Here is a great "memory jogger" for Command Functions and Size Up from one of our instructors, Scott Hulsey.   Size-up Matrix   Command Sequence Cycle     Click the link for each and feel free to use how you wish. If you have additions and suggestions, please share.   Thanks for reading and […]

That’s right, it is different. That team may lose a game if they don’t practice. We may lose a firefighter, a citizen, a building or a block of buildings if we don’t practice. It’s time to be different. It’s time to not cave into negative peer pressure and to create our own positive peer pressure that makes it “wrong” to be on the side of “inaction.” It’s time we hold what we do and love to a high standard and expect the best of ourselves and of those around us. Do the job and do it better than well. Encourage others with our actions and show the next generation what being a firefighter is about. Don’t let them be their own worst enemy.

Building on my FDIC presentation, leading the department in tough times.

As an officer, you have added responsibility and become a management tool in one form or another. Although you have just been promoted and will now be viewed as an officer, your people will recall your prior actions to determine your initial level of respectability. Right, wrong or indifferent, what you did and how you acted and how you treated others before you were promoted will play a large role in how you are viewed and their respect for you or lack of respect will be based on those previous observations.

This is a commentary about negative attitudes and complacency. We do and love our “job” and all of our “job.”

I was talking to some old friends that I had worked with when I had originally got hired as a career firefighter. We were discussing the “good old days” and having a good laugh. We all have moved on to different departments and districts since then, but we all agreed that those were some the […]