The Power Of The Pause: Transforming Crisis Into Connection With Jeremy Brewer

 

In this transformative episode, former police officer Jeremy Brewer reveals how a simple yet profound shift—the power of the pause—can reshape the way we engage with the world. From high-stakes crisis intervention to everyday conversations, Jeremy shares how creating space through mindful communication builds trust, defuses tension, and fosters genuine human connection. He takes us inside the emotional rollercoaster of law enforcement, offering real-life examples of how slowing down, listening deeply, and responding with intention can not only de-escalate conflict but also change—and even save—lives. Whether you’re a leader, a parent, or simply someone seeking more meaningful interactions, Jeremy’s insights will inspire you to embrace the space between reaction and response. Tune in for a powerful conversation that will challenge you to rethink how you show up—for yourself and for others.

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The Power Of The Pause: Transforming Crisis Into Connection With Jeremy Brewer

Jeremy Brewer is our guest and a live example of what it means to live your possible. He is a former police officer who was shaped by the community he served. Are you looking for ways to humanize your interactions that will better yourself and those around you? Jeremy shares examples of how to use open-ended language to shape the success of your conversations with slight shifts in approach that can make someone’s day better or even save someone’s life. I am grateful to have Jeremy on the show and appreciate how it continues to serve the betterment of humankind. Enjoy the show and live your possible.

 

 

Jeremy Brewer, great to see you. Welcome to the show.

Darrin, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

It’s great to have you here. I’d love to dive into everything about you, what you represent, what you bring, your passions. Before we get going, I’d love to know what’s on top of your mind. What are you bringing into our session?

Top of mind is just a training that I gave. It was a little bit heavy yet impactful, and the feedback was extraordinary. I think because it was so real and so human and so raw that people really felt it. They really connected to it. I had about an hour drive home from where I was training to I got back to my house to meet with you. I spent a lot of that ride in reflection.

Important to reflect on what’s going on in the world and the moment you’re having in that session. I’d love to get to that session and understand high level what that was about. I’d like to step back a little bit and just talk about, at a macro level, the world you’ve been in. You’ve been a first responder, you’ve been a law enforcement. First of all, I want to say thank you for everything you do and have done.

It’s amazing the impact and then get into a bit of how did you get here to what did you learn the passion to the point you’re out there training and coaching and leading other people to see what’s there and to see also what your perspective is on possibilities and joy. Those other things that are more personal, but I would love to get your insights on that. Before we go any further, tell me a bit more. What’s your view on law enforcement these days, and what’s going on out there in the world?

The Shift In Law Enforcement Towards Humanity And Collaboration

Thanks for such an awesome question. I think law enforcement is in a transition. I think for the longest time, we came across as law enforcers. Even though people were very empathetic. I worked with some people who were incredibly empathetic. When it came to the job, you still had that role a lot of ways of law enforcer. I think the difference is that communities out there now, they’re demanding more of everybody. I don’t just say that I love law enforcement, which is your question. I think as a whole as helpers.

They’re demanding more from nurses. They’re demanding more from teachers. They’re just demanding more. To a degree, I think that’s good. I think that there’s a little bit of a change. We’re getting a little bit back into the humanity of the job. I say that not that it wasn’t always there, but it wasn’t always present in how it came about, if that makes sense. There’s been a lot of movement in the last decade, especially here in Connecticut, where law enforcement is working with mental health clinicians working with outreach teams.

Instead of families having trouble with a family member and saying, “We’ll just call the police and get them out of my house.” Now it’s, “Wait a second.” If we could avoid going hands-on with somebody, if we can help them get to the next level of the care that they need as a team, it makes it safer for everybody. Sometimes, because I did this job for over twenty years, people would call the cops, and they’d say, “So-and-so in my family.”

Whether it was a juvenile, whether it was an adult, whether it was somebody elderly. They need to go to the hospital to get the help that they need. Sometimes, what would happen is they’d go to the hospital and not necessarily get that. This isn’t a dig at the hospital. This is just the system in general. They’re overwhelmed with a lot of people who are going through a crisis. What happens? People get sent home 6 or 8 hours later, and now they’re in crisis again.

Now, if the officer shows back up and we’re over here going, “We’re to get you the help you need.” They’re like, “Are you?” It just ends up becoming a little bit of a situation. I do like where law enforcement is going in those collaborations. At the same time, you have to balance the fact that it is law enforcement and that there is a job to do. People would like to use the term de-escalation. It’s been around, and we can talk about that a little further too, but all these deescalation skills are great. Sometimes, unfortunately, you do need to go hands-on with people.

People like to use the term 'de-escalation,' but while these de-escalation skills are great, sometimes, unfortunately, you do need to go hands-on with people. Share on X

I hate to say that’s just the way it is, but sometimes that’s just the way that it is. I’m thinking now, too, that with body cameras, people are starting to see not so much our side of it, but they’re starting to see what we’re up against. Honestly, think body cameras have helped us in a lot of ways to see how when somebody is in a crisis or somebody is heavily under the influence, or if they’re just under the influence of their own emotion because emotion drives behavior. They start to see how difficult of a job this is. It is an incredibly difficult job because you’re managing people, which can be so dangerous.

I appreciate all those perspectives. It’s just curious what you’d want people to understand more about folks that are in these roles. In these roles, they’ve been labeled, they’ve been judged. I think we create these stories about them, and they can be misleading. There have been some tough events to watch. We’ve seen this, but that paints a picture on everybody, which I think is unfair. I think what you’re putting out there is incredible, and what you’re doing and the team’s doing to really humanize the police officers that are putting themselves at risk. At times, we have to protect ourselves, certainly doing it in the right capacity in the right way.

Like so many jobs out there, like teachers and nurses, you’re asked to do so many things. Let me just go to the teachers for a minute. Listen, I am by no means a teacher, but I did work in a school, and I got a sense you’re there to help to instruct. You’re also a social worker. You’re also a mom. You’re also a dad. You’re also a coach. There are so many different hats that teachers often wear at the same exact time. It’s the same thing with police officers. It’s an incredibly complex job.

You can go from taking a shoplifter. Let’s say at Target, who was just maybe making a bad choice, and then literally minutes later, be with somebody who passed away. An hour later, be at a minor car accident at Walmart. I mean, the emotional roller coaster of what you are exposed to just in a single day, in a single shift. The highs, the highs, the lows, the lows. I just think that, as people, that can weigh on you because you’re carrying, or we’re carrying the weight of the last call to your call.

Even if it’s a motor vehicle stop, let’s say maybe we’re going a little faster, you went through a light. A lot of times, we’re still carrying that heavy call we just were at two hours ago with that family grieving or who knows? That’s the draw for a lot of people. I’ll be honest with you. A lot of people want to be a cop because of that. You’re not working on a manufacturing belt. Your job is so different every day. That was one of the draws for me. Again, I think that’s the complexity of the role.

You’re also suggesting, which we will probably cover regarding your Ted talk that you did, the power of the pause. Just to your point, as you see a police officer, give them a pause, give them the thought that they just came from another really difficult situation. Maybe they were saving you or a loved one, or maybe they were protecting you in a different capacity. Maybe they’re letting someone know that someone had just passed. These are tough moments. I appreciate you sharing that. I’m curious. How do you keep it together through the day? How did you have those pauses yourself just for self-care purposes when you were a police officer?

Anything it takes work. It’s not effortless. A lot of times for people, it’s breathing techniques. What I found to be the most helpful was when I started policing that way. Let me give you an example. I teach now in crisis intervention and we use a lot of skills, active listening, we use space and distance, we use body language. There are all different things we use. One of the lines that I always try to leave with is that if you don’t practice these skills every day on every call, you’re not going to be fluid.

It’s going to be choppy. If somebody’s in crisis, they know you’re feeding them a bunch of lines because it’s choppy, and it’s not right. What I started to realize, to your point, was that there was a centeredness and a calmness on myself that I felt when I approached each call that way. Again, we can go from zero to a hundred where I can go in like, “My heart rate’s low. I’m trying to evaluate the situation.” That can easily turn into a weapon call in an instant.

