By Dana Larkin
Staying sharp or attempting to stay on the top of your game has a lot to do with personal motivation. But what exactly is motivation? Is there a way to develop it, model it, or learn it? Is motivation intrinsic to an individual? Does everyone have the same propensity for self-motivation, and you just need the spark to get it going? There are individuals in the fire service at the top of their game, “touring” on the national circuit and attempting to teach others to do or be more. When they can get someone inspired to do better, how can the individual keep that momentum going for more than just a few days or weeks after the event? How can firefighters turn that moment into a life-changing habit?
As a fire service instructor and training officer, these are the questions I’m constantly struggling to decipher. Obviously, everyone is different and will have different things that will trigger their inner motivation. What might be inspiring to me might have zero effect on the next person. The challenge as an instructor is to both try and find what combination of techniques will get individuals the information they need and also deliver it or package it so it will stick with the individual and make a lasting change.
I pose all these questions, but just like finding motivation, the answers are going to come strictly from your own experience. Of course, you can substitute several words for motivation: drive, passion, intensity, growth, desire. I prefer motivation as I see that all those other words fit into that definition. I am not going to necessarily answer all or even any of these questions, but they need to be front of mind when designing or implementing training.
The What, The When, and The How
All training should achieve a desired goal. When I conduct training, I want people to learn a skill, but more importantly I want to try and trigger something in them that will propel them to seek out more knowledge. It’s like the varied methods of teaching in school between the modern way and the classical education model…think ancient philosophers. The modern way or when people are brand new to a subject is to teach you WHAT to think, memorizing facts. The next step would be what most of the fire service does—we teach you WHEN to think. We focus entirely on a set situation and what the exact response should be in that situation. We might even expand that training to a predicted set or series of situations, but again the focus is just to get the student to realize they need to be thinking about a certain set of actions. The final step is the classical education model, that is, we teach you HOW to think. The goal in this mode of education is to try and get the student to apply reason to the situation, and then apply their knowledge to formulate the best response. If we want to create thinking firefighters, we need to focus on teaching them how to do think critically, rather than merely learning rote responses.
The Benefits of Outside Training
No matter what people say, they cannot be motivated until they truly want to grow. I spent quite a bit of my time in the fire service just passing time. I was doing all the training and drills that were required by my department and I was learning, but solely by repetition and muscle memory. I was not motivated to grow and improve. I wanted my paycheck and no extra responsibilities beyond being a back seater. What worked for me to finally break that barrier and move towards lifelong learning and desire was in leaving my department for training and seeing people outside of my mutual aid partners.
More departments and more training officers should seek out outside opportunities for their members. We get too comfortable within our own departments, and that can hinder training. When members go outside of their department, especially if it is to an event hosted by a department that is not a mutual aid partner, there is a shift in behavior for the individual. You are now in an unfamiliar department, and you are the representative for your department. That is a powerful tool to ensure that the individual attending the training will be paying attention, especially if you are requiring them to come back and teach what they have learned. No one wants to be that person who went to outside training and before coming back your exploits beat you back. For the vast majority of individuals, your behavior and your ability to learn are increased when outside of your comfort zone.
Why do I think this works? Because that is what changed my perception of the fire service and ultimately saved my career. I went a mere 100 miles away to an event. I met people that challenged the way I was doing things, I heard lectures that dumbfounded me on the amount of information that was out there I knew nothing about. I attended a hands-on training (H.O.T.) class that blew my mind. I came back to my department a changed man. I could no longer merely do the minimum, I had to know more, be more, and do more. Once that door was opened, there was no closing it. Funny thing is, some of the lecturers were talking on topics that I felt like I had a good handle on. If I were just training in my department, I might not have been paying much attention to these subjects because I didn’t think there was much more there to learn about.
I try to bring back everything I learn to my department. I make sure to share topics and ideas with other firefighters to get their input and attempt to enhance my learning by immediately attempting to teach what I have learned. I talk often to my chiefs about new ideas and topics with the goal of trying to figure out how to implement what parts of it will work in our system. In the past four years, we have changed just about everything with how we respond to a structure fire. We have renamed our attacks and defined them, so that everyone is on the same page. We changed our fire hose, changed nozzles, and, more importantly, changed priorities. I have also spent a lot of time talking to our newer members about motivation and learning. Even though I am the training officer, I try to have our younger members lead the training events. This allows them an opportunity to gain a better understanding of the topics and hopefully it helps to cement in them the desire to continue to improve.
