027 - How You Can be the Best Field Training Officer - With Paul Hasselberger

Lt. Paul Hasselberger is a law enforcement administrator and educator who has a passion for constant improvement. His drive to find balance between formal education, practical skills, and real-world leadership experience can be seen through his various assignments and accomplishments.

After earning degrees in psychology and sociology, he joined the Clifton Police Department in 2005 and quickly earned awards and commendations for his personal performance including: a physical fitness award, life-saving awards, and meritorious service citations. His work ethic helped him earn multiple specialty assignments including: SWAT, Academy Instructor, and Narcotics detective.

Outside of his full-time position, Paul has put his experience, education, and leadership skills to use by providing instruction to hundreds of FTO around the country. He has presented at various conferences and was most notably chosen to participate in the International Law Enforcement and Educators Association’s (ILEETA) prestigious “Emerson Hour”. Paul has also continued to instruct at the Passaic County Police Academy for the past 10 years and worked as a subject matter expert for police supervision promotional test development for the state of NJ. 

Mr. Hasselberger has volunteered for leadership positions on various non-profit boards. He served as the Vice-President of his agency’s supervisor’s union and is the founding director of the NJ Chapter of NAFTO. Paul has been the President of NAFTO’s Executive Board since 2018. During his term, he collaborated with the Executive Board to redefine NAFTO’s mission and business operations. These changes will allow NAFTO to maintain its position as the leading provider of FTO training while becoming the Nation’s leading advocate for improved training programs.

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Transcript

0:07

There's another principle called diversity of knowledge where I don't necessarily have to, you know, you don't need to think like me. If I surround myself with people that have different perspectives, we're more well rounded so me and my partner can go to a job and we'll end up with more right answers because we have our collective knowledge than if I showed up with my mini robot. And in the FTO world, that's super important to understand because we're not trying to create minimes. I'm not trying to replicate myself. Every training I deal with, what I'm trying to get them to do is make good decisions, use some of their personal communication skills and their leadership to blossom into their own best officer, the best version of them that they can be. Welcome to the podcast. Today I have Paul Hasselberger here with me. And let me tell you what, I am honored to have Paul with us. He is a man of a lot of wisdom and he has a huge amount of experience. And you know that I consider myself the Robin Hood for first responders, where I'm stealing wisdom from the people that have it. In this case, it's today's guest, Paul, and giving it to our listeners. So Paul, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for having me, Kerry. And that's quite the introduction. So I'm honored to be a guest. Well, I'm honored to have you here. Thanks for taking the time. And tell me about the organization that you work with because I'm fascinated by it. So I am the current president of the National Association of Field Training Officers, which is a mouthful. So we go right to the acronym in Police World. It's Nafto N-A-F-T-O which is also the website nafto.org. And what we are is really an association dedicated to improving field training to the newest officers coming to our noble profession. And it's a niche. There's a lot of other associations out there, like the traffic organizations. They dedicate to the special subject matter of investigating crashes. And field training is a niche all of its own that needs a little extra attention because you could be a very good police officer. But training a new officer to fill out and become another great officer takes a little bit of instruction, a little bit of help. So that's what we rally behind. I was talking with somebody the other day and they were telling me there's several states that don't have an FTO program. Yeah, FTO programs are complicated. First of all, they're very polarizing. Without getting into the broad history of FTO programs, there's two main programs and people really are, know, supporters of one or the other. Nafto is actually model neutral. What we advocate for is that you have a training program, you've put some intentional thought into it and you dedicate time and energy into improving the newest officers as they come into your departments. State by state, though, it varies widely just as much as our rules and courts kind of vary and even within state. I mean, in New Jersey, we're almost like two separate states. North Jersey, south Jersey. If you like the Yankees, you're north jersey. If you like the Phillies, you're South Jersey. And our experiences with FTO are quite different. I mean, we just started formal FTO programs dominantly up in North Jersey in the last ten years and they've been down in South Jersey for 20 years and obviously out in the West Coast for much longer. So there's a ton of variety nationwide and you come to expect it when you see how different some of our agencies are. You have a 50 man department that has 200 sq mi and 400 man department that has 10 sq. Mi and they have different training needs. So their training programs have to look different. Yeah, well, in the community that they're serving can be vastly different between those, whether they're working in a rural environment or a more urban or suburban environment. So the training program, it would make sense that there would be some differences. So let me ask you this what kind of challenges for the departments that do the agencies that do have field training or police training, or fire training officers, or paramedic proctors? What kind of challenges are you seeing and solutions to those challenges? So one of the challenges, I would say the biggest one you kind of hit on is if people don't have a program, it's a ton of work to start. It's like starting to write a college course, like staring at your Word document that's just like blinking with no word count, no nothing. So that's a big uphill challenge. And then the other one is that it's almost