Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
#44: Creepy Carl. Safety Manager.
80 Plays6 years ago
On the eve of Thanksgiving, podcast series host Jill James catches up with Jason Maldonado, who is grateful for how his chosen profession of 15 years has influenced the risk perception of his children. Jason’s start in safety began in the Air Force, where he revived training efforts for Hazard Communication, HAZWOPER, and Lockout/Tagout (LOTO). He transitioned to the private sector, and, with the help of a great mentor, developed his characteristic style of employee safety engagement. Today, he owns his own safety consulting business and is the published author of The Practical Guide to the Safety Profession. You’ll learn about what happens when you have the wrong safety goal, and hear a bunch of terrific stories from his career.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction of Jason Maldonado
00:00:10
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by Vivid Learning Systems and the Health and Safety Institute, episode number 44. My name is Jill James, Vivid's Chief Safety Officer, and today I'm joined by Jason Maldonado, who is a safety professional and the owner of relentlesssafety.com. Jason is joining us from his home in New Mexico today. Jason, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
00:00:36
Speaker
Yeah, so Jason, you and I are recording on the eve of Thanksgiving 2019. Yep. So yeah, and we're both we're both safety professionals been at this a while you've how many how many years into the professional are you?
00:00:53
Speaker
Uh, I've been saying 15, but it actually just flips. I'm 16 years in 16 years. Yeah. Wow. Great.
Impact of Safety Profession on Family
00:01:00
Speaker
So if we were to ask one, I'm just coming up with this right now off the top of my head. If we were to ask one another today, like right now, what are we like most thankful for, for our profession? Um, what would it be for you? You know, and this is going to sound a little bit,
00:01:17
Speaker
more introspective than I think you might have intended it to but I'm thankful for the outlook that it's given me to raise my kids because I mean I've got two little kids that will narc on me if I don't put on a pair of safety glasses which I mean it is just insanely cool to see them
00:01:37
Speaker
have the forethought and the ability to see the world through a safety lens and not be afraid of it because they're still crazy little kids and they jump off stuff and do all kinds of kid stuff. But they have this sort of risk perception that I don't think many kids have. That wasn't on purpose. I was one of those parents who was like, all right, that's not safe. You need to put on your PPE. I didn't do any of that. It just kind of happened naturally. But I think that came through me.
00:02:09
Speaker
what you do being who you are, then I think that's probably the biggest one. Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, and I guess for me, I think about the years that I was actively working as a safety professional in a facility and how my why every day was
Networking and Continuous Learning in Safety
00:02:30
Speaker
to help people in humanity and workers be treated humanely, fairly, and of course, to keep them safe.
00:02:30
Speaker
if that's a testament to, you know,
00:02:39
Speaker
and and now in my in my present role I really had to think you know like what's my what's my why now and it's really within our own safety professional network and connecting us and being supportive to our profession and and being able to have people like you be able to share their stories and their wisdom so that the rest of us can learn and grow because it's certainly a position that or a profession where we were never done learning and
00:03:07
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think I share that perspective a little bit too. I'm at the point in my career now where I'm trying to give back because there's been so many times where I've felt lost or alone in my role because I was the only one. Yeah. And you're on an island. And until you learn that there are people that you can reach out, that you can trust, you're going to be stuck in a pretty dark place sometimes.
00:03:37
Speaker
And I don't want anybody else to have to go through that like I did, so. Right, right, right. Yeah, there's a lot of us out there to help one another. Right.
Jason's Path to Safety Profession
00:03:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So Jason, tell us your story. How did you accidentally find yourself in this interesting profession? Very accidentally. So I went to college. First, I thought I wanted to be
00:03:59
Speaker
an actor and I found out that I hate acting. It's just boring and terrible and I didn't like it. It wasn't for you. Not for me. And so I switched my, or tweaked my major a little bit and got into public speaking and got a degree in public speaking.