That can turn into danger in an instant. I’m not saying that you’re so calm or you’re not present and you’re not ready to go in the moment, but if you are in that calming mode, just breathe and say, “We’re going to get through it. We’re going to make this happen. We’re going to go to this next call. We’re going to breathe.” Sometimes I’ve told people embrace the suck. If something is going to suck, just embrace it.

If you’re going to be in traffic for two hours, if you get yourself amped up before that, like, “I’m to be in traffic.” If you say to yourself, “This is probably going to suck. Let me pop on a podcast, maybe this one, or a little sports talk radio and just breathe.” It might not be as bad as you imagined, but a lot of times, we’re drawn, as people, to negativity. We have negativity in common.

You meet up with somebody, and they want to complain about something. It’s like, “Yeah.” Nobody wants to get together and say, “You know how great things are?” It’s so much better when you do. You and I have a conversation about positive, happy things. We’re both sitting here with smiles on our faces. For so many people, they have negativity in common. We see it now with political angst, no matter what side of the aisle you’re on.

Either you’re really happy, or you’re really angry, and you’re going to talk to whatever group it is that fits that mold. If you think about what place that puts you in mentally and now you’re dealing with the public and that goes for anybody’s job out there. It’s not just being police officers. How you’re coming to the table and all of these jobs. It’s the same type of thing.

That pause, that mindfulness step, whatever it is, breathing, whatever technique works for each of us, even if it’s looking up to the sky and say, “I’m here touching your fingertips. I’m alive. I can make an impact. I can leave my fingerprints on whatever this is that’s important to me or to us to whatever it is.” It doesn’t have to sound like, “It’s mindfulness, or it’s yoga.”

I’m with you. You’re keeping it real because it allows you to like what you’re describing. You’re going into a situation, and you need to see clearly. If our blood is up in our brains somewhere else or we’re ready to fight the whole fight-or-flight thing, we’re not thinking straight. We’re not seeing clearly. We’re not able to react the way we need to in any situation.

I can only imagine as a police officer the importance of that and for anybody else that’s dealing with any other human being, which is, I think, most people in the community or in the workplace. I think it’s powerful. I’ve heard you talk about these experiences shaped you. I’m curious about like, give us some more examples. How did this shape you? What shaped you? What did it lead you to do? Help us get to where you are. How did you get to this place?

Personal Growth Through Life Challenges And Vulnerability

How I got to this place was basically in the mid 1990s, I wanted to become a fireman. That was my goal. I got my EMT because back then, if you weren’t an EMT in the mid-90s, they wouldn’t even look at you as a cop. I got my EMT, and I started working professionally for an ambulance service here. Instantly, I loved it. I loved the different call volume every day. I got to meet a lot of different people with a lot of different experiences.

Again, you got to remember I was 20, 21, 23 years old, and you transport a lot of elderly people to, say, dialysis appointments. Yes, there are your 911 calls, of course. I’ve met so many amazing dynamic people who would share life stories just in the back of the ambulance of World War II or different things that they had gone through or whatever. It was like, “This person’s like lived an incredible life, and they’re sharing it with me.”

One of the difficult things sometimes that happens is dialysis. For anybody who doesn’t know, you have to go multiple times a week. You would go usually three times a week. Sometimes, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’d bring the same person to the hospital. You get to know these people. Sadly, sometimes they pass away. It’s just like another person fills their spot in the ambulance. There are so many of those people that I can look back on now.

You talk about never really knowing the impact you can have in somebody’s life. I’ll bet a lot of those guys and ladies would never remember the conversations that you had in the back. I think to some degree, it’s my personality. I think I was drawn to that connection with those people. Again, I was taking fire department tests, and I just said, “Let me take a few police department tests.” This was right after 9/11, I’m talking six months almost to the day after 9/11 is when I started the police academy. Again, it was an eye-opening paramilitary experience.

I lived there. I was one of those academy classes that you lived there Monday to Friday. You did get to go home on the weekends. I loved the structure. I loved the brother and sisterhood of it all. There were 48 people in my class. Again, this is back in early 2002. Of the 48, I want to say we had eight women in the class, which for the time was a heavy amount of women in the law enforcement class. It just went on from there.

I always say this when I speak to young cops, “A lot of times you get on the job and you either take on the personality of your field training officer or the officers around you, the culture that you’re in. The cop you are from year one to year five changes from year five to year ten, from year ten to year fifteen. It becomes, what do you want that to look like?” I think for me, I didn’t really start to connect to it until things in my own personal life started to go a little bit sideways.

You really start to understand what it’s like to be on the other side of it. When I say that, I wasn’t out committing crimes. It wasn’t like that. When you go through relationship issues, when you have a child diagnosed with a medical issue that they have to live with forever, if not more than one issue, all sorts of life stuff, there’s a couple of different things you can do with that information.

You can hold it inside, you can share it, or you can use a find a way to better connect to people. Now, I was able to better connect to people going through stuff. I never had to tell these people that I was going through it, but the way that I asked the questions, the tone in which I spoke, and the body language in which I had. I feel like people read that I got it.

You cannot dismiss that body language piece because when somebody’s going through something and you’re not standing there with your arms folded like you’re judging, because that was one of the biggest knocks on us as cops. You people always think we’re judging their situations. Sometimes we are. For the most part, how you’re carrying yourself in certain circumstances can play a role. The more I met with people, I just said, “There’s a lot of good people out here that have gone through a lot of stuff.” I always had my eye open to it.

 

How did you build from that? How did you transition that work? You’ve talked about mental health. You’ve talked about different crises that you’ve been involved with. I don’t know if that led into that, as you’ve been humanizing the work you’re doing.

The Power Of Communication And Crisis Intervention Techniques

I had a little bit of a reputation for being able to connect to difficult people. Now you’ve met me. I’m not a very big guy. I’m a very average. I’m 5 foot, 9 inches, maybe 165 pounds. If you look at me, you’re not like, “There’s an intimidating cop.” Sometimes, for a lot of people, your ability to communicate isn’t just a good thing overall. It can buy time to save you from fighting with somebody that you don’t want to have to fight with.

If I can buy myself some time to get my back up there, I’m going to do everything I can to avoid. Now listen, if we had to go hands-on, we do it. I would rather have it where that wasn’t the case. I started. I had a very calm, very chill demeanor. I was able to talk to people who were way up here, way high. They had a class come around. Again, this is going back thirteen years ago called Crisis Intervention Training. What it is? It’s a week-long class.

It’s still out there now. There’s a lot of skills. When I took it, it was called NVC, which was Nonviolent Communication, which is basically what we talk about now for de-escalation. Nonviolent Communication was like a three-day class. It was everything on active listening, emotional labeling, your body posturing, and paraphrasing. All the stuff that we talk about in hostage negotiation, it’s the same thing.

I remember the trainer who gave it, great guy, Joe Brummer, who’s here in Connecticut, does a lot of great work with restorative justice. He was my trainer. I remember I said to him in class that he wasn’t a cop. I was like, “Man, I don’t know.” I’m like, “These skills sound good, but like in the heat of a domestic in like somebody’s house, there’s no way this stuff is going to work.” He says to me, “All right.” He’s like, “You can push back, that’s fine. I could take it.”

He said, “I’ll tell you what, try it, not at work. Try it in your personal life. Try it with a family member.” That’s exactly what I did. He was 100% right. What I was doing, whether it was with my wife or whoever, instantly, instead of going in trying to fix a problem, all of a sudden I found myself truly listening, truly hearing, are they looking for me to fix this? Are they looking for me to vent? Are they just looking for me to connect to how hard this situation is at the moment? Like, what is it that they’re looking for?

As soon as that worked at home, I was like, “Let me try this at work.” Again, it’s not that I wasn’t trying it, but I wasn’t thinking about it actively. I started to use it on a couple of calls in mental health, and it was instant. When I tell you, when we go out and train this stuff now, I said, “This will change your life today.” When you go out there today and go out to the public and actively listen, when you watch your body posture, when you paraphrase, when you emotional label, sounds really tough for you and then stop talking.