a flip side of it is some agencies have a program, it's 20 years old and it hasn't been updated and it's volumes and volumes of three ring binders that aren't really very contemporary. There's some even conflicting stuff in there. There's some stuff that you don't even want your FTOs training anymore. So it's keeping your programs up to date because our environment that we work in is constantly changing between technology and society is the program we just used to train our last group of officers might need to change to train the next one. So kind of teaching trainers and coordinators of these programs that this is a living system and you have to understand that it ebbs and flows and you just have to understand some of the cycles involved so you don't panic when things have to change and you get used to just working in uncertainty in a change environment. It's kind of interesting. I flash back to because I started as a reserve officer and then I came on full time. So I went through two cycles of FTOs and my first cycle of FTOs, because I had to have 200 hours in the FTO program to become a level one reserve and be able to work on my own. That 200 hours, literally, almost every day I had a different FTO, whereas when I came in full time, I had the same FTO for, in essence, a month at a time for six cycles. There was a couple of cycles that were only two weeks long. Right. But I think back and you're going to learn how to do things as a firefighter, a medic, or a police officer deputy. You're going to learn how to do things from somebody. And for those agencies that don't have an active training program, whether it's an FTO or a PTO or fire training officer, field training officer, your new people are going to learn from somebody. Wouldn't you rather have it be somebody that's been vetted and has a higher level of training and has been taught training techniques and who's tasked with responsibility and has welcomes that responsibility to make sure that the correct information is put out 100%? And here's the other thing. A lot of the stuff that the most important stuff for new officers to learn are never going to be in a manual. They're your agency's culture. And so your FTOs are the people you're handpicking to socialize your new officers. So if you flub or you don't give it due attention, a few years later you're down the road and you have this poor culture or culture that you're not happy with and you wonder how it got that way. You weren't developing it and maintaining it as time went on. And if you don't pay attention to it, it's going to happen anyway. It's human nature. Culture is going to exist one way or another. Your input is what makes it positive or negative or effective. Or efficient. Yeah. And that is a huge thing that you just said. You can choose as a leader in your agency. Now I'm talking rank and title leader because I make a big distinction. There's rank and title leaders, there are also the informal leaders. And everybody at every rank, every level is a leader. And you should be a leader because people are going to listen to you. You're going to have influence on people. But as a rank and title leader, you have a choice in how you set the culture for your agency. And you can either choose to be intentional about it, or you can live your I call it living your life by default or by design. Do you want to live your life by design or live it by default? Let's take it into the professional arena. Do you want your culture of your agency to be by design? Or by default and by design, you select the right people to onboard the new people and like you said, to socialize them. Dude, that is absolutely brilliant. Talk about stealing wisdom from those people that have it and giving it to the people that need it. That's a huge one right there. And it's something we teach on our basic FTO classes. One of our biggest things is the socialization aspect of it. And to speak about leadership when you talked about there's formal title leadership, I'm kind of the belief that everybody owns leadership. It's kind of a collective, it's part of your culture. So if you have a culture where leadership is encouraged and fostered, you have greater accountability. Leading by design will be the standard and the norm to use culture terms instead of the default. Right. If I'm not a good formal leader and I don't encourage leadership or everyone to take ownership of it, then the guys, my patrol sergeants and my watch commanders and my beat cops, none of them are going to embody leadership, and they're going to just do whatever they need to do to get through that next call and onto the next one. So a key aspect there is understanding that leadership isn't just my leadership or your leadership. We are a community. What is our leader? What do we believe about our leadership? Yeah, I don't care whether you're in the fire service or EMS or in law enforcement into things. The community looks to us to be leaders. And so you have to be a leader in your organization. I don't care if you're wearing stripes or not. I don't care if you're wearing an FTO pin or a fire training officer pin or not. You're still a leader, even if you're just like, well, I'm just a patrol deputy. Guess what? You're a leader as a patrol deputy. And I think that's a great point that you make. So thank you for that. So, staying with the training aspect, because again, the reason I started this podcast is because you can't talk about training without talking about leadership, without talking about communication, even though we try and segment into those separate topic areas. So focusing on training, and I've taught at our field training officer, both basic and refresher classes, and I've actually done the teaching and training techniques block. It's my favorite one to do. What kind of support does Nafto offer? What kind of gems of wisdom do you have to offer for somebody who's either looking to be an FTO or who's currently an FTO? So, we have a couple classes that we offer. We have a basic FTO class, we have a Managing the FTO unit class. We have some advanced topics classes. But one of our main offering is our annual conference. We just finished up our annual conference in June in Tree Point, Louisiana. We try to rotate it around the country year to year and 2019. We already know we're going to Salt Lake City, so we'll be in the Utah Salt Lake City area in June of 2019. So I know we're looking to put together another great conference with