BECOMING UNSTOPPABLE
BY JOHN M. BUCKMAN
The key to achieving success is recognizing the significance of every experience. Everything you do either helps or hurts you. Once you realize that every action has consequences–good or bad–you are one step closer to becoming unstoppable.
This one quality can guarantee continued success in everything you do as a volunteer fire chief. If the leaders of your volunteer fire department are to succeed in recruiting, retaining, and leading, it is important that they become unstoppable. If the leadership is to achieve the things important to the membership, then the leaders must continue to be unstoppable. How can we do that?
PERSISTENCE
Persistence is a very important quality in a leader. It is important to an organization. Persistence is that quality that makes us get up in the morning and face the challenges the daylight brings. The volunteer fire chief faces the additional personal challenges of balancing the professional and personal lifestyle with the demands of delivering emergency services at a moment`s notice.
RESILIENCY
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Every great success is ultimately the triumph of persistence.” Over the years I have noticed one common thread running through every success story. All successful individuals and organizations must have an incredible resiliency that enables them and the organization to bounce back, forge ahead, and be-come unstoppable.
Researchers in a detailed study on goal setting and success conducted in New York several years ago concluded that people who set goals on a regular basis succeeded 95 percent of the time. That is an extraordinary success rate! Just think about it: The mere act of setting a goal virtually guarantees fulfillment.
But hold on, there`s a catch. The researchers also found that only people who refused to quit achieved their goals. In other words, you can achieve almost any goal you set your sights on as long as you keep moving toward it and refuse to allow the inevitable setbacks and disappointments to deter you from your course.
“UNSTOPPABLE” DEFINED
Let`s analyze the meaning of “unstoppable” as it pertains to persons. Invariably, this refers to the type of person who has strong character and amazing resiliency to triumph over obstacles. Only through the continued exercise of character, or persistence, does a person become truly accomplished. Resilient people never complain or wish things were better. Instead, they go out and make things better. They don`t wait for opportunities to come to them but seize whatever opportunities they can find or create their own. These are qualities of unstoppable people. Nothing is stopping you from joining their ranks.
The ability to overcome difficulties, ad-versities, and obstacles is the first quality of a dynamic leader. Anyone can acquire technical and academic knowledge, but it takes patience, persistence, and a strong will to develop true resiliency.
The only way to become unstoppable is to simply refuse to stop. This quality cannot be developed in a week or even a month. It is a mental habit developed by prolonged practice. The process is not complete until the habit becomes a permanent part of your character.
To become persistent, you must first become disciplined. Persistence is self-discipline in action. The more you discipline yourself to bounce back from defeat or disappointment, the easier it becomes to exercise persistence. Just as continuous exercise strengthens your physical muscles, exercising persistence strengthens your mental muscles.
Thomas Edison is a great example of re-siliency. He believed that success was in-evitable once you had a clear idea of what you wanted to accomplish. He understood success to be a process of systematic elimination of all the wrong methods. As a result, he conducted more than 17,000 experiments to find the plant variety that would produce latex for car tires. Edison`s theory was that success was inevitable if you learned something from every experience and made marginal improvements time and time again.
These principles hold true for volunteer leaders as well. Nothing in the world can stop you from succeeding except yourself. Think about it: If you want to become physically fit, you will have to go to a gym or engage in what is called “cross-training”–the exercising of different muscle groups at different times to build endurance, flexibility, and strength.
Every leader who is leading is going to make mistakes. The key is to learn from those mistakes and not make the same ones again. To ensure that you do not make the same mistake twice, conduct an analysis after every difficult setback. Ask yourself, “What did I do right? What could I have done differently?”
Write down those things you did right. Even if the situation was a total catastrophe, you probably did a variety of things correctly. It is essential that you examine the positive things and sort them out accordingly. Then, think of all the things you could have done differently. Write them down. Each answer will become a lesson for the future. A mistake is not wrong unless you don`t learn from it.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SUCCESS AND FAILURE
There is one main difference between successful people and unsuccessful people. Those who succeed make progress; those who fail make excuses. In fact, unsuccessful people have an ongoing affair with their ex-cuses, using them at every turn to justify not moving ahead.
No matter what your favorite excuses are, many people likely have had it far worse than you and have gone on to become successful nonetheless.
The volunteer fire department needs persistent leaders, leaders who won`t give up until the end is achieved. The challenge of raising adequate funds to finance a quality, responsive organization needs persistent leadership that won`t quit. The fire service is a highly respected organization. The public consistently has ranked the fire service first in trust and capability in virtually every survey ever done. The only area in which the public hasn`t ranked us at the top is the one in which it wants to put its money. The volunteer fire service leadership continually struggles to raise adequate funds. In many cases, the funds are used to purchase lifesaving equipment and fire trucks that deliver services.
The volunteer fire service must do its job right. To get more money, the public must be educated to understand the importance and value of the volunteer firefighter and the volunteer fire department. That educational process should include our ability to demonstrate our priorities for service and the types of services we provide. In many communities, the public still does not understand just what the fire department does. Educating the public is important if we are going to survive. The more the public knows about the fire department, the more understanding it will be when it comes time to pay the bills. The more the public knows about all the services provided to them, the more receptive they will become.
There has never been a better time to achieve all the goals and dreams you`ve imagined. If you set your goals, make a commitment to learn from your experience, and persist until you succeed, your potential will be unlimited. You will become unstoppable.
Have a great journey as you move down the road to success. n
JOHN M. BUCKMAN, a 26-year veteran of the fire service, has been chief of the German Township (IN) Volunteer Fire Department since 1977. He is immediate past chairperson of the International Association of Fire Chiefs Volunteer Section, a member of the National Fire Protection Association Volunteers Advisory Task Force, the president of the Southwestern Indiana Survive Alive Inc. public fire safety education facility, and an editorial advisory board member of Fire Engineering.
