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Introduction
For as long as I can remember, we have been told to spend thirty minutes per day working out, keep track of our calories, wear sunblock, and buckle our seatbelts. While these still hold true today, I have yet to come across anything to help or inspire you each day as a leader. “What is a leader?” you ask. Well, quite simply, it's you. If you have discovered my 7 Minute Leadership Podcast and now are currently reading this book, you are a leader. You don't have to wear a gold badge to inspire people or wear the C on your hockey jersey to be a leader (episode 27). Perhaps you are the leader amongst your friends – you know, the one who always makes the plans to go out or the one in charge of making all the travel arrangements. Or, maybe you are the one in charge at your company or maybe even in an entry level management position. How about this: maybe you're a minimum wage worker who aspires to someday be in a leadership role or you are the head of your household. Whichever role you are, there will be something in this book and in my podcasts that will help you. So who am I and why do I have the right to publish self-help anything? Sit back and relax; here is my story.
At my very young age of thirteen, my father enrolled me in Civil Air Patrol, an auxiliary of the United States Air Force. Every Wednesday evening was spent at a local church where our squadron meetings were held. Wearing an Air Force style uniform and learning to stand at attention, salute, and march was quite the culture shock for a young teenager who just wanted to listen to eighties music and grow his hair long. But that wasn't in the cards for me. I was being groomed for something else, a career in the military. I quickly progressed through the ranks as a young cadet and mastered military customs and courtesy. I wore the uniform correctly and passed all of my promotion tests and requirements to move up in rank. Summers were spent at the 911th Tactical Airlift Group at the Greater Pittsburgh Airport for the Civil Air Patrol Summer Encampment.It was a summer filled with more classes, more marching, and being very close to the love of my life, aviation. My father is a pilot and has owned planes his whole life. I have pictures of me, as a baby, sitting on my father’s lap flying the plane. Being around Air Force planes all summer was a dream come true. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" may be the great quote from the movies, but trust me when I tell you, I loved the smell of jet fuel early in the morning. I was different from all the other kids in high school. While every other teenage boy was busy grooming their mullet every week and underage drinking, I was busy perfecting the art of the high and tight. I could spit shine a pair of boots like you couldn't believe. My mother would often ground me for stealing her pantyhose to shine my boots. Trust me, it's a trick you learn that gives a parade gloss like you have never seen. Don't try it without permission from the person who owns the pantyhose. But I think you are starting to get the point. Four years of prime high school life spent wearing uniforms, saluting people, saying, "Yes, Sir" and "No, Sir" like it was my job – I was quite the militant little teenager. As if planes, living at an Air Force base, and marching until blisters exploded in my socks wasn't enough, here came a thing called Search and Rescue.
A small single-engine plane crashed somewhere between the two mountain ridges between Latrobe and Altoona in Pennsylvania. Our squadron was being activated to go and look for the wreckage. At the time, one of the primary missions of Civil Air Patrol was to search and locate downed aircraft in North America. At such a young age, I didn't really think this was a thing. Boy, was I wrong. So my mother's phone rang, and it was our squadron commander telling my mother that we were being deployed to go and look for the aircraft. It must have been around 7:00 p.m. when she received the phone call and I can remember her saying, "But he has school in the morning." She was quickly informed that because of the nature of the call and the mission of Civil Air Patrol, my absence from school would be excused. Wait, what? I don't have to go to school? Count me in! I never packed my outdoor gear so fast in my life. Fast forward a few hours later and there I was, a teenager walking in the pitch black of the Laurel Highlands looking for the downed Pitts Special aircraft. This was cool, not so much for the pilot for obvious reasons, but how amazing of an experience that all of this responsibility was starting to amass for me. I won't bore you with all the details, but we found the plane and the deceased pilot. After this, I was hooked on Search and Rescue and knew that this was something I wanted to be a part of, more so than flying planes. I quickly enrolled in all of the Civil Air Patrol Search and Rescue trainings, schools, and weekend bivouacs they offered. I now started spending weekends throughout the year at a place called Hawk Mountain, the Civil Air Patrol's private Search and Rescue training compound in Eastern Pennsylvania.
It was there I learned the art of survival in all seasons, had my first formal leadership training, and truly started to understand what being responsible for others meant. I mean, how many of my teenage friends were spending the weekend living off the land, sleeping in manmade shelters, and learning to navigate with just the stars? All in all, Civil Air Patrol was my baptism into a lifelong leadership role in everything I was yet to do or be involved with.
Running parallel to my time in Civil Air Patrol, I also fell in love with scuba diving. It was offered at my high school as an extra-curricular activity, and I was eager to do it and get certified as a PADI Open Water Diver. The first time I would breathe through a regulator underwater was not during this program, but years earlier. My family owned and operated a hotel in Pittsburgh and my father pretty much paid the local dive instructor to come to the hotel pool one day during the summer to let me try it. It was called Discover Scuba and I was probably eight or nine years old. I remember that moment vividly and knew this was something I was going to want to grow up to do. I took and passed my open water certification, but that wasn't enough. I convinced my father to let me take the advanced open water diver course, and then the night diver course, the rescue diver course, the wreck diving course, and the cavern diver course. By the time I was eighteen, I pretty much had every PADI scuba diving card one could have. My future was determined; I knew my life was not going to be in the air – it was going to be underwater. After graduating from high school, it was a no-brainer to join the Navy.
Well, my father would have preferred that I join the Air Force since I already spent my entire teenage life in an Air Force uniform, but I wanted something else. Three days into Navy boot camp, our company commanders walked into the barracks with a large three-ring binder and said, "This is the non-wartime recruit training binder," and then he threw it into the garbage can that moments earlier came flying down the hallway of the crew quarters to wake us up. He then pulled out a smaller three-ring binder and said, "This is the wartime recruit training binder; Iraq just invaded Kuwait." Words no eighteen-year-old fresh out of high school wanted to hear. The Navy was good, certainly not what my recruiter had promised me. So let's just fast forward a few more years. After the Navy, I found myself still hungry for even more adventures underwater.
I went to a PADI diving instructor school in Ft. Lauderdale, picked up my PADI Open Water Diving Instructor certification, and started teaching scuba all over South Florida. I would later move to Houston, Texas, to go to a civilian Commercial Diving school and complete an intensive course in underwater welding, hyperbaric medicine, and diving in nuclear and contaminated water. I spent a few years living the life at Club Med in Mexico teaching diving, and also back in the States doing commercial diving. I later came back to Pittsburgh in the late nineties and began working at Splash Water Sports, where my diving passion had begun a decade or so earlier. I quickly got hooked up with the City of Pittsburgh River Rescue Team, teaching all of their scuba classes and working on their gear. I had expressed an interest in wanting to be on river rescue, but was quickly told that it was too political and that basically the meter maid had a better chance of getting on river rescue than me since I wasn't a city employee or resident.
I enrolled in EMT school shortly thereafter and then directly into paramedic school. Hungry for money and wanting to live on my own, I accepted my first EMS job in Eastern Allegheny County, and my hopes and dreams of being on the city's river rescue team died. Working as a street medic was an exciting opportunity. Being in the medical field was never in the cards for me growing up, but something I found to be incredibly rewarding. I have responded to many disasters such as the horrific events of 9/11, multiple hurricane responses, and other