breakouts, kind of focusing on different key elements that we need or we feel are important for FTOs to hear so they can say contemporary. And at the front of training and in all of our classes, we talk a lot about adult learning, we talk a lot about socialization modeling, the different domains of learning, and how to kind of incorporate it in a very simple field training cycle. If you kind of do these few steps all the time, you're going to have a pretty big impact on the trainee that you're driving around with for 810, 12 hours. Very cool. And do we have dates in June for our listeners? Because they're getting a heads up scoop. They're getting inside information, which is always great to have. So share away, brother. Absolutely. June 19, it opens. So it's June 19 to June 21. It's a three day conference, and I believe it's in the South Jordan area, just south of Salt Lake City, so they can head to our website. And I think we have a little save the date card. It's so new. I don't think we have much of our curriculum set yet. I think we're kind of still putting together our curriculum for the conference. Well, it's going to be an awesome three day. So people should fly in on the 18th, right? Absolutely. First thing. Yeah. All right. So, folks, as you're making your travel plans, look for that whatever airline I happen to fly, one that I don't know. It happens to be in the south of the country and rhyme with best, but you can buy a ticket like close to a year in advance. So June has opened up, if not pretty quick. So fly in on the 18th and either fly out late on the 21st or stick around for an extra day or so and fly out on the 22nd, 23rd. Salt Lake is an awesome, beautiful town. There's so much around it. You could drop up in a couple of hours, be up at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and have some great time in June. It's just going to be beautiful. So great pick of a location. You got to bring San Diego, though. I'm just saying. Yeah, we try to jump around the country. Try to jump around the country. So San Diego was now on our list, right? We got a hook. Terrific. Yeah. Brother, I'll work with you on hosting it out here because you guys put on an awesome conference, a lot of great information. So if you're aspiring to be an FTO or a fire training officer, a paramedic proctor, it's going to be some good information for all first responders here. So definitely check out Naftonafto.org, where Paul's, the current president of that organization, doing a great job leading it and Paul, as we close out this area of this section, close out training, what kind of takeaways do we have for the officers or firefighters? Medics are listening. The best thing I could tell you, if you're a good police officer and you want to work, you want your coworkers to embody, some of the things you need to understand that it doesn't happen by accident. Human nature exists whether or not you believe in it or not. There's adult learning models, there's adult learning styles. There's things we could do to enhance recall. All those are happening in the background while we go out, and we be good police officers or be good first responders. So if you're interested in teaching future employees to be good coworkers, research some of these techniques so that you can understand what's working in the background, because you can either use it to your benefit or it could work against you. But knowing that it's there and what the mechanisms are certainly make you a more powerful trainer and ultimately a better leader, because I think there's a very strong connection between the two. Yeah, absolutely. And for those resources, you can go to Nafto.org and there's going to be resources. They're going to be consistently added on both websites for you to use as a trainer. It doesn't matter whether you're an FTO, a fire training officer, a paramedic proctor, doesn't matter what you're in. There's tons of resources all on training from both of those websites. We're with Paul Hasselberger with the National Association of Field Training Officers, Nafto.org. And in this section, this segment, we're going to be talking about leadership. So, Paul, as you look at with obviously a focus on the FTO issues, but as you look at law enforcement, as you look at fire and EMS first responders in general, what kind of leadership challenges do you see and what kind of solutions can you share with us? Well, I think one of the major things that I've been very interested in is this idea of collective leadership coming into police work and this chain of command, dominant, authoritative. My leadership is applied to my office or my title. I recognize that it didn't work as well as it probably could have. It was very slow. And being a younger officer, kind of coming up to the ranks, getting myself promoted a couple of times, or getting promoted myself, I learned that it's not just a part of being a good boss. It's actually leadership is owned by all the individuals on your shift, all the individuals in your department. And the most important part is understanding that you can be deliberate in forming your own leadership and developing your own leadership because it's something that you could enhance. It's not something that you're necessarily born with. So if you're in public safety, I like to think of it as this. If your job requires you to go to a scene where you need to take a quick breath and figure out what's happening around you, then you need leadership. Because that's the moment where you're rushing through your head and you're saying, I think I need to do something super important here, and people are watching me and they're going to take what I do as a lead. And when you show up on scene, there's a car accident and everyone's freaking out. Everyone's understandably upset. When you show up and scene, you can be calm, using the leadership qualities to take control of scene. We call it command presence in police work, and that's what it is. I'm the boss, but there's a way to do it without saying, look at my nice shiny uniform. I'm going to yell and scream at you. What they need sometimes is a little compassion. Sometimes they need you to be calm, take a breath, hey, what's going on? You're very upset. Lay it on me. And just that simple leadership will get them to come down to you. But understanding that that's your role, your partner's role is to do the same thing. The fire department, the EMS, when they show up, they're all