How much of what you believe today have you actually decided for yourself? Think about that for a minute. Your definition of success, what you consider acceptable, how you measure your own progress, even what you believe you’re capable of achieving. How much of that comes from your own experiences and convictions, and how much did you absorb from the people and places you’ve spent your life around?
I think we underestimate just how much our surroundings influence who we become. We pick up habits, opinions, attitudes, and beliefs from the people around us, and over time those influences become so familiar that we stop questioning them. What started as somebody else’s perspective eventually becomes our own, and we can spend years defending beliefs we never consciously chose in the first place.
The fire service is a perfect example. Think about your first few years on the job. You were learning the work, but you were also learning the culture. You could see what earned respect, what people admired, what was accepted, and what got challenged. Your first crew’s work ethic, the way they treated each other, their attitudes toward leadership – all of it helped shape the firefighter you became, whether you recognized it at the time or not. Some of those influences made you better. Others may have left you with habits you’ve spent years trying to overcome. Influence is part of growing in this job. Letting it decide who you become without ever questioning it is where we lose ourselves.
Choose Your Influences
I think belonging is the reason it works so well on us. We all want to be accepted and valued by the people around us, especially in a job where the crew is such a big part of who we are. That desire to belong can shape what we’re willing to tolerate and the standards we’re willing to accept. Being influenced is valuable when it raises your standards, and it’s worth questioning the moment it asks you to lower them. Sometimes we compromise parts of ourselves just to stay comfortable somewhere we’ve grown used to. Being part of something doesn’t automatically mean that something is helping you become who you want to be. If you don’t know who you’re trying to become, any crew will be happy to tell you.
Brothers Helping Brothers in Beavercreek, Ohio, and Science to the Station in Kansas City, Mo., put me in rooms full of people with different backgrounds and experiences, every one of them trying to contribute something meaningful to this job. Being around them changed the conversations I was having and the questions I was asking about my own work. It also reminded me that we have more say in our surroundings than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. Our coworkers and the leadership we work under are often out of our hands, but who we seek advice from, whose opinions we trust, which discussions we join, and where we put our time and energy are decisions we make every day. Influence finds everyone. Growth tends to find the people who went looking for it.
If the people we’ve served alongside shaped us, then someone is being shaped by us right now. Looking back at the firefighters I admired when I first came on the job, I learned far more from watching how they handled themselves than from anything they told me.
Someone Is Learning From You
James Baldwin once wrote, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” I wonder how much of that applies to the firehouse. We talk a lot about leadership, mentorship, and developing the next generation, but how often do we consider what people are learning from us when we aren’t trying to teach them anything? How we respond when someone makes a mistake, how we treat people we disagree with, the effort we put into our work, and the way we talk about the job when things aren’t going our way. That influence doesn’t wait until you’re an officer or hit a certain number of years. Every one of us is part of somebody’s first crew.
You don’t have to be the perfect example or have all the answers for this to matter. We’re still learning ourselves, and sometimes the people we have the chance to influence end up teaching us something about ourselves. We can be so certain about what matters that we stop listening to what the people around us are trying to teach us. Choose what you value with intention, but leave enough room to be surprised by what you learn. So take an honest look at the environments you spend the most time in. Who helped shape the standards you hold yourself to today, and have you ever told them? What have you accepted as normal simply because everyone around you accepted it? When someone looks back on their time working alongside you, what will they remember?
The truth is, you’ll spend years unlearning what you picked up just to fit in, so be careful what someone else will have to unlearn from you.
Photo by Steve Baer | FireDog Photos