00:04:16
Speaker
Wow. Not a really useful degree when you're 20, 22 years old. Because if you're going to get into advertising or anything else, they want this standard typical five years of experience. So I kind of tinkered around. At one point I decided I wanted to be a singer. I was OK at that, but I had no drive. I wasn't one of those passionate musicians that just that was all they were about. So I wasn't going to make it there. And my little brother joined the Air Force.
00:04:45
Speaker
And I was talking to him throughout his basic training and in his tech school. And he was just as true blue as you could be. And I was pretty struggling. And then all my college loans came due, and I didn't have any money. I think I was selling cars at the time. And he goes, man, he goes, you got a degree. Go down and join the Air Force. Be an officer. Great job. And so I went down to the officer recruiter, and they said, we don't care that you have a communications degree. That thing's worthless. We want engineers. So I ended up enlisting.
Safety Experience in the Air Force
00:05:16
Speaker
And I became a munitions technician. So there's a safety element there.
00:05:31
Speaker
I kind of progressed through the ranks pretty quickly. I got a crew within my first, I don't know, six months, and then I got staff sergeant within two years. And I just did some pretty cool things. And I learned a lot. I got my leadership experience, which was the goal of joining the Air Force in the first place, and supervisory experience. And the opportunity came up to run this program that tracked reliability of munitions assets. And I won't name the program, but just a really cool program
00:06:00
Speaker
The guy that wrote it was a master sergeant in like 1986, 87 timeframe, and he didn't have any way to track his missiles. So he went home and wrote this program on his Commodore 64. Wow. Yeah. And then he sold it to the Air Force and retired and came back and became the subject matter expert on this program. Just the guy was brilliant. So I mean, he made his millions, I'm sure.
00:06:25
Speaker
When I got involved in it, though, they were transitioning the program from DOS to Windows, which was actually terrible, because if you were good at typing, you could sit and jam through your records without moving, and now they added a mouse into it, so it was disruptive. I was working for the government when we went from DOS to Windows, too. I always called it DOS in sheep's clothing.
00:06:53
Speaker
It was so clunky. Because I could go through 100 records in 30 minutes, just bam, bam, bam, type and never move from the keyboard. And then they throw that mouse in there and you got to click enter and it was terrible. So I did that and that had a really, I didn't realize it at that time, but that database work had a huge impact on the way that I think about safety because it was designed around
00:07:19
Speaker
reliability and predictability actually, and it's the only thing I've ever seen that accurately predicted anything. What they did was they would take all the maintenance records from all the missiles throughout the entire Air Force, and they would put them through some crazy algorithm. I didn't know what it was.
00:07:36
Speaker
They would predict which lot of this missile was going to go bad, and they'd pull it out of service and do preventive maintenance on it before it ever blew up on the jet or had a malfunction and didn't fire or something like that. And they had like a 98% rate of correctness. And it was just really cool stuff. But once we got done with that project, I didn't really have much to do. And I was sitting in the support office of the missile section, and my boss, which the support office is where they did all the safety stuff.
00:08:06
Speaker
And they didn't really do it. They just had books on the bookshelf. So my boss was like, well, you're not busy now. Start those programs. Get them running again. And so the first one was HazCom. And then I think I did has Whopper stuff and got rid of chemicals. And then I did lockout tag out. And I did annual explosive safety training. And that was sort of the thing that got me in at the beginning. And then maybe a year or so later, they transitioned me down to
Transition to Civilian Safety Role
00:08:31
Speaker
the actual Munition Safety and Training Office.
00:08:35
Speaker
And I actually did most of the training. I wasn't really the safety guy at that point. I helped out on audits and stuff, but most of my focus was on the training.
00:08:48
Speaker
And then toward the end of my enlistment, I injured my knee pretty bad and I got put on med hold. So I knew I was going to get out. I just didn't know when, which made looking for a job really hard. Yeah. You're like, now what? Yeah. So it was, I think it was September somewhere around there. It was like August, September, and we got an email and it said, Hey, the, uh, there's a job fair on main base in 10 minutes.
00:09:12
Speaker
And so I hopped on my motorcycle. I drove down there and see you guys. I'm going. There was a giant construction company and they were hiring for two different sites. One of them.