collectively feeding that leadership in that scene and all kind of doing their own little role to solve that, whatever the public service or the public emergency is. And it's critical that we all do our own parts and we all don't show up with the bad leadership and we've seen them. That's the guy who shows up with the can of gasoline to the fire and looking to yell and scream and kind of be super authoritative. So from that I thought that there's a leadership model that I started studying called Swarm leadership. And it has principles that kind of encourage that. So first would be self organization. Whereas I don't need to tell you, as the person that works for me, what the most important thing is. I have to trust that you could figure out from your own perspective what it is. And then if you do that and your partner does something else, then collectively the whole job will get done correctly. There's another principle called diversity of knowledge where I don't necessarily have to you don't need to think like me. If I surround myself with people that have different perspectives, we're more well rounded so me and my partner can go to a job and we'll end up with more right answers because we have our collective knowledge than if I showed up with my mini robot. And in the FTO world, that's super important to understand, because we're not trying to create mini mes. I'm not trying to replicate myself. Every training I deal with, what I'm trying to get them to do is make good decisions, use some of their personal communication skills and their leadership to blossom into their own best officer, the best version of them that they can be. There's other principles like indirect collaboration, where you don't necessarily have to a lot of how we interact is with we see as more interacting with each other. If you look at it more as like interaction with a finished product in the FTO world, this is with our trainees. So we spoke about it before about rotating FTOs. If I have one FTO, I'm a trainee, but he only has to contribute his knowledge to my development, and then I get to rotate to another one and he gets to develop me through his lens, and they're looking at me as a finished project. Instead of having to try to bite that whole apple on one gigantic bite, it takes the pressure off, but it also leads. You can understand how collaboration becomes kind of the norm rather than an exception, especially in police work. And the last principle would be adaptive mimicry, which is basically making sure that everybody is staying in their lanes. So I don't have a fireman trying to arrest someone. I don't have a police officer trying to do some complex medical procedure that we're not authorized or trained how to do. And even within our own departments, I don't have a detective ordering patrolman what to do. I have a patrolman knowing what his function is, doing it to the best of his ability, forwarding it to the detective, them staying in their lane, understanding that they're all collectively trying to serve the public and resolve whatever emergency or crime that's been committed. So I was seeing the swarm leadership really kind of spoke to me because what's more collective about leadership than swarm? And it's the concept that none of us are as strong as all of us. So no matter how good I am, we're going to be better and stronger if I can get the people around me to get to be the best versions of them. Yeah, absolutely. The biggest thing is bringing all those talents in to the mix. I can think back, I still remember, and I actually train on this using bank code. Bank being the acronym for the four personality types blueprint, Action, nurturing, knowledge. I had an officer who was very blueprint, and Blueprints are about systems and processes and structure and low risk. I would sometimes be at a scene and he would be the one whispering in my ear, hey, let's remember about this policy. We remember this procedure. We follow this, and this is our way of doing things. And there were times to do that and there were times to deviate from it, depending on the situation. But to have his voice and his perspective was critical because it always brought me back. If I was making decisions of, okay, these are things I need to consider, doesn't mean I'm going to actually follow that because the situation might dictate. I need to deviate from that. However, having that voice was hugely important because sometimes he brought up things I didn't think about at the moment. I might have thought about him later, but at the moment, I didn't. The other thing, I want to go back to what you said, and I absolutely loved it. I call it the windshield size up. When you're pulling up at a scene, I don't care whether it's in a fire truck or a law enforcement vehicle, sheriff's deputy car or a police car, you pull up and you look through the windshield and you do your size up, and you're like, okay, here comes some fun. Here comes an adventure. And you take that deep breath and having that wisdom that you just shared with us to take that deep breath and step out and know that you're in a leadership role, because the citizens look to us, the public looks to us to be leaders. And when everybody else is just losing their mind and you're not, that's huge. That's huge. And I call it slowing down to speed up. Yeah, you don't run at a scene unless you're in a foot pursuit. You don't run at a scene because all it does is it wigs everybody out. It wigs out the other officers, wigs out the firefighters, wigs out the medics, wigs out the citizen. Why is he running? There must be some out of control emergency. Now, if you're chasing somebody, yeah, you got to run and run fast. Run tactical, run safe, run smart, but otherwise you don't need to. So don't run at a scene. We work stadium events here in San Diego, and we're at Petco, and there's some fight that's broken out or unless it's a cover now, and an officer saying, I need you right now, you don't run. You walk fast, but you don't run because when you run, you got 60, 45,000 people. Well, it's a Padres game, so like 8000 people. I'm just kidding. Sorry to the Padres, but you still have several thousand spectators who all of a sudden two cops or four cops or six cops are running through and wigs people out. So slow down to speed up, and you actually lose that fine muscle movement because you're raising your heart rate above the level where you don't have that fine muscle movement that you need. And