Inspire, Teach, Lead
Todays Mental note:
I am in an asking and teaching mood today. I am asking for our officers and senior firefighters to step up. Lets be the teacher today. Help someone with less experience and training achieve something new. If they haven't learned something yet have the ability to say here let me teach you this it could help you and your crew in the future. Be a leader make yourself someone that people want to look up to. Show that you have the ability to teach and inspire young or inexperenced firefighters how to do there jobs and the expectation of what you want out of them. The younger guys should look up to the senior guys and officers. Officers and senior guys should remember that they were young once. We need good leaders and teachers in todays fire service. We can have the best training and technology, but without someone there to guide and teach these things are useless. As an young firefighter myself these are some of the things that i look to recieve Knowledge and training. More and more i here that firefighters are becoming complacient and the older they get the more they do it. My favorite one that happened a couple of years ago was, a younger firefighter went to the person in charge and asked what do you want me to do and his responce he got was "Put the fire out." This isn't what we need. As young guys we need people to say things like," Pull the 150' 1 3/4 line and advance it through the front door." This is the guidence we want. This is the leadership we should get, not put the fire out. We need to know that we should pull this line for this situation, but not do it until told. Thats freelancing and we rely on our people in charge to tell us what to do not make our own decisions. So officers and senior guys, get off your butts and teach us young guys something, lead us, and inspire us to do the best we can, because thats what keeps firefighters alive and that is the ultimate goal. Preservation of life and property including our brother and sister firefighters. So officers and senior men ask yourself what do you want from us young guys and go out and teach and lead us. Altimately you are inspiring us to do an be the best we can. This is the best job in the world and i feel that sometimes it is takin for granted. Thank you for reading and be safe-Patrick