00:09:21
Speaker
went out of business, they lost all their funding, it was a federal job, and the other one kept going, but they only had one position available. And I started talking to the lady, and she goes, well, we're looking for this technical safety data analyst. I said, well, what's that? And I said, I work in the safety and training office. And she goes, OK, well, that's nice. But what I'm really looking for is somebody that knows how to run a database. And I said, ding, ding, ding, ding. I know how to do that.
00:09:50
Speaker
So I said, well, here's the problem, though. This is exactly what I did. And I told her the whole story about the reliability thing that I just told you. And she's like, yeah, you're perfect for this. We definitely want to bring in for an interview. So they brought me in. They interviewed me with everybody. They offered me the job. And of course, the whole time, knowing that I didn't know when I would be available. And they held the job from September to December for me. And that's how I got into it. And of course,
00:10:19
Speaker
I got out of the military with a totally different mindset than how safety really is, but that was kind of the second part of the story was figuring out how to do it in the real world.
00:10:32
Speaker
uh-huh yeah right so this is a this is already a crazy story jason you went from acting public speaking to well maybe i could be a singer maybe not air force munitions tech data data nerd that's awesome jumped around a little bit you know yeah so what did you think
Building Trust with Workers
00:10:56
Speaker
safety was and what changed what shifted from that yeah going in when you when you started in the Air Force by the time you got out well I got to back up just a little bit to tell you yeah because so in the safety and training office we were sort of like a subset of base safety so we weren't even
00:11:14
Speaker
We weren't the people that were actually assigned by career field. We were still munitions troops. We just did safety stuff, right? Yep. It was an ancillary part of the job. Exactly. That's the word I was looking for. We had three, four guys in the office. One of them did self-inspection, so he just did audits all day long. I did the training, and then we had the guy that did safety, and we all kind of cross-functionally helped each other.
00:11:39
Speaker
And then we had a drunk master sergeant that slept in the corner all day, but he didn't do anything. So the guy that did safety, we call him Creepy Carl, because he was. And I didn't even know that safety was a job you could have. And he was going to stay in for 20 years. But he was always looking at ASSE at that time, classes that he could go to, and all this stuff. Like, what are you doing, man? And he was like, oh, I'm going to be a safety manager.
00:12:09
Speaker
Whatever that's not even a real thing. What is that? Yeah, right. Uh-huh And it was just crazy that I ended up getting into that instead of him But uh, yeah, there's all kinds of creepy Carl stories that would take another podcast So when I got out of the the Air Force I thought that safety was just The rules right? I mean, it's yeah, I say it you do it I could give I
00:12:38
Speaker
more or less give orders to people that outranked me by two or three ranks. And I did. They didn't like it. And I did it professionally. But, you know, if people weren't upholding their training, I'd write their Master Sergeant and Astigram and copy the Chief and the Colonel, and they'd get in trouble for it. And then, lo and behold, I'd get my training completed, you know. Yeah, so when I got out of the Air Force, I thought that's how things were. And very, very luckily for me, I didn't think so at the time, but I had an uncle.
00:13:08
Speaker
who lived in Las Vegas, where I was living, and sat down and talked to him about this new job that I've gotten with this giant construction company. And he'd been in construction for, I don't know, at that point, probably 30 years. And I was 27, never done construction, barely knew anything about safety. I was probably a little too confident in myself. And he looked at me and he goes, man, what the hell are you gonna tell a 30-year ironworker about safety?
00:13:38
Speaker
You know, I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. So, so just, and it scared the crap out of me because I'm like, well, he's right. There's nothing that I can tell this guy. Um, so I kind of developed this defense mechanism, uh, to just go in and ask people, Hey, what are you doing? That looks really cool. Can you show me? Like, I don't know anything about this. Show me, show me your job.
