Pinnacle Opening Keynote: Change, Stress, and Solutions

After 2 days of bonus power seminars and special meetings, the 17th Pinnacle EMS Conference formally kicked off Tuesday night in Marco Island, Florida, with an opening keynote address from speaker, author, and entrepreneur Michael J. Levin.

Levin, author of Let Them See You Sweat: Lessons I’ve Learned on My Personal Journey With Stress, brought his expertise in that subject to an EMS audience that, here in the summer of 2022, labors under plenty of it. Between 2-plus years of COVID-19, recruitment and retention struggles, financial woes and more, we are one mighty put-upon workforce, and the numbers suggest it may finally be catching up to us.

Recent rigors have all required plenty of adaptation—a topic Levin raised with a reference to psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ 7 stages of change. They mirror her more popularly known stages of grief, with 2 later added to the original 5. Those stages—shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, and acceptance—also reflect the process by which organizations endure change.

To lead a workforce through it, Levin said, requires giving them ownership. When employees feel possessive of their organization and its performance, they’re better, more engaged stewards—they don’t want someone else mucking things up. But even more, empowering employees to drive change—and bolstering them, as leadership, with guidance, mentorship, and support—leads to new methods that are more embraced because they’re not imposed from above.

Giving people that voice isn’t without challenges. They may feel no one has listened to them in the past. If they do believe you’re listening, they’ll expect solutions. But if they know they’re heard, it provides an opportunity to fix problems themselves.

That’s all necessary groundwork for change to be embraced: communicate broadly and give everyone a voice and comfortable environment to speak up and share their thoughts. That precipitates cultural change away from top-down leadership toward a more inclusive approach. Finally changes to process come last, through processes of testing and adjustments.

This all has retention benefits, Levin stressed—young people want to make a difference, and fostering an atmosphere where they can may help keep them content.

Stress and Solutions

As background to the lessons of his most recent book, published in 2016, Levin shared the tale of his own medical emergency, nearly 2 decades ago, when he stopped breathing after becoming overheated playing basketball. He woke up to a kindly EMT, and what Levin mostly remembered, he said, was the proverbial “how he made me feel.” Let Them See You Sweat was the lesson in confronting fear and difficulty that finally emerged.

Some lessons:

1. Understand the delayed effects of stress. Levin had been through plenty before developing medical problems, including bad investments and starting a business during a recession, but didn’t link those problems to stress for some time. Ultimately he realized he was experiencing panic attacks—episodes of fear that trigged intense physical reactions.
2. It’s easy to self-medicate, but the solution in Levin’s case didn’t come from pills. An unresolved sweating issue ultimately drove him to a Mayo Clinic neurologist, but when he improved his eating, sleep, and exercise habits and began seeing a counselor, his physical problem resolved.
3. Let friends and family support you. EMS is full of “suck it up” types—and there’s a place for that, Levin said, but not everyplace. Vulnerability is another quality leaders must model. Don’t minimize the value of those friendships.
4. Practice and encourage self-maintenance. We have programs to maintain vehicles and equipment; yet we burn through and burn out our most important asset of people.

Change is stressful, Levin concluded, and EMS must acknowledge that. But we hold much of our own solution too. As the Eagles sang in “Already Gone,” “So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know we have the key.”

Awards

At the keynote’s conclusion Pinnacle leadership announced a pair of prestigious awards.

• Chief James Campbell, BS, FACPE, of Spring, Texas, claimed the group’s Emerging Leader Award. Campbell is chief of EMS for the Montgomery County Hospital District.
• Fitch & Associates Senior Consultant David E. Nelson, DMin, earned Pinnacle’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Nelson is a human resources consultant, trainer, and appreciative inquiry coach and has been an onsite coordinator for Fitch & Associates’ annual Ambulance Service Manager’s certificate program for more than 2 decades.