by slowing down, you're actually going to be faster. In a use of force situation, like in officer involved shooting, slowing down to speed up. When you're at the range and you're practicing doing a magazine change, if you slow down just a little bit, that magazine change will go so much faster than if you try and race through it. Same thing works in so many different situations. So I love your swarm analogy. I love how you're talking about doing that deep breath and then, now let's step into action. And that deep breath doesn't take but a moment, but it gives you so much value. I think that instead of one of the best things that I like to make sure that our guys know is that when you take that breath when you're seeing whatever crazy situation that's happening in front of you, that breath is for you, but a lot of it's for everybody else because you hit on it right there. Panic is contagious, but so is calm. So if you get out and you stand up and you walk over to whatever's going on, but you're moving with purpose and you're being very deliberate, what you're doing, but you're exhibiting some sort of control. Again, we're human nature. Human nature kicks in and people that social proof theory. If the cop isn't upset or the firefighter doesn't seem like he's in a hurry, then there's nothing to be alarmed about here. And then now we have the ability to control massive amount of crowds. Unless you're at a Padres game, it's not that big of a crowd, I guess I just learned. But yeah, you have the ability. You have a very small number of public safety employees that can control and manage an entire stadium full of people. And that's through leadership. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm just going to show up, do my job, be professional, not completely wig out when something happens, because if I wig out and my partner does and that's contagious, and next thing you know, the masses are all running for the exits and you have some pretty terrible things that happen in that situation. Yeah. And I'm going to go a little bit woo woo here with you, if that's okay. Can I do that? Do I have that permission? Sure. All right. So energetically. Energetically, all of us at one time or another, anybody who's been to a live stadium event, I'm just going to use that just because it's so easy to pick out. Yeah. I remember rolling into when the Chargers were still here in San Diego before they abandoned us. Obviously, this is the Sports commentary podcast, but before the Chargers left San Diego, I can remember rolling into Qualcomm Stadium at a Chargers game, and we are tribals with the Oakland Raiders. The Oakland Raiders were there. And I remember rolling into that stadium and just feeling the negative energy from the crowd. It was a tenseness it was like people were ready to fight. And I remember rolling into the parking lot, and it was just like a wave that came over us and like, whoa, this is going to be a really long night. So energetically. When you are calm, people feel that. Again, it's a little bit woo woo. But hey, look, we know that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can only be transformed. And there's positive energy and there's negative energy. What are you going to be putting out? Yeah. Leader to your organization, as an FTO, to your trainee, as a paramedic, proctor to your intern, doesn't matter. As an officer, law enforcement officer, a firefighter to the public that you're serving, what kind of energy are you going to put out? Is it going. To be positive, it's going to be negative. Is it going to be scattered? Is it going to be calm, controlled, reassuring? Because they're feeling that and they can't put words to it. They can't articulate why they feel calm when you walk up, but they just feel better. And it's because of you and the way that you're presenting yourself. Yeah, I think I have a great anecdote so I'm a lieutenant now. I was a lieutenant at the time. I was the watch commander of a shift. I wasn't working, and they had somewhat of a complex job, and they called me at dinner time, which to them was like, don't disturb the lieutenant, especially when he's not at work. But they told me this crazy event that basically involved officers from another state coming and making affecting arrests in our state, which they don't have police powers. And then they were trying to basically take this person back over state lines, which in New Jersey is basically kidnapping. And they had everybody there. And I started off when they told me, I just let off like a chuckle, like, oh my God, that sounds like a terrible day at work. And my sergeant that was working with or that was calling me, he goes, you know what? From that reaction on, I knew that everything was going to be okay because there's no problem that's so big that we can't work through. He called for help, and I'm there to help him. But let's take the panic out of what we have to do right now. And now let's go and retell that story with some facts so I can start peppering in some of the knowledge that I might have or some of the policies I can remember. And we'll work together and we're going to work this thing out. In the end of the day, everyone's going to go home. No one's going to get in trouble, and we'll be able to resolve this job. But it speaks to that energy. I get a panicked call, and my reaction is to laugh and say, thank God I'm not at work today. Oh, wait, you are. Let me help you. Yeah. Thank God I'm not on call. Wait, I am. Let me step away from dinner. But yeah, that energy. I know what you're speaking to. I think that's human nature. We're animals. We're social animals. We can pick up. And it's all nonverbal communication, which I'm sure we can get into, but it's all being communicated whether or not we're saying it or we're acting it in the FTO car. It's even more important because how you treat your trainee, how you treat the public, how you treat your bosses, your trainee is looking at all of that. And if you're trying to build a good culture and you're trying to socialize trainees on how to become good cops and good leaders, you have to be on all the and it's very tiring, which is one of the reasons I'm involved with Nafto is that I understand how hard a job it is and how critical a role they serve. And I vowed to do everything I can to help them. So very important. Yeah, absolutely. Well, listen, Paul, as we close out this section in the leadership part of the podcast, I want to thank