00:14:05
Speaker
Yeah, even if I saw something that was messed up or wrong or whatever and it didn't work all the time but most of the time and then as I refined it it got better and better because I figured out that People usually have some pride in what they do, especially trades people, you know Yeah, and and if you can break through that ice and get them to show you how they're the best at this or that or whatever They're gonna start talking and they're gonna start, you know smiling a little bit and oh, yeah let me show you this and I made this and I did that and
00:14:33
Speaker
and you kind of break down that wall and then you can have the safety conversation if you need to because you know half the time at that point anyway in my career I'd go out seeing something that I didn't think was right and then the person would explain it to me and be like oh that's that's the only way you can do that. So I learned a lot from it but it gave people tremendous respect for me because they knew I wasn't coming out there to
00:15:02
Speaker
catch them doing something wrong. Right, to be the safety cop. Right. And I never really wanted to be that. I didn't even like doing
Mentorship and Career Growth
00:15:09
Speaker
that in the Air Force. But that wasn't an issue, because like I said there, I said it, they did it. So it wasn't like I was trying to catch people doing something wrong. That's how we did it, because it was orders. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, big difference from military to civilian life. Oh, for sure. Yeah. For sure.
00:15:32
Speaker
Yeah, so what happened next and what you just keyed into Jason, by the way, is just genius and such a great thing for you to discover, you know, at the beginning of your career. So you didn't have to go through those uncomfortable mistakes of people thinking, you know, like, who is this kid? Yeah.
00:15:49
Speaker
Yeah, and I still look like a kid so they're still you know, I actually had a guy I took a job was my first regional job This is just a funny side note and we had this appreciation breakfast for everybody. So we're standing in line There's this big gruff guy. I don't remember what he did but he'd been there a while and and he looks at me and he goes How'd you get a job like this being as young as you are and just off the cuff? I'm like, well, I
00:16:15
Speaker
I'm not as old as you think I should be, but I'm not as young as you think I am. How was that? How did that go over? He laughed and then, you know, we had a good conversation. I think I sat down and had breakfast with him and, you know, we didn't even talk about safety. It was just like, who are you? And so it was a good icebreaker. Yeah.
00:16:38
Speaker
That's cool. That's most of it, I think. The rules and regulations, yeah, you got to do them. But that doesn't scare people. That's not what workers think about. Right. Right. But yeah, the next thing that really happened in my journey and that I think kind of solidified the path that I'm on is I got a new manager. And this guy came in. He was 69 years old.
00:17:02
Speaker
when he came in. So he was old and frail. Well, he wasn't frail. He was old and feisty, I'll say that. He had taken a few steps down from being a regional manager or a
00:17:18
Speaker
division manager, I guess is what they called it, for Asia Pacific because they had sort of downsized their Asia Pacific region. So he came back to the projects and it just so happened that he had bought a house in Vegas and he wanted to kind of retire there and make this his last hurrah. So this guy came in with just
00:17:37
Speaker
tons of knowledge of overseas work and tons of stories. The cool thing about him, his name is Nick. He was a pilot in the previous Vietnam days. So 1958, 1959, when things were kind of getting heated up over there. And everything he said was an airplane analogy. And to the point where we're like, shut up about airplanes. None of us know how to fly airplanes, Nick.
00:18:04
Speaker
And you sorta could kinda see through his stories because of your experience through the Air Force, or no? Did it not matter? A little bit. It was similar. I get planes, but what was really cool about it was that he was a little bit old school in his thinking, but he was progressive enough to understand that safety needed to change, needed to get away from all the forms and just menial stuff that doesn't make an impact.
00:18:33
Speaker
He just became, he took me under his wing. I was the lowest ranking person on the team, but he just groomed me because I guess he saw something in me that he wanted to make better and gave me kind of free reign to do whatever I wanted to do in this sort of made up data analyst role, which it was. But one of the most powerful moments in my career, like I said, everything was a plain story.