It’s incredible. What people will give you back. I started to do this, some mental health calls. Then I said, “I want to get better at it.” I started to do it on the damaged mailbox. I started to do it on minor car accidents. Instead of it being a task that I did, it became who I was. That right there was the shift. That right there really shaped the trajectory of my career because I was able to take that because people would call me.

My supervisor would call me, and he’d say, “Can you handle a call in a different area? I know it’s not your area, but the guy working that area, this isn’t necessarily his expertise. I’ll catch you on the backend. Can you just go over there?” I didn’t mind doing it. I started taking on calls that they thought would best fit my skill set. One day, somebody said to me, “They should create a position strictly for you.” I’m like, “Yes.” I did that.

I worked with my wife, who works in corporate, and she helped me put together this corporate basically presentation for the town I worked in that was like, “We need a person who does just these skills, who works with outreach teams, who works with juvenile justice. We need somebody, and I’m that somebody.” I’m not going to say it happened overnight. It took a little work, but I was able to get it. It’s funny. The name of the position was Crisis Services Liaison Officer.

That was my title. For some period, I had an unmarked. I was still in full police uniform, but I would go to calls in an unmarked car because we saw, especially with mental health, you’re pulling in a police car, and it’s an instant raises the ante there. I would show up and just chill. Everybody laughed at me because it was light blue. It was a baby blue car.

You can only imagine the ridicule I got on that one. It worked. I rolled with that for a few years. I started training in crisis intervention. Like I said at the beginning of this, one of the biggest things I tell people, this becomes a way of life. It becomes a shift in the way that you do things. Often, in our trade, we say, “It’s another tool for your tool belt,” which I always hated. If you look at it as a tool for your tool belt.

Listen, I wore a baton for 21 years. I’ve never hit anybody with a baton. If I had to pull a baton out of my belt, how effective do you think I would be with that? “You practice it once a year.” If you don’t use it all the time, it’s not something that you’re comfortable with. Again, taking these skills and putting them on everyday calls, everyday interactions, everything with your kids, that’s where you pro gets stronger.

I could just picture the baton there for a second. It’s just that you’re not using it. It’s not your instinct. It’s what everything you’re talking about, what you’re practicing with. It’s the old phrase of how we be is what we become as you’re talking about practicing and putting this to work. You say it, you get some positive feedback, and there are a lot of books written around these habits, rewiring our habits, atomic habits, I think.

There’s a lot there that you’re talking about in real life. That’s what I love about what you’re sharing. This is real. This is not soft stuff. You and a of people think, “Soft, I got to rewire my habits and turn these into actual rituals.” That’s what you’re doing. You’re turning these into actual rituals that have great impact. They mean something for everybody that’s impacted by you.

Balancing Soft Skills With Readiness In Law Enforcement

Without losing the ability, and herein lies the rub. You cannot lose the ability to in a second have to turn on a dime and go to the next level. When we talk about where law enforcement and I think sometimes that becomes the fear where officers are like, “If I come across too soft or if we train officers to have these soft skills, are they going to hesitate?” That’s always the pushback. Are they going to hesitate?

What we’re saying is we’re not thinking about hesitating. This is in it full time. You’re in it real deal. You need to be able to shift from 0 to 100. You need to be able to do that, but you can also save your own life by coming in this way. You can also save taking the life of another person by just giving yourself a little bit more distance, slowing things down a little bit more, reading body language a little bit better, and being cautious of the wording that we use. Our words are very powerful. Our words are very impactful.

Thinking about how you say something to somebody can really be the piece. I understand the pushback. I do, because I was in it. I get it. Why do we say in law enforcement, you need all types. You need the guy that’s the WWE wrestler that, God forbid, there’s a bar fight that could toss everybody out. You need that guy. You also need the guy that can talk somebody off a bridge. You need everybody. That’s the unique dynamic about law enforcement. You cannot have all of one. You have to have a nice pie, if you will, of people.

Our words are very powerful and impactful, so thinking about how you say something to somebody can be the difference between saving your own life or taking the life of another person. Share on X

The balance too, that you’re talking about, it’s everywhere. It’s corporate America. It’s people I work with in different community events and different conferences I’ve been to. People are afraid about not being that level of balance that we need. It’s hard, to your point. I think what I’m going with is that everybody’s so divisive about how they view things. You talked about politics.

We talked about having to be right or wrong, looking at things as black or white or whatever it might be. It’s not. Why aren’t we thinking about the ability of what’s the connection between the two? How do we look at something without pulling ourselves away from or separating from it and like in your example, feeling I’m going to be too soft. As a leader, I was worried I was going to be too soft. I wanted people to respect what I brought, people that they would like me, but we would get the results.

We’d get the numbers. We’d be able to move forward. Yet the absence of bringing people into the equation to help contribute to that or solve. Maybe in your situation, help themselves not get themselves arrested or in a worse situation. You create that space, not only for yourself, but you also created that space for the other individual or groups to maybe jump in that space of baby safety. Maybe that space of that pause that you talked about. I love that you talk about in your Ted talk about letting the door breathe.

Practicing Emotional Control

That was something that we talk about when people do SWAT operations. When somebody busts a door, let’s say somebody has to take the big Ram and bust the door in to do some SWAT raid. The minute that door gets hit, nobody just runs blindly in there because you don’t know what you’re up against. They call it letting the door breathe. Let the dust settle for a second. Let’s see what we got here. Let’s feel what we’ve got. Let’s hear what we got.

What happens in a lot of situations in life is what? The faster your heart rate is going, the less you’re thinking. Your heart rate’s already going to be going when you hit that door. When you’re letting it breathe, let’s bring our heart rate back down. We talk a lot about these Navy SEAL teams. Do you think these guys’ heart rates are at 200 or 300? No. They training to keep their heart rates low so they can work with the precision in which they do.

Keeping your heart rate low helps you to perform better. I’m talking in any task. I know you’ve done public speaking. I’ve done public speaking. If my heart rate, if I’m nervous. We all are. I don’t care how seasoned of a speaker you are. When you have to go present on something, if you care about the topic, if you care about how you’re delivering it, there’s always a little bit of that sense of nervousness. Especially if you’re going to a big stage, you’re going to a TEDx stage, it’s a big deal.

If you don’t learn to practice to keep your heart rate low before you go out there and to really like start to feel, I know we’re going to get into this, but I do a bunch of coaching with TEDxHartford, and I try to get people to understand. When you’re practicing a talk, do a bunch of pushups and a bunch of jumping jacks. Try to give your talk. Your heart, your breathing is off.

If you can practice being able to fight through a rapid heart rate, if you can learn to fight through speaking over nervous breathing, as that starts to come down, you’ll be in your flow, and you won’t be surprised by it because you don’t want to be surprised by your behavior. You can put something along those lines into any of these calls. When I would go on calls with people who were like barricaded in a room, yeah, I was nervous.

They’re behind a closed door. I don’t know what’s in that room. I don’t know what their plans are. If you’re on the other side of that door, usually to the right or left, let’s be honest, you’re not right in front of the door, but you’re trying to help somebody get to the point where they’re willing to open that door. There’s a lot of maintaining your own heart rate, maintaining your own level of emotional stability. Keeping it in the front of your mind.

Keeping that situation at the forefront of your mind. If I start thinking about, I don’t know what I’m going to have for dinner. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll buy a new car next week. If my mind is thinking all these different things, I’m not present in that moment. A lot of that stuff, a lot of those pauses, go back to basically reconnecting with yourself because it’s those unexpected moments like walking up on a stage. If you’ve never been on that stage, you don’t know how you’re going to feel. You have to be ready for anything.

It’s like you’re keeping your emotions in check instead of letting your emotions run forward. You say, “Your emotions, it’s fine. You’re there. Let’s jump ahead of that about what the importance is, why I’m here. What am I doing? What do I need to address? What’s in front of me so I can see it so clearly?” Your emotions are still there.

