Beautiful Lessons that Scars Can Teach You about Healing and Leadership

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When I got the station assignment, A lot of people came up to me and offered condolences. They said, oh, man. This is a tough crew, but you'll be okay. It's just for a short period of time. Don't worry about it. You can survive it. I had no idea what to expect. I was nervous and didn't sleep much between graduation and my 1st shift.

On my 1st shift, I arrived early with donuts, like all good probationary firefighters should do. I walked into the station, and I had knots in my stomach. I set the doughnuts down, and then I kinda wandered around. There were a few people walking around, and I found my academy mate who was on the offcoming shift, and I was gonna relieve him to go home. So we started doing shift change, and then captain Jack came up to me, said, come see him in the office after I get my gear on the truck. I did all that. I said hi to a few people that would talk to me, and I went into the office. He was sitting at his desk, and he said, okay, I need you to shut the door.

I shut the door, and I sat down. He was tall, older, pretty lanky and very calm demeanor. I sat down, and he said, welcome to the crew, and explained that he was in the middle of a pretty rough divorce, and so he wasn't in a great space. I was listening and paying attention to him. And then I noticed kind of behind him some commotion. So I looked over a little bit, and there were, I don't know, 5 or 6 men with Halloween masks on jumping up and down behind him. I was trying not to laugh, and I was staying focused on him. He looked over his shoulder, and he looked back at me, and he said, Yeah.

We Fire to play around and have a good time here at the station. These were not skills that I was taught in the fire academy. I took a big breath, and I said, awesome. We should get along just fine. The shenanigans never stopped when I was at the station. During the summer, we frequently had water fights, and they were epic water fights. They may or may not have included sometimes pulling the hose off the fire engine and maybe bringing it into the station. Captain Jack's rule was make sure everything is repaired before we go home the next day.

The best water fights took place in the bay where all of the apparatus were. And it was such a big bay that there was a garden hose in the front and in the back. And to really be successful in these water fights, you needed to have both oozes. I tried. It didn't take me long before I started to be an active participant in the water fights because I was tired of always getting wet. 1 night, it finally happened. I had both hoses in my Diane standing in the middle of the bay. It was awesome.

And then I don't know what happened, either someone scared me or jumped up behind me. I dropped one of the hoses, dropped the other hose, and went running to try and recover one at least one of them. Instead, I got too close to the eye of the garage door where this huge 3 inch screw was sticking out of it, and it sliced my leg. The water fight was then interrupted, Diane injury time out. There was a lot of blood, but I was fine. I was not going to stop with the water fight. Unfortunately, we did have to stop to clean up the mess. And whenever I look On my left calf, I still see that scar, and I smile because that scar represents so many memories of the 1st year in the fire service.

The crew spent a lot of time pranking me. I spent a lot of time bringing my mattress up the stairs, waking up to a vacuum cleaner going off in the middle of the night under my bed, and being the victim of a shaving cream bomb at the dinner table. I've also learned to always check under my bed when returning from a call late at night. The crew also invested a lot of time training me and teaching me how to be a great Fire firefighter and what it meant to be part of a team. I know Fire some of you, it may not sound like a healthy workplace or that my experience was really weird. And I have to say, I learned so much about myself And like I said, it was about teamwork and leadership and the camaraderie building trust and love amongst a crew. That experience became the foundation of my fire service and leadership career. But it's not just physical scars.

Burn scars impact mother nature after a wildfire. If you've ever seen the post devastation of a wildfire, that are many black spots because the fire destroys the grass, the trees, and whatever else gets in Her path. Mother nature usually wins. In the late nineties, I went to Yellowstone for the first time, shortly after some wildfires went through the park. It was a stark contrast between the Blackburn scar and the beauty of nature around the wounds. It was really impressive to see the power mother nature can wield. 20 years later, I returned to Yellowstone, and the scars healed. I couldn't tell where the fire destroyed the land except for the smaller trees.

A reminder that we must always tend to our scars. Scars heal from the inside out and the healing process is slow. Think about a time when you got a cut or a scrape. Eventually, it scabbed up, and you may or may not have been bored or curious and picked at the scab, realizing quickly that it had not fully healed because it started bleeding again. The healing process wasn't complete. I think it's the same for our emotional scars. You may not even know they exist, and you may not know what to do once you've realized they exist. And this is where the power of therapy comes into your life.

You know, if you've listened to The show at all, I am a huge fan of therapy. And I find that if you have a therapist that you can work with, who can help you learn about your scars. You can start the inside out healing process. Fires are good for the environment because it removes the low growing underbrush. It cleans the forest floor of debris, opens it up to the sunlight and nourishes the soil. A few months after the Marshall Fire in Colorado, The bright green grass was growing and the burn scars. And just like in Yellowstone, it was a reminder that mother nature works on healing her scars from the inside out as well. I believe that scars are the most vital part of who we are.

They make us stronger literally because of how they heal and figuratively because they remind us that we are still here to talk about them. And scars are where the light shines through. Your physical and invisible scars are part of your story, your journey, and who you are becoming. They can remind us of a point in time in our lives when we faced something that changed us or challenged us, pushed us out of our comfort zone, which we may or may not have control Her. But we can control Her we choose to move forward Diane let the light shine out of our scars. But what we can control is how we choose to move forward and let our light shine through our scars. So my friends, my challenge to you is embrace your scars. Let the light shine through them.

They make you more beautiful. They are a reminder of a life that you have lived. And even if you receive the scar in a traumatic, painful, horrible memory. Don't let that scar define you. Thank you for giving the valuable gift of your time and listening to The Fire Inside Her podcast. Speaking of value, one of the most common potholes we fall into on the journey to authenticity is not recognizing our value. So I created a workbook. It's all about value.

Head on over to the thefireinsideher.com/value to take your free workbook that will help you remember your value. Until next time, my friend.