I also can’t stress enough the importance of sending your people to FDIC International. I have attended three times and already have my trip planned for this year’s event. FDIC is the single largest event in the fire service and gives the most opportunity to see a huge variety of topics and speakers in a single area. In 2023, I went with a member of my department who only had three years of full-time experience. We attended the F.O.O.L.S. Brotherhood bash, where I was able to introduce him to some friends of mine from across the country. It was quite the experience for him, and he even bumped into a few national speakers and spent some time talking to them. We went out to dinner after, and he was very emotional about the whole experience. Between the H.O.T. classes and all the lectures he attended I could see that he was in the same place I had been years before. Since then, I have attempted to involve him in more training and encouraged him to be a mentor to our part-time firefighters. He has really stepped up and is still just as motivated as that Wednesday night in Indianapolis. He has even taken on the role as President of our local F.O.O.L.S. chapter!
Mindset and The Frontiers of Motivation
Will that success with one person mean that I can use that combination of events to get someone else motivated and moving forward? Maybe. Will it work for everyone in my department that needs some help in breaking out? Unlikely. Does this frustrating aspect of trying to figure out how to get people invested in the fire service motivate me? Absolutely! This is my motivation, and the question that truly drives me to learn more and do more. How can I get the firefighters I come in contact with to want to be great? That is the best part of this job: there is no one way to do things. In my trying to teach and motivate, I can be learning at the same time! It’s like those videos that start with “I was today years old when I learned…” I don’t get mad or upset when someone shows me something new or different. I get curious as to what else this person might have to show me that I don’t know.
The right mindset will help with motivation and keeping people moving forward towards growth in the fire service. My mindset when I go into any training event or classroom to learn is that I am the dumbest person there, which allows me to be as open as possible to new ideas. If I go into a class thinking that I know what the speaker is going to say or how that won’t work in my department, then I am closed off before the class even starts. Even if the speaker talks about how they attack a fire with their initial alarm of 27 engines, five battalions, six medic units, and three ladder trucks, I still listen, since there might be some tactical piece of advice I can get out of their description of the event. It doesn’t matter that my initial alarm is one engine, one battalion, and two EMS units. Being the dumbest person in the room will allow me to listen to the entire description without thinking about how that can’t possibly work. Indeed, this may be when you catch that gem of an idea that you can tweak to work in your situation. Being the dumbest person in the room means I need to read more, do more, and learn more to try and get better. I need to be constantly improving so I won’t embarrass myself or my department. Being the dumbest person in the room means I must listen way more than I speak so I can try to gain knowledge. I also am a big believer in the Dunning Kruger Effect, and I know that the more I learn, the more I learn that there is more to learn! That cycle keeps me going.
I have started to do some writing as the next challenge to keep me motivated. I don’t come from a huge department. I don’t run 30 calls a shift, have fires every rotation, deal with gunshot wounds or knife fights, have a huge homeless population, have buildings over three floors, freeways, railroads, or anything that resembles a downtown area. I don’t feel that I have enough experience to teach anything to deal with those situations. I do, however, have experience teaching the calls that my department runs. Although my take on how to do that might be different than others, that is not my desire. I want to teach about what I know better than any other subject—how I have changed my career from something that I just showed up for to something that I cannot live without. How my experience has changed my life and made me better. How others have inspired me to do more and be more. Hopefully, that can help just one other person become a better firefighter. I want to do everything possible to motivate other firefighters to get out of their comfort zone and push themselves to be the best version of themselves. The more I work towards that, the more I am motivated to learn more and be better. After all, I am still the dumbest person in the room.
Dana Larkin is a captain and training officer for Camano Island (WA) Fire and Rescue. He has been with the department since 2002 and has been a career firefighter since 2006. He has a bachelor’s degree in sociology and fire service administration. He is an ISFSI-certified live fire instructor and has conducted live-fire training for multiple departments. He is the founder and past president of Cascade F.O.O.L.S. and treasurer of F.O.O.L.S. International.