Your heart rate is the forefront of that. Your heart rate is going to control your actions. If you can get that heart rate down, you’re going to be in better shape. Not perfect, but better.

Jeremy, do you have an example? You got to that point of using inquiry as a way to create these spaces. Do you have some common questions? Maybe you’re opening. I don’t want to steal your tricks, but it’s more about how to help people think about how to enter into something that could be confrontational or maybe a conversation they’ve been frustrated about in the past. Something more common about how do we open up the dialogue in a different way?

I can remember before you’re stepping in. Years ago, I got to give a good friend of mine, a former colleague, Ray Hassett. He’s a fellow trainer. He’s a legend here in Connecticut. I remember one day I was going to give a death notification, and he said to me, “Before you walk to the door, I want you to remember four heartbeats a minute.”

He just threw it out there. I was driving to this call, and he said, “I want you to think four heartbeats a minute because it gives your mind something to do to control your body.” Instead of thinking about what I was having to do, I started thinking four heartbeats a minute. Now, I know that sounds ridiculous. You cannot get your heartbeat down to four a minute. I thought that was a nice little mindset shift.

Now, if you’re going to pull into a difficult conversation with a boss, with a loved one, with a stranger, with a dog, you name it, you tell yourself, “Four heartbeats a minute.” You can just feel it in your shoulders. You can almost feel your shoulders come down. That’s the piece for me.  I started to use this, and he gave me that gem probably 6 or 7 years ago now. I still use it to today. When I pulled up to give this training sessions that I gave on this heavy topic, I said it when I pulled in, “Four heartbeats a minute. Let’s go make it happen.”

It just became a thing. If people who are listening here who we’re going to walk into, we’re all going to walk into a challenging situation. That’s just life. Saying to yourself, four heartbeats a minute, it might slow you down from trying to fix someone because we go into that, “This is what you should do.” Just settle it down. Settle yourself down.

 

I think it’ll give us some space too, to ask question, to inquire, and help me understand, or let’s talk about what we want to get out of this together. To your point, just telling someone or yelling at someone it’s just going to escalate the situation, whatever that might be.

The Power Of Open-Ended Questions

One of the lines I used in policing that was very effective. Again, this came from one of my mentors, Hassett. He said to me, “What would you like to see happen?” I got to tell you. We use this one a lot in training because, and this is the big thing here. It gives people the illusion of control. The illusion that they have control. That’s big because if you’re going to get arrested, it gives me a sense of where you are. If I was like, “Darrin, what would you like to see happen?”

Now you can say to me, “I’d like to have a cigarette before I go.”. That gives me something to work with. “I’ll get you a cigarette. Who gets you a cigarette before you go?” That might completely change the structure of where we are. Now, if I’m like, what would you like to see happen? AYou’re like, “I’d like you to put your own gun in your mouth and leave.” That also tells me where you are. We use this in school systems. When I was the officer in the school system, you’d have fights with kids, and parents would show up, and they’re emotional.

It’s their kids. You didn’t really know where they were. We gave the parents the control. What would you like to see happen? The look on their face and usually it was accountability. I want to see accountability. Now, that opens up another open-ended question. What does accountability look like to you? For some people, it’s an arrest. For some people, it’s detention. For some people, I just want them to apologize.

If I walk in and I’m like, “Here’s what I’m going to do, Darrin. I’m going to arrest her for beating up your daughter.” You’re going to be like, “All right.” It might not have been what you wanted. It might have been like, I guess you’re telling me what you’re going to do. Now, I’ve had people say, “I’d like to have her arrested. What else is on the table?” I’d say, “There’s a couple of different angles we can go here. We can go A, B, C, D, or E, whatever you want.”

Just giving a parent, it’s not even the illusion at that point, giving the parent the choice, “I have three different options to choose from in this scenario.” I can remember a bunch of teachers that I worked with. They were like, “That’s brilliant.” They’re like, “I never even thought of that.” They just thought like, “This is what we do. This is how we handle it.” Sometimes it is. Sometimes, that’s the way it is, but just giving the parent the sense that they had a say in something that it brought the animosity between the administration and the teachers down.

Like, it brought stuff way down. Now, of course, the pushback is, what if you cannot do what they want? Sometimes, you cannot. You tell people, “I cannot do that, but I can do this.” Don’t tell me what you cannot do. Tell me what you can do. That goes for everything we do in life. Often, we tell people, “No, you cannot do that. Now, what can I do?”

You can think about it with our kids at the mall. When our kids were younger, what would they do? You take them to the shopping mall and they would run. They’d run down the thing. What would we say? Stop running. How about telling them to walk? Instead of stop running, walk. “I’m going to need you to walk.” They stop running. They’re just, “Err.” It goes right. Again, just giving someone different verbiage. It really is a game changer in a lot of these communication elements.

Conversations, language, it really is everything. You said the words and the posture. It’s how people come across the tone. Like, “Do you really want to listen? Did you really give someone the option?” You’re giving them some of the options. Ask open-ended questions. Why aren’t we practicing that more? Maybe we all should just practice that when we walk out of this call, and people that are listening to this in your next meeting or your next conversation with a loved one, ask an open-ended question, see what happens.

The issue becomes it takes effort. It takes being present in the moment, and it takes effort. Look, I’m not perfect. There are times with my wife or with my kids, and I’m like, “I know better than that.” Like there’s no one on earth is walking around so perfect that they’re always magical at this. I think what’s funny is that you pick up on it quickly when you’re not.

You pick up on it quickly when, like, “I think my son was just looking for me to listen and not try to fix that.” Here comes the piece, walking back into his room and owning it as so often as adults. Look, I’m 49 years old, my son is sixteen. Some people think, “I’m not apologizing, I’m a grunt.” No, listen, I’ve come in and said, “Man, I think I read that wrong. You came to me with this, and I just want to make sure that when you do that for your kids, when you’re willing to own, I think I made a mistake here.”

Especially when it comes to listening or how you responded. As parents, we’ve all gotten mad. I don’t do it often, but I’ve gotten a little bit short with my kids. If you go back to it, why was I short with my kids? It’s because there was usually something else going on in my life. It was usually nothing to do with what was going on there. You have a reaction, and you’re like, I don’t know if I was like 30 by the time I realized that this is going to sound dumb, but you’re probably going to get this. I must’ve been like 30 when I understood that my parents were people.

I get you.

There’s so often they’re like, “That’s my mom. That’s my dad.” You forget like, “My parents was my age with these goals and these things that they wanted to do. My parents have had disappointments.” As a teenager, do you think I thought about my parents’ disappointments? Not at all. I didn’t think about paying a mortgage. I didn’t think about buying gas. I didn’t think about oil in the tank. I didn’t think about groceries. That stuff just magically appeared. All of sudden, you got your own house and your own family, and you’re like, “This must have stuck to my father.” All of a sudden, you start humanizing your own family, and you don’t, but you don’t realize it until you’re there.

Just building. I had moments where I’m like, “They were right.”

Those were fair questions, fair challenges for me back in my young 20s.

It’s incredible where you’re offering up there. Coming back, being vulnerable, you’re not being soft as a parent. In fact, you’re building relationships more than you’ll ever imagine. I can only imagine the side look you got like right. Maybe later on, you maybe had a different connection there, I imagine.

I have found that they’ll come to you openly. If they’re feeling not judgment, they’ll come to you. I have two daughters that have conversations with me that you wouldn’t even imagine. Like not anything like, do you know what I mean? A lot of ones that traditionally just mom would take care of that mom does, but they’ll also come to me very comfortably with certain things regarding being a female. It’s I don’t make them feel uncomfortable. They don’t make me feel uncomfortable. It’s just is. I love that dynamic that they feel that they can come to me with that. It’s pretty cool.

You’ve created that space. Again, creating that space where these interactions can happen. You just didn’t show up, and all of a sudden, that happened. It’s an element like everything. It’s about the trust we build in each conversation. Even if we break it down, we got to build it back up.