you for being here and thanks for your wisdom on leadership. You're welcome. Thank you. Today. We have Paul Hasselberger here. He's the president of the National Association of Fuel Training Officers. We'll call it Nafto for shorthand. And that's the website, Nafto.org. There's a ton of resources available@nafto.org where you can if you're an FTO, you're aspiring to be an FTO. If you're a trainer in any area, there's tons of information available. Paul, thanks for being here. And we're going to be talking for this next about 15 minutes, this segment on communication. So what challenges are you seeing with communication and what kind of solutions do you see yourself using and others using? So I think from an FTO's perspective, as a police officer, I'm used to interacting and communicating mostly with the public, right? That's my interface. My job is to go out there, interact with the public, serve the community. I interact with my coworkers and my boss. But my primary, my bread and butter is dealing with the public as an FTO. Now I'm going to change that focus. That's still important. I need to do that. I definitely need to do that and model it. But now I need to communicate my ideas to a trainee. I basically have to dump the information that I have in my head out so that they can digest it. And I think that process is very complex and may not always seem natural. It's not always intuitive to everybody. I think some people can get it faster than others. Some people can draw experiences from their experiences. In the past, if you've learned a sport, if you've learned a martial art or an instrument, and you've been coached and you typically can pick out what you've liked and how you've picked up on information, and then you start just kind of modeling that back. But sometimes you don't always get good feedback on whether or not it's working or not. So you can just go along on your Kerry little communication way and thinking that you're doing a great job. And meanwhile, the trainee leaves after two weeks being super confused and can't wait to work with another FTO because they just didn't understand what you're trying to communicate and the information you're trying to pass along. So I think from FTO standpoint, communication, that shift in communication is one of the biggest problems. But also once you unlock it and you understand that a lot of the key principles that make you a good police officer can make you a good trainer, I use it all the time. I enjoy doing criminal interdiction. I like stopping and preventing crime by investigating just people enforcing motor vehicle law, pedestrians, just citizen contacts. And to develop a roadside interview or a field interview takes a lot of conversation, a lot of mistakes. But once you get the hang of it, you kind of get the nuts and bolts of it. You can get pretty good at it and to the point where people would call, have called and helped me kind of take over an interview or just maybe give some advice on where to go with it once I was able to crack the code. That that can work when I'm talking to anybody, because all it is, it's communication skills. It's nonverbal and verbal communication. So how I stand my proximics of it, right, using little fancy words, is I can control. I can make you open up. I can make you resist me. If I want to make you agree with me more, I answer questions or I design my questions to end in yeses, to elicit a yes response. And over time, you become more likely to cooperate with me. If you're looking to shut someone down on purpose, you ask them no questions. It's simple things like that. Now, you take that from an awesome cop standpoint, someone who's like a stereotypical criminal interdiction officer, and you put a trainee next to them. I think you can unlock those communication skills by understanding that you're trying to accomplish the same thing. I'm trying to influence and motivate the trainee now to learn the information that I have. And while I would say the end result is a little different, right, we're not trying to lock up our trainees, I would think it has a little different connotation to it. The mechanisms are the same and then through promotions and I'm now an administrator in my department, and I have a leadership role that I take a lot of responsibility for. I understand that dealing with my employees and those that work for me, anybody in my department, anyone I interact with where I understand they're looking at me as a lieutenant. I understand that I'm using those same tools. If it's going to be a particularly hard conversation, we'll open up with some simple questions about yeses and no's. It's how I stand if I'm leaning on something, if I'm sitting down, if they come in, if I stand up and move over, right? We're just using all the same tricks and tips I use to try to arrest someone now. But all it is is it's human behavior. And when you understand and you can kind of apply that in different settings, is where I think you really unlock the power. Because I don't have to learn everything all over again. I just have to learn how to adapt this tool that I got pretty decent at and I could take a whole bunch of it and just apply it in a new setting. And I think that that has been some of the greatest leaps in development that I've seen our FTOs make. When they see it's not that hard, that people are kind of I think especially in the public safety sector, people are geared to learn the knowledge that they're there. I took the fire position because I want to be a fireman. I want to be a good fireman. So I just need you to show me what to do and maybe not shut me down and close me off because I don't like how you communicate to me. Same thing with a police officer. I want to be a police officer. I want to be a good police officer. And I don't know everything, so teach me, but don't shut me down by turning into a drill instructor in the car. I just got through my police academy and this is kind of inappropriate setting because I'm not going to learn that. Um, I think communication ties all aspects of training leadership together. Yeah, totally. And dude, that is a ton of wisdom. And I'm a self proclaimed Robin Hood for public safety, stealing wisdom from those that have it, which is you, Mr, and bringing it to the people that need it and want it and desire it, and just they want it. And that's our listener. So, Paul, thank you for all of that. That was awesome. And you've cracked your bank code. I talk