the amount to start reversing or or creating a new habit for yourself. So for those, I don't need to mean to hijack and but you know, for those that are struggling with something, it's going to take time and it's going to take perseverance and it's going to take consistency, but you can do it. I'm living proof.

Coping, Bourbon, And Hard Truths

SPEAKER_00 24:02

All right, listeners, that brings us to the end of part one of this conversation with my very first guest, Patrick Faulkner. In this first half, we focus on identity, what happens when the uniform comes off, when habits that once worked started quietly costing you more than they give, and how overwork in first responder culture isn't accidental. It's inherited, reinforced, and often rewarded. In part two, we take this further into the beliefs that drive hustle, the role leadership often plays in burnout, and what it actually looks like to rebuild after being forced to pivot or question the system. And Patrick actually utilizes his own experience to give you some practical tools and tips. Part two will be available tomorrow morning, so make sure you're subscribed to the channel so you know as soon as it drops. If you do want to connect with Patrick, all of his links are in the show notes, including his podcast Knock and Talk Show, his LinkedIn under Charles Patrick Faulkner, and his business, the Faulkner Endeavor Group, where he helps small businesses get started. And if this episode resonated, subscribe to the podcast, share it with someone who's deep in this bullshit, and consider supporting the show using the links in the show notes. You can also subscribe to my newsletter to keep up with everything new that's coming out. And if you're more of an audio person, I actually tried something new this week, and the new edition of the weekly recharge is actually recorded. So you'll be able to listen to me read it to you. So that's where we leave part one, and tomorrow we will pick this back up for part two. See you guys then.