One of the examples I like to give here is that I’m not anti-profanity. I don’t swear a lot. I really don’t. I was a cop for twenty years. Let’s be real. I mean, especially when I do a lot of training, I try to police myself and how I speak because I consider myself a professional. Rarely, and my kids will bring it down to this time. I hit a hornet’s nest. I rarely swear in front of my kids. I’m talking. I tried to set this hornet’s nest on fire once. It was way too high to spray as a bee guy like this. It was too high for me to get with the spray.

I put a tiki torch on the end of a pool skimmer, lit it, and I tried to burn this thing in the tree. The minute I got it up there, I mean, these hornets came out, and they were all over my head. I was running as fast as I could into my house with these hornets in my head. My kids were younger. As you can imagine, I was f-bombing all over the place when I was holding frozen peas on my head. My kids to this day never forgot that. If I ever, let’s say we’re out somewhere and I don’t realize they’re around and I let a little profanity out.

My kids are like, “Dad, that was like a hornet moment.” They always go back to the hornet moment. Here’s my takeaway. When we think about power, especially with children. A lot of times or your juveniles, whatever it might be, all they have is to get at us. All they have is when you think about that power, because kids, for the most part, don’t have any power. When it comes to language, I met so many people who would make language about power.

“You’re not going to use those words in front of me. You’re not going to talk to me like that.”  What does the kid say? “F*** off.” That’s the only power they have. What I taught my kids early on was I don’t agree with profanity because we cannot use it everywhere we go. You’re going to want to get a job someday. If you don’t learn to be able to shape how you talk in different environments, you might not get a job. I said, “I cannot just go to work and swear.” Which I laugh but I used to always say, “I cannot just go to work and swear. If you can learn to not do that, it’s a skill.”

I said, “You want to talk however you want to talk around your friends. I got no problem with that.” Even if they’re playing video games up in their room with a headset on and I can hear it, I still let it go because it’s there with their friends. As long as they’re not speaking to me that way or speaking to my wife that way or speaking to each other that way, as long as they can learn to start policing themselves in that environment, it takes the power of it away because they want that shock factor when they get angry to maybe tell mom or dad to go screw it’s sudden.

Every so often what, language comes up, and I don’t make a big deal out of it. I’m like, “Let’s clean that up.” All of sudden, it’s like, “Sorry.” I try to give them that. This isn’t judgment. I’m friends with parents who openly swear in front of their kids and who let their kids swear. No judgment here. I’m not judging. I’m just trying to set my kids up where they can police themselves better because I know how easy it is to be in an environment where a lot of people are swearing. It’s catchy. It’s like a yawn.

If you’re around enough people who are swearing, next thing you go home, you’re like, “I don’t normally talk like this. Why is this happening?” It’s a psychosomatic thing. Little nuggets of things like that. By no means am I trying to pretend to be the perfect parent here. Not at all. I’m sure if my kids were on the show, they’d tell you tons. Just little things that we can use to try to diffuse a lot of these power struggles, which is what communication struggles really end up being overall.

Jeremy, switching gears a little bit, as you talk about training and speaking, you have such a great way about you and how you’re impacting the world. It’s so positive. I could just see people feeling comfortable around you immediately. How did you get into speaking? How is this translating to what you’re doing, to the training, to how you’re reaching out to the rest of world? You’ve been doing Ted Talks. Like you said, you’re a speaker coach with the TEDxHartford. Tell me a little bit, how is this translating to what you’re doing now?

The Power Of Storytelling In Speaking

I was lucky enough to have a really great mentor, which is key. We are starving for mentors right now. There’s not a lot of great mentors out there, especially with our youth, with the way they’re on TikTok. Maybe some, shouldn’t judge all of them. Maybe there are some, but I’m real life. A friend you can call, somebody you can look up to. A friend of mine, I’ve said his name before, is Ray Hassett.

Having a great mentor is key. We are starving for mentors. Right now, there aren't many great mentors out there, especially for our youth. Share on X

He was a former professional actor who became a police officer. He did a lot of training. Just my personality style, I got into doing some training about 2016 or 2017. He sat in on one of the sessions that I did and he said to me, “There’s something about you because I cannot put my finger on it.” He said, “If you’d like, I’d be willing to mentor you. Here’s the thing. I’m not going to tell you what you want to hear. I’m not going to tell you your grade. I’m not going to tell you all these things. I’m going to tell you the hard stuff that a lot of people don’t want to hear if you want to become better.”

He said, “You’re missing it in a lot of ways that I think if you just make a couple of shifts, you could be dynamic.” I was like, “Awesome.” Instantly, he started to basically train me in the way, not necessarily in an actor way, but he started to help me see how much of it is about your audience. As speakers, so often we make it about ourselves. That’s the magic in storytelling. Yes, when you’re telling a story, we always say, “Every story should have a point.” If you’re going to be in a training and you’re going to give a story, so often in law enforcement, there wasn’t a lot of points in there were war stories. “I came in, and this happened.”

There was not really a great takeaway. If you’re going to tell a story, I want you to be the vessel of the story, the narrator of the story. You don’t want to be the main character in the story. You want to tell it so I can feel like I’m there and that I can walk away with something going. “I could totally see what he’s talking about. I get it.” That’s one of the biggest challenges for a lot of people. His coaches in TEDxHartford, I learned this from the TED people out of Manhattan as well. Their whole thing would be, especially in a TED-style talk.

In a TED talk, normally you have somewhere between ten and maybe eighteen minutes. It’s not a lot of time. There’s not a lot of time there for buildup. As people, we love buildup, “This is how it happened. This is right.” You cannot do that. The hardest thing is you need to tell me. If you’re going to do a talk, you need to tell me in about 25 seconds why I should be listening to you because our attention span is so short. You’re going to hit me with that impactful piece, no doubt. I should want to know why I should continue to listen and I should feel it.

A lot of people when they create stories, and a lot of them are good stories, but are the details important to the story, or are they important to you? That’s a hard thing because I think it’s important to the story, but you might think, not really. Like, “That’s not really that important.” Let me give you an example. A lot of times when we talk about children. A lot of times, people make it about their children. Most people don’t care about your kids. I don’t mean to sound cold that way. I don’t.

Most people think about their kids. If you’re thinking about sharing an example of something, my daughter is a type one diabetic. She got diagnosed when she was thirteen years old, and it was a big deal. If I was going to tell a story about my daughter getting diagnosed, I would want to try to build that story around, imagine you had a daughter and imagine she got diagnosed. You talk about the feelings and the emotions of the event, not the feelings and the emotions that my daughter experienced.

Therein lies the rub. Imagine you’re the parent and somebody comes in and says this versus, “I was in the emergency room, and they brought me in this room. I felt this. I said to my wife, and she felt it.” That becomes a bit of a war story. Now when you’re like, “I want you to smell the environment. I want you to feel the power behind that door.” When you’re crafting stories that way, where people are like, “I get it.” That takes a lot of work.When people draft a talk, I’ll just go to TedxHartford for a minute, you get the speaker applications that are open, then we end up closing it sometime, I don’t know, May or something. They make selections in May or June for an event that takes place in December. That’s how long it takes to craft a great talk because you have your general talk, “This is what I’m going to talk about. These are my hit points. This is my ending.” Every word has to count. Every word has to matter. You have to go through it a million times. You have another coach look at it and say, “What do you think?”

 

Another coach might be like, “That was strong.” What happens is with our own information, we start to get used to it. We start to miss stuff. Always working at crafting stories to have a point to what you’re talking about. That takes time. Some of the stories that I’ve crafted for crisis intervention and even the work I’m doing now as a risk control consultant. It takes time to read. It’s almost like a good standup. You don’t just go to a comedy show and people are instantly funny. No, they’ve been working on those jokes for months.

I can remember an interview with Jerry Seinfeld. I’m not a huge Seinfeld guy. The show was good, but I’m not a big standup guy for Jerry. I remember he said he once worked on a joke for two years before it was ready to be out there. That’s a lot of the work that these people do. Just last week, I saw Nikki Glaser. My wife and I went to the Bushnell to see Nikki Glaser.