about bank a lot. I'm a true believer in the value of it and what you describe. Bank being the acronym for the four personality types blueprint, Action, Nurturing, and Knowledge. And when you understand what somebody's bank code is, you can speak the language that they hear best. It was designed as a sales training system. And what I've done is I've taken the Rapport building and the communication part of it and brought it to public safety. And the idea is that we're selling stuff all the time, we're just not exchanging money for it. So the sale for you as a Criminal Interdiction Officer is to open the trunk. That's the yes. They say yes and they open the trunk. That's a sale. If you have kids, getting them into bed, getting them to take a bath, getting them to actually brush all of their teeth so they don't have later on, just one to brush, which is why the toothbrush was invented. A toothbrush, not a teeth brush. They're all sales. Eat your lima beans. Hell no. They're all sales getting promoted. If you have an FTO that speaks English and the trainee speaks Spanish, then they're not going to be able to communicate. And that's ultimately what happens. And with bank, you're understanding their personality type and you're able to communicate in the language they can best hear. So you're automatically learning to speak three other languages. Because I'm sure when you started out as Criminal Interdiction Officer, and we're just going to use that because you started with it. And I think it's an awesome analogy. At first, you weren't speaking the language that all suspects could hear, but you began to learn the language. You began to learn what worked and what didn't. And the difficulty is, how do you pass that information along to somebody else who is not as skilled or talented, hasn't learned these communication skills that you developed? And so for you to pass all of that information along, for you to be able to communicate that knowledge is a challenge. Regardless of how good you are at that skill, passing that information along can always be a challenge. Some people are really good at it and intuitive. Others have to work at it. So the advantage of bank, obviously, is that it teaches you what these other languages are. So you recognize immediately, within 90 seconds or less, what language this person hears best and what's going to get them to say yes. So for a trainee, for an FTO, with a trainee in the car, knowing your trainee's personality lets you immediately know what they value and you can speak to those values. It's values based communication. So we know that based on research, about 7% of the message that we convey is through the actual words. That means 83% collectively is everything else. Body language, facial expressions, tone. The energy that we talked about in the last segment toward the end, where we talked about negative and positive and calming energy and scattering energy, what energy we project. All of that is in that other 83%, which is why text messages, emails and MDT mobile data terminal messages get so misunderstood because you're taking 83% of your communication and you're dumping it out the window. I don't care if you add an emoji, smiley face or a frowny face or whatever you add in there. That helps, but you're still losing a lot of your communication. So as we look at communication, especially from an FTO, whether you're a fire training officer, a field training officer, police training officer, proctor for a paramedic intern, whatever you're doing, how you communicate, I think the key takeaway for this is it's not the language you're using that's important. It's what is the language that you can use that the person that you're speaking with with, not at the person you're speaking with, can best hear. Because I can talk all day long in Russian. And if you don't speak Russian, you're never going to hear a thing I say. And you're going to be really sick and tired of me after two weeks or a month in the car with me. If all I do is speak Russian and you don't speak Russian, you're going to hate me afterwards. And all it was is, we're not speaking the same language. Yeah, you get the polite smile and nod, right? Oh, yes. Okay, thank you, thank you, over and over again. Yeah. They taught me in the academy to say thank you for sharing when I don't really either agree with you or understand you for sharing. Yeah. Very neutral, right? Very neutral. Yeah. As long as I smile and nod my head, then that's a good thing. Right. But you're using some of that the hidden power of words is like you're thanking them so they feel like now indentured, like, oh, well, you've put them in a position where they've done something for you. Right. So that nice little thank you for sharing. You haven't written them off. You haven't just cast them out. In fact, thank you. You've made me better today, having met you. I took something out of it while you spoke Russian all day long. Yeah. I want to throw out one other thing, too, as a resource to people. And I make no money on this, but there is a book called Never Split the Difference and Chris Voss, who someday I'll meet him and I'll shake his hand because the guy is nothing short of amazing. He was the lead hostage negotiator for the FBI, for the International H T team, and the book he wrote, Never Split the Difference is amazing. And here's one way to remember the title. So if a husband and wife are having a disagreement and they're getting ready to go out and he wants to wear black shoes and she wants him to wear brown shoes and they split the difference, what ends up happening? Well, you wear dark brown shoes. No, you wear one on each foot. Right. If you split the difference and you have one black shoe and one brown shoe, everybody loses. Right. And go out and people laugh at you. So never split the difference. Easy way to remember the title. It's a great book, especially as you look at how do I work my way through all these sales things that bank can help you with. Never Split the Difference is a really powerful set of ideas for how to negotiate your way through life and be able to really show up as a high integrity person. So kind of a cool resource. Yeah, that's wonderful. I can't wait to look that up. I used the banco. I thought it was a pretty interesting aspect. And I kind of emailed you before the podcast in preparation for it, so I took it and in kind of arranging my values some point, I don't know, it just came to me out of nowhere. It