For all my predictions, becoming a trainer for firefighters was not on my 2023 bingo book.
As one of my side gigs, I facilitate something called Safe Management. I've talked about it before on here. It's a crisis intervention training. Most front-line social work jobs in the helping professions require employees to do something like this. Examples of similar trainings are Understanding and Managing Aggressive Behaviour, and Non-Violent Crisis Intervention.
Somehow, a firefighter caught wind of us doing Safe Management, liked what he saw and asked if we could do a "different" version, targeted for firefighters and condensed to a two hour workshop.
We didn't really know what we were doing. We figured that they may have encountered people belonging to the demographics we support, gotten non-typical responses from them and had less-than ideal outcomes. So we decided to develop our training around this assumption.
We didn't have a lot of guidance. Turns out that firefighters enjoy learning by doing, so they didn't give us much criteria or context. They just asked us to develop something that we could run through a team of seasoned workers that could help us fine-tune our material.
It's very important at this point that I emphasize that the product we presented to the firefighters was 100% original content from me and my co-facilitator. We were approached because of our background in Safe Management training but none of the material translated to the workshop we presented.
We called our workshop "Take The Heat Off", as an attempt to connect what firefighters do with the emotional state that a person might be in when they're trying to deescalate them.
During our run-through, we received a lot of good feedback specifying what they were looking for. I was positively surprised at how open they were to talking about introspective topics, and how they deferred to us as experts on emotion. I had gone in thinking that these perspectives would be a hard pitch.
One thing that surprised me was that they were interested in our expertise surrounding vulnerable people generally, not just people with developmental disabilities specifically.
Overall, they seemed encouraged by our presentation and asked us to be a part of their basic training going forward. We're currently figuring out logistics, but from the request put out before us, it looks like I'll be doing about as much Take The Heat Off as I do Safe Management, at least in the immediate future.
The person in charge of training at our organization said that it went better than he ever expected.