We were there, too. That was great.

You went to the show?

Yeah.

You’ll get this. Remember when she said, I thought this was fantastic. Remember when she told the joke, it didn’t land the way she wanted. She said, “I’m working on this. You’ll see it on the next comedy special. You will remember when you were there when I was still working on it.”

I do remember that.

I say, “I never admit stuff is work.” If something doesn’t land, I just move on from it. That story didn’t seem to land. I’m just going to move on from it. I’ll never usually admit that it’s work. I appreciated the fact that she was like, “I’ll work on it. It’ll get there.” It humanized her. It also humanized the work. I think some of the best feedback somebody can give you, and somebody said it to me, “God, you do this so effortlessly.”

It’s great feedback, but it is far from effortless. That’s the piece. I don’t take it offensively. I take it as a badge of honor because if you’re taking it as effortless, that means I did my job. What they don’t get is the hundreds of hours that you put into crafting that story.  I love it. I never get lazy with it. Sometimes, people have a story that works. There’s a story that I’ve given in crisis intervention for years, and I’ve played with different parts of it. Its the central theme is there, but I’ve played with different areas because I never let it get stale.

There are always pieces of it or pieces of what’s going on out there that you can bring into that training. Sometimes, when I train out of state, I’ll watch the news in that town that I’m training in that morning. I’ll be like, “Do you guys see the news this morning? You see what happened in Rhode Island?” I’ll bring it into. This is exactly what we’re talking about, to keep yourself relevant. A lot of people they do get comfortable in the stories and the experiences, and you could change them up daily because stuff is always happening.

How did you bring this into your training session? It’s top of mind. It seemed like it was a little heavy.

Addressing Suicide Prevention In Employee Wellness

I was doing a training piece on employee wellness, and that means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Where I was going with it was a sense of suicide prevention and stepping into difficult conversations with people, your coworkers. Where I was speaking, one thing you always have to be aware of. Again, I learned this through time and experience. You never know who’s in your room. You never know who’s in the audience.

I give a class called Defensive Driving and it’s put on by the National Safety Council. I do this as a risk control consultant for where I work. The opener, they hit you with some like shocking information. They want to hit you with that shock value. Did you know a hundred people a day die in car accidents and all this other stuff? Before I go there, I’ll always acknowledge I don’t know who’s in the room. What if somebody just last week lost somebody in a car accident?

They came into this training thinking “Defensive,” not realizing this is how we’re opening up. Now you unintentionally put somebody in a not a good spot. Where I was speaking this morning, they had lost someone to suicide just back in January. I knew it. When you walk into a room and you’re going to speak on that, you’ve got to put it out there. “Listen, I’m aware of what I’m stepping into, and I’m coming in here with all the respect for what you’ve been through and some skills to try to hope that it doesn’t happen again.”

This isn’t about blame. This isn’t about shame. This isn’t about should have done this, could have done that. This is not that presentation. This is, “Let’s look at things a little differently.” Let’s say, “How could we handle this a little bit differently?” We talk about a lot of the stuff that we talked about. If you know somebody who’s going through some stuff, instead of just trying to fix them, how about just being there and acknowledging that things aren’t great? Often, a lot of the places that we work that have these EAPs, these Employee Assistance Programs.

I think those are great. Many of them you get three free visits, and they’re anonymous and all that stuff. The old mentality is put it up on a cork board, somebody’s walking by the time machine or the clock in machine. We put all this pressure on the person who’s in crisis, who’s struggling to make that call. We say, “The stigma is not what it was.” Which is true. Knocking that there was a big stigma about reaching out and getting help no matter what area of work you’re in. A lot of people, either they don’t know they’re in that place or they’re not in a place to make that call.

That’s a big deal for somebody. For somebody to make that call is a big deal. It is a big deal. I’ve gotten to the point now, and we teach this in crisis intervention. We need leadership. I was on the peer support team of our police department, but would say to anybody, if you’re a leader in an organization, I don’t care what that organization is. Call that number. Introduce yourself. I’ve done it a million times. “It’s Jeremy from so-and-so. I was just curious about what happens when you call this number. If I’m in a struggle right now, what happens?

Do you have a specialist in financial troubles or gambling addiction? Do you have a specialist in divorce or someone finds out of a cancer diagnosis, what have you? Who can I talk to?” When that person says, “Madison, she’d be perfect for that,” Wonderful. Now when I come across somebody like, let’s say you, and I was like, “Darrin, I get the sense something’s off. Listen, I talked to this girl, Madison. She’s part of our EAP. She specializes in this stuff. I think, honestly, just one sit down with her, it might do a lot. You might say, you know what?” Now, it sounds like I have a relationship. Now, it’s not just a cold call. We call it a warm handoff. Give you that warm handoff to the other person. If we’re just going to be like, “Call this number.” Then what?

A lot of times, we say your credibility is on it. If I tell you to call a number and I don’t know what happens on the other end, a lot of good I am. It’s a lot about your own character. Changing the mentality of just putting it all on the person. I’m glad that the stigma is not what it used to be. I’m glad. I really am. I’m not trying to take away from them. Yeah, we have to look at things differently. I know this as a speaker. There’s this moment when you’re speaking people, you can feel it. This morning I had 35 in the room, not a single person on their device, everybody engaged.

The Importance Of Authenticity And Engagement In Presentations

Again, this isn’t about me as the speaker. It’s about the information. People were so in tune to what was being said that you could feel we might have some change here. You can go to any presentation. You’ve probably seen it a thousand times. Somebody throws a million slides on a board or on a PowerPoint, and they’re going through them. For some people, it’s effective. If you want to affect change, you have to have a level of engagement with people because that’s the first step.

 

 

Whether it’s something as heavy as suicide awareness or if it’s something along the lines of slips, trips and falls and ergonomic stuff to try to help from getting injured at work, you can deliver that in a way where people are like, “I get where he’s going here. Maybe I’ll try those different things.” We call it buy-in. If you’re going to get buy-in, you have to make me believe that you believe. That becomes the piece. For me, if I get up in front of a group of people, I want them to believe that I believe. If I’m going to speak on something, I’m going to believe in it.

I’m not going to go speak on that I don’t believe it. I’m not going to just I wouldn’t do it it would come across as phony as hell. People would be able to read it off of me. Little nuggets like that I get from a personality perspective. Not everybody is extroverted. Not everybody has that gear that they’re willing to go, but that doesn’t mean they cannot take these same skills that we train TEDx speakers. That doesn’t mean you cannot take those same little storytelling pieces or just the ways that you change your slides. Think of a typical TED slide.

Is there a lot of words on it? No. Typical TED slide, 3, 4, 5 words. Those 3, 4, or 5 words are just on the board to back up what you’re saying because you have to remember, every time you flick a slide, I’m no longer paying attention to you. I’m now reading a slide. I may be missing what you’re saying. I try to do as few words as possible. I like a picture, frankly, just a straight-up picture to show it exactly where we’re going or what we’re talking about. You people who are reading to this, when you’re going to give some type of presentation for work.

Now, granted, there are certain ones where you need data, where you need certain bullet points. I get all that. Throw a few in there at times just to back up a point of what you’re saying. That could completely shift how somebody reads your presentation. Just watch how many slides you use. We try not to do too many. When we do TEDxHartford, when I did the one for TED, I did none. It was just me, which is what I did this morning, which I like because slides sometimes slow me down or they don’t allow you to shape shift a presentation if you’ve got a slide. Again, some people like them.

That’s just a preference thing. Think about your slides. Think about when you’re going to open a presentation, I don’t care what it is. I don’t care if it’s an hour-long presentation on real estate. You need to start off with a story that’s relevant to what you’re going to talk about and that draws everybody in. That’s the piece. You need to humanize what that talk is going to be about. I think that’s the piece that I find that when I go places to conferences and stuff, that becomes the missing piece. Somebody comes up to the microphone with a bunch of letters after their name, and they talk about all their accomplishments.