seemed like, is what does it matter what I think my values are? What values am I projecting to those that I work with? So, interestingly enough, I asked everybody that I have kind of a direct report with guys in my traffic unit, guys on our emergency services unit team, my boss, to ask them if they'd fill one out through the perspective of what they think my values are. Kind of like, hey, evaluate me. What I can say about the bank code is I love the fact that there's no wrong answers, right? It's not like you're not saying one value is any better than the other. That just makes common sense. But in interpreting all mostly from my subordinates, they put one of my values of knowledge, they rank the knowledge value extremely high. And I came out as more of an action based value. And in kind of thinking about how that could happen, whether or not it was how I talk to people, kind of integrating, kind of just introspectively, looking at what am I putting out there that makes me seem knowledge based. I wonder if it was part of the amount of experience that I have and my formal position. I'm in meetings that other people aren't. So how I lead the people around me is with information, right? So while I'm thinking we're moving towards a goal. They see me as a knowledgeable individual. So they call me and they reach out to me and they're looking for that knowledge. They're looking for that trainer, right? They're looking for the FTO in me when they talk to me are they. Looking for you as a resource they see resource. Exactly. So it's just interesting know I thought that know very insightful for know especially when we speak about communication almost who cares how I think I am as a communicator, short of just whether or not I'm personally trying to improve people who really matter whose opinion matter are the people that I'm trying to communicate with. So they kind of turn on its edge. And oddly enough, my boss my captain came out with me being action based. So kind of weird dichotomy there with the people that see me as a boss I'm a resource. My boss who doesn't see me as a resource kind of agrees with my estimation of how I act and my action based values. So super insightful tool I recommend anybody to do it. Especially if you're looking to kind of improve communications because I understand your group and your group dynamics. I've spoken throughout all these segments of how important it is that you don't exist in a bubble. You're a member of a department or a team or an engine or a bus or a squad. And what you contribute is kind of all directly related to how you communicate. And so if you think you're being one way but people are not seeing you that way, you need to figure out where that disconnect is. Don't just explain it away. I'm careful not to explain it away. Obviously, if I want to be seen more as action based, I need to maybe tone down the technical explanations of things, nurture them, trying to find the answer themselves. I could do these things with this knowledge now, but that's super important and great advice for anybody, I think to go out there and kind of great experiment to run on yourself. Yeah and you did it a great way. So what I want everybody to do there's going to be a special podcast episode on how to crack your code and it's going to offer several different that episode. Look for that, listen to it. It's not going to be a long one. It's going to be about 1015 minutes long. What you did was I got to give you a kudos, Paul, because there's a lot of people who don't have high enough self esteem to have other people have input onto them like you asked for. And you use bank code as a tool, which is an awesome tool for that. So without going into a lot of details for the listeners, go to Mybankcode.com Victory. You'll be able to crack your own codes, your family codes, your workers coworkers for free. I do that as a gift for you. So mybankcode.com victory what you're looking for. When you know your bank code, you know your primary personality, and that's how you're normally going to talk to people. It's what we lead with. It's human nature. But we're a mix. We're a mix of all four. And sometimes people have a hard time deciding, well, am I in action? Am I nurture? Am I knowledge? What am I? And the cool thing about the full assessment is it actually gives you a number value where you can look and go, oh, wait a second, these two are equal, so situationally, they can change. But I'll explain all that in the podcast and the video that accompanies that. It's going to give several different ideas for how you can use bank both at home. Because remember, you have to parent the child that you have, not the child that you want to have. Bank knowing their bank code can be really helpful. And as well as your spouse, your significant other, whoever's important in your life, your work, relationships, it fits all of them. It's an awesome tool. It's quick, it's easy, 90 seconds or less. And, you know, you can predict their buying behavior. Their buying behavior is what makes them say yes. And getting to that yes is powerful. So, Paul, thanks for being with us on the podcast. You have done exactly what I hope to do. You have opened your wallet, you have opened up your mind, and you've let me steal wisdom out of it and give it to the people that need it. So thanks for bringing that wisdom to us today. Thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed it. And it's an honor and privilege to be a part of something like this. So thank you very much. You bet. Now, I'll look forward to having you back on the show at a future time. Until then, folks, as you go out there, whatever job you're doing, firefighter, medic, law enforcement officer, always remember Kerry's golden rule do unto others before they even think about doing unto you. Stay safe. Bye for now. I hope you found a lot of great value in this episode of the Deescalation Conversations podcast. Please be sure to go out to our website, theidea World. T-H-E-I-D-E-A world. On that website, just click on the link that resonates with you most if you're a K through twelve educator, if you're a firefighter, medical services, law enforcement, flight attendants, whatever industry you're in, we have specialized training for you. So check that training out. Because literally, it can save your life. It can save your relationship, it can save your career there. So check out the idea world. I'll look forward to seeing you soon. Take care.