How about walk it up to the microphone and telling us a story as to why we’re there. That’s way more dynamic. TEDxHartford, we do, I think, a pretty good job. I know people who’ve gone to other TEDx events who’ve come to our event, and they’re like, “This is legit. This is good.” Our team works very hard, and our team does it for free. That’s another big piece. All of our coaches are not paid. They’re people who really just enjoy structuring a talk.

They’re loving to help other people share a message. That’s what TED was always about. It was never about making money. For anybody reading to this who doesn’t know, you are not paid to give a TED talk. Whether it’s main TED out of Manhattan or whether it’s a TEDx event, all of it is voluntary. You are not paid for any of it. People who usually speak at these things they love it and they believe in their message.

Calvin Thread, I’m hearing you speak to Jeremy as the human side of things, helping people feel, sharing that story at the beginning of a presentation. When you have a crisis, trying to understand where people are at, giving them some options, and thinking, “It’s got to be something that you practice.” It shows in how you’re talking through your stories, your questions.

I got to ask you this question. What brings you joy? I feel like you’re helping other people. They’re helping people get to deescalated. You’re trying to get people back to a good place. You’re trying to help people through problems or issues or maybe overcome news you’re giving them or news they’ve heard. What brings you joy through all this? How do you keep that? What does that look like for you?

A couple of things. One of the things that brings me some joy is that my wife does some work as well in the nonprofit world. We have a couple of rescue dogs here. We foster. We have our own dogs, and we have fosters coming in and out here, little rescue dogs. She fosters for an agency called the Monkeys Pack. She helps them do fundraising events. Listen, these animal rescues, they’re broke, they ain’t got no money. Any little bit, because they have to pay for all these spay, neuter, pill. I mean, you name it. They’re always hurting for money.

She does a lot of fundraising for Monkey’s Pack, and we have an event coming up in a couple of weeks, and it’s a music trivia. It’s fantastic. She puts so much into it. I love that it’s hers. I do the TEDxHartford thing, it’s mine. She does this, it’s hers. Every so often, we cross-pollinate. At the live event for TEDxHartford, she’ll volunteer at it doing different things. It brings her in. At her events, she brings me in. Sometimes I’ll MC it unless we have an MC type of thing, or when we do the raffles.

I’ll call out the raffle tickets, and I’ll get the crowd all excited about what raffles up next and all these different things. Sometimes, we can take what we do separately, and we take both of our skill sets and we join them together. It’s absolutely phenomenal because our personality styles are so different. If you met my wife, she’s lovely. She’s wonderful. She’s very much introverted, which she laughs because I’m such an extrovert, but it’s that yin and yang. It just works.

When we do these events together, I get to see it through her eye as well versus my own eye or we can bounce stuff off of each other, and she gets to have it be hers until the event where she wants my help. The same thing with the TEDxHartford stuff. It’s basically mine. She comes that day, and then I get to get her perspective. She doesn’t hear any of the speaker’s speeches because usually, if I’m going to do on a Zoom, I’ll do it away from her. The day of the show is the first time she hears it. She’ll be like, “I’ll talk about them sometimes,” the people, because we become very friendly.

She’ll be like, “You were right. That was powerful here. This stuck out to me there. That was really cool.” Having a wife that understands the nonprofit world, understands volunteerism, understands giving back, and it’s cool. To answer your other question about joy, again, it goes back to most people who get involved in police, fire, and EMS. A lot of times, there’s that sense of, “I want to help people. I want to be involved. I want to be impactful.” I think now the joy comes in. How do you take the skillset that I have from working with the public for over twenty years?

How do I put that into slips, trips, and falls? How do I put that into workplace safety? How do I put that into bloodborne pathogen exposures and all the different things that, as risk control consultants, we are invited in to do? I find that from the storytelling perspective, you got to craft it right, though. You cannot just keep going in and be like, “Here’s another cop story.” No, right. It has to be a real-life example of something. Now, when I have a topic trenching or whatever, confined space that I’m going to be talking about.

I sit there and I think about having the opportunity to try to draw off of those experiences, to craft the best stories. I’m telling you, I said it before, and I’ll say it again, there’s a moment when you’re presenting where everybody you can feel it’s palpable. The energy in the room that you may be having an impact makes the hair stand up on my neck. I’m telling you, it’s not about me. It’s them buying. You can just see looking at the heads, like they’re buying into what I’m saying. I feel like that is very powerful.

Another one of these nonprofits that I was honored to be invited to was an organization called the Connecticut Hall of Change. I was invited there back in 2021 by its founder. The Connecticut Hall of Change was founded to honor and memorialize formerly incarcerated people who, since their release, since they’ve gotten out, they’ve done incredible things. Now this isn’t just like, “You got out, and you didn’t go back.” I’m glad for those people, too, because recidivism is a big deal.

These are people who have gotten out and have not only continuously worked at making their own life better, but they constantly work at making other people’s lives better, whether it’s getting youth engagement to help avoid from going down the path that they went. I get invited to be part of this selection committee. In order to be selected, you have to be free and clear from any involvement for five years. That means you have to be off parole for five years, off probation for five years. You have to be free and clear from the justice system.

What people do is they fill out all these applications about all these wonderful things that people have done. We’ve had people go on to get doctorate degrees. One of our winners is now a middle school principal down in Washington, DC, who you’re like, “Wait a second, you’re talking about a convicted felon? She was able to get a pardon and got her doctorate.” Now, she’s out there doing the work. I know that not everybody’s ready for second chances. There are a lot of people out there, and no judgment that they have a hard time with second chances.

They also have a hard time with restorative justice because it’s a new way of handling accountability. A lot of these stories people don’t hear about. You don’t usually hear about the story of somebody who served 10 or 15 years in prison, got out, and now it’s like they’re leading all these great juvenile programs for people who live in troubled areas and all this stuff. Reading these applications, it’s like, “My goodness.” The biggest honor, and you’ll appreciate this as an interviewer, is that every year we select eight people. We call them grade eight.

It tends to be that we try to get four women and four men. Every fall, we have a ceremony. It’s a big deal ceremony. We treat it like at the Oscars. It’s great. We usually have it somewhere in Hartford. It’s been at Playworks Theater. It’s been a bunch of different places in Hartford. It’s an amazing event that honors people. One of the things when they win is that you have to speak at three events a year. That’s one of our things. Three events a year, you got to speak at it. Usually, they speak at the Department of Corrections when you have new CEOs coming out or they’ll try to speak at schools and just get the information out there and stuff like that.

As part of this, we do interviews for our bios. What I have is usually about fifteen questions written down, generic, incredibly open-ended. What I say to everybody, because they allowed me to do the interview, is everybody gets the same question, but all the interviews go where they go. It was like you said to me before we started this, “If there’s anything you want to retract or anything that you’re not comfortable with, just let me know. I put all that out there.” Having the ability. It goes down to what we were talking about with the active listening and all those things to sit across from somebody and listen to them vulnerably speak about their experience.

You have to remember at this point that I’m a stranger. They walk into the interview, and it’s not over Zoom. It’s live. We’re live. We have a professional videographer and professional lighting and all these things. These open-ended questions of “Tell me about your childhood. Tell me, what did it feel like the first time you were handcuffed?” To listen to their answers. This is the one that I came up with because they let me add a few of them. What was that a-ha moment where you knew you needed a change?

A lot of times I’ll say Oprah Winfrey, because she was one of the greatest interviewers ever out there, because she was an incredible interviewer. It didn’t matter who she was talking to. You didn’t get the sense that she was sitting there with judgment. She was the best with open-ended questions and with just getting the emotional piece. I’ve had people tell me, what was that a-ha moment? Everybody knows. Everybody has an answer that will knock your socks off. To be able to sit there and say nothing, because these interviews, like you say, they’re not about me.

Impactful Work With The Connecticut Hall Of Change

When we play them back, you never hear my voice. You never hear a question asked. When we play them back, you only hear the answers. One of the things that almost everybody has in common is childhood trauma. Almost every time, the story begins with significant childhood trauma that doesn’t justify their actions. In many ways, sometimes they’ve hurt people, whether it be physically, mentally, or financially. I’ve never had a single person sit across from me and not own it. I’ve never had a single person sit across from me and say, “I was wrongly convicted.”

No. Everybody has always said to me, “I was living a hard life, and I made some tough choice,s and these choices hurt people, and I own that.” For people to say that and to say, “This was then I don’t want to share a vulnerability anybody’s moment.” I’ve had a few people share incredibly vulnerable moments about what that moment was. That was like, “My life has got to change.” Just when you hear that, it cannot not help but shift you as a person.

Again, so many people and second chances, and I get it. There are amazing people out there doing amazing things, and that Connecticut Hall of Change is out there, and we’re just trying to raise awareness to those exact things. We’re going through our selection process now. We’ll probably select people sometime around June and sometime usually around September or October. It’s out there on Facebook. Show our awards ceremonies. If I could just plug it, CTHallOfChange.org. Do you ever heard of Old New Gate Prison?

I have heard of that.

It’s an incredible museum. There’s a copper mine. The old Newgate prison started back in the 1780s or whatever it might be. They used to house inmates in mines where they couldn’t get out. You’re talking about there’s bats living down there. There’s no lighting. Why? You can tour it. You can tour exactly where people live. Our founder, Charlie Grady, he said one of the best places to honor these people of change was to be in a place just like that.

When you go into the museum, up on the wall, you’ll see all of our winners throughout the years, and they’ll show the videos that we create. Sometimes we’ll do an interview like this, it’ll go like an hour, but we can only really show three minutes because what we do is as they say, “Jack Smith.” Everybody claps as Jack makes his way up to the stage. That’s when they showed a 2 to 3-minute video. When he goes to take the microphone, there’s not a dry eye in the place. Now people have a sense of like, “This is why this guy’s up here. This is the work that has gotten done.”

It’s cool. We’ve had some politicians who say what you will there, but they’ve supported us. They’ve come out to the show, and they’ve supported us in other little ways. It’s been a lot of movement behind it. By the way, this is the only one in our country, right here in Connecticut, the Hall of Change. We have other areas, Maryland, Virginia. I think Detroit wants to start getting in on it. It’s starting to get some legs of honoring people of change. How do you not do that?

Again, creating space for people to know that it’s possible. If people don’t know that they could come somewhere and admit that they had some wrongdoing and be vulnerable. To me, that’s expensive. If we recoil and deny it and have self-preservation from that standpoint, you’re never going to be able to grow or give yourself a chance or maybe have an impact that you want to have on the world. You and your wife are doing so many amazing things and giving back in wonderful ways. Should be proud of that.

 

 

Listen, you can only do what you can do. You can talk about the impact, and I’ll tell you, these people have had more of an impact on me than I can have on them. I look forward to this year’s grade eight. I look forward to the interviews. Once again, we usually do these, and we try to do them in a day. Imagine eight of those in a day. Now, some people are a little more quiet. Some people will only give you maybe 15 or 20 minutes. I’ve had other people give me an hour and a half. It’s like the conversation here. It just goes like in those interviewing skills and you have very good ones.

You almost go back to that four heartbeats a minute where you remind yourself, this is about them, it’s not about me. You start to think about the questions that you want to ask. You go to that. What did that feel like when this happened? I don’t go there to try to make people cry. Like there’s those, “What did that feel?” I want people who are watching it to understand what did that moment feel like. People will tell you very, very honestly and vulnerably what that was like. It’s an honor that they’re willing to share that with me.

Love it. Jeremy, one more question for you. The name of this podcast is called Live Your Possible. I’d love to get your unique perspective on how would you define that. How do you define Live Your Possible?

Living Your Possible: Embracing Boldness And Impacting Others

Here’s an example. When I applied to TED in 2019, I was talking main TED out of Manhattan, they have their huge event every year in Vancouver, Canada. Thousands of people apply, thousands to speak at TED. I remember telling my friend Ray, “I’m going to apply. They’re never going to get back to me. It’s never going to happen.” I was pitching an idea about what I learned as a police officer about the human reaction when making death notifications.

He said to me, “They’re going to call you. Here’s why. It’s because you’re coming at their mentality of traditional police officer is not what you’re talking about.” He was a hundred percent right. They got back to me in eight hours after I applied, they called me and said, “We want to hear more.” Now, that process was a six-month interview. I interviewed for six months before they selected me. I’m not claiming this was overnight, but at the time, I never thought that is possible. I think a lot of times, we sell ourselves short. That’s not possible.

Some things are impossible. If you’re disabled, you might not be able to run a marathon. That doesn’t mean you cannot participate in a marathon, whether it’s the wheelchair marathon or what have you. My size, I’ll never play in the NFL. There’s a 160-pound, 5 foot 9 inches guy. Yes, there are certain limitations, but there are ways to find levels of success and impact.

You have to be open to them. Another phrase that we use is never underestimate the impact of the moment. A moment that you have with somebody can change the trajectory of where you go in your career. That’s really how I ended up with the job that I have now. Never in a million years would I have thought that I’d be working risk control for a major insurance company. My boss knew a few people I knew, and they were like, “You need to talk to this guy. You got to talk to him.”

Never underestimate the impact of a moment. A moment with someone can change the trajectory of your career. Share on X

Next thing you know, boom, and we’re here. Yes, there are limitations in life, but if you’re going to limit yourself to not even try, you got to get out there. I pound that to my kids constantly. Get out there, try it. You fail. You failed. Did you learn something from the failure? Did you learn something about yourself? Where can you get stronger? Did you learn that maybe this isn’t for me? Whatever that might be. I would say, give it your all. Go for it.

Jeremy, that’s awesome. Comments that have resonated with you that you want to make sure you leave us with? Did he ponder words?

Just that I think it’s people. You’re more important than you think. Even something as small as handing somebody a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Your impact on another person is holding the door for somebody. Just little acts of being present in the moment. Just doing it. When you get behind the wheel of a car, breathing, not being on your phone, listening to a podcast or some nice music. If you know politics is a trigger for you, step away a little bit. I’m not saying you step out where you don’t pay attention anymore, but if you’re going to drown yourself in politics, and again, this is whatever side of the aisle you’re on.

Often, we want to sing into a mirror. We only want to be around people. You have your friends on Facebook who just constantly go against each other. There’s no positive energy in that. All you can do is live life to the best of your ability. If you don’t like where we’re at, then you vote four years from now. If you don’t like where we’re after that, you vote again. Getting out there, voter turnout is terrible in this country, and it’s pretty sad. I’m just saying like, try to step away from that emotion because it can drown you.

Jeremy, this has been wonderful. I could chat with you all day. Love your energy, love your storytelling, love your ability to be courageous and vulnerable with me. I appreciate you very much. I look forward to working with you out here in Hartford, and hopefully, we’ll cross paths again and meet up at Starbucks. I’ll buy you that coffee and open that door for you.

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

You’re welcome. Thanks again.

 

Important Links

• Jeremy Brewer on LinkedIn
• CT Hall of Change
• TEDxHartford

 

About Jeremy Brewer

Jeremy Brewer spent 27 years working as a first responder. He began his journey in the mid 90’s working as an EMT for a professional ambulance service. Shortly after 9/11, he transitioned into law enforcement. The entirety of Brewer’s career was working the frontlines. He attributes that time with the community to what’s shaped him as a person today.

Jeremy was one of the first officers at his police department trained in Crisis Intervention Training (CIT). Being exposed to CIT had a huge impact not just on him personally, but also on his career. He took that knowledge, experience and passion and created a new position within his department called “Crisis Services Liaison Officer”.

In that position, he was the first responding officer to calls for mental health emergencies, follow-up collaborations with community outreach teams and youth advocacy groups. Brewer has been a trainer in areas of crisis intervention, grief notifications and human interactions.

Jeremy’s engaging delivery style earned him a speaker selection for TED Conferences in 2020. He’s currently a speaker coach and volunteer for TEDxHartford. He retired from policing in July of 2023. He now uses those skills he’s developed as a Risk Control Consultant for PMA Companies.