00:19:03
Speaker
Yeah, he and this is this is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever done but I think it was about the time that my wife got pregnant with my son somewhere abouts in there so I was stressed out and you know wondering about where money was gonna come from because she was gonna quit her job and all this other stuff and he came up to me all excited and we had this corner office in Vegas that kind of overlooked the strip so beautiful location where we were for a construction project anyway and
00:19:31
Speaker
He came up and he's just all excited. He goes, hey, geez, listen, the project manager and I talked, we're going to give you a promotion. You're going to get an 8% raise. Whoa. Yeah, it was huge. And he goes, I got some bad news, though. What that means is that this program that you've been working on, and I've been trying to revamp the database thing that they had hired me for and turn it into something that actually worked. You're getting some traction there, and the boss wants you
00:20:01
Speaker
on that 100% of the time and I was pissed. I totally ignored the fact that I had 8% because what he just told me was that I had to stay in the office all the time and I didn't get to go out and do real safety.
00:20:14
Speaker
Yeah, you know, and you didn't want to be tied to the slash Windows computer. OK, it was it was a Microsoft access program at that point. OK, progress. And for the for the fellow nerds, I named it Quato after the the bad guy in Total Recall.
00:20:34
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's that's way obscure. I know. Somebody's gonna somebody is somebody smiling ear to ear right now. That's my favorite movie ever. No, but so I got I was just ranting and raving like this is crap, Nick. And I used many worse words. And and that was the kind of relationship we had. We could yell and scream at each other and and then come back and apologize. And I mean, it was just it was a really
00:21:01
Speaker
I wouldn't call it like a father-son relationship, but he really took me under his wing. But he kind of stopped me mid-sentence, and he goes, you know what? You need to knock it off. You need to fly the plane you've got. And I stopped, and I'm like, what does that even mean? I don't fly planes. And he goes, all right, well, I'm going to tell you this story. I'm like, yeah, great. How many times have I heard this one? And I hadn't heard this one before. And he goes, all right, when I started flying for the Air Force,
00:21:28
Speaker
I had no idea I was going to do it. He said, I graduated basic training in 1959, and this guy from the CIA came out and asked everybody in my class if any of us knew how to fly airplanes. He said, yeah, I do. I flew a crop duster for my uncle during the summers in high school. And they said, all right, well, you're a pilot now. And they promoted him from an Airman Basic E1 to a warrant officer one, which is probably the equivalent of my 8% raise.
00:21:57
Speaker
Yeah, wow. Yeah, so they they flew him over to Laos. They did a little bit of training with them and then took him to Laos. And I don't know if you've heard or have you seen the movie Air America with Mel Gibson? No, like 1990 movie. It's terrible. Sorry, I don't think so. Yeah, don't watch it. It's awful. Okay. But that was the story that he was actually in. So he they took him sort of out of the Air Force and they assigned him to the CIA. They were civilian clothes. They did.
00:22:27
Speaker
Reconnaissance and there was there was rumors that they ran drugs and all kinds of other crazy, you know stuff But who knows he said they didn't But he said the first day they get out on the runway Then I'll send you the pictures of these two planes because it's to have the visual it's it's pretty stark so they got on the runway and they've got the f5 and
00:22:48
Speaker
fighter plane, right? And then they've got this F-117 flying boxcar cargo plane and it was ugly. I've sat in a couple of them and they're just gross planes. And he's looking at the fighter plane and like, oh yeah, I get to be a fighter pilot. And the instructor goes, nope, that's yours.
00:23:09
Speaker
And so they take him, they get in the fighter plane. So Nick was a really big guy. He was six foot three, six foot four-ish, somewhere in there. Really, really stocky guy. Didn't just long. So they crammed himself into this cockpit and the way he does. And like I said, I've been in one before so I can imagine. I'm short and it was tough for me.
00:23:28
Speaker
So he's in there just talking about, oh, this knob needs to be down here, and this is really stupid that I have to move my leg and cram it into this little spot to press this pedal, and there should be a wheel here instead of a stick, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the instructor stopped him and said exactly what he said to me. He said, son, you need to fly the plane you've got. Maybe someday you're going to engineer the greatest thing that it was ever built. Today's not it. Get us off the runway.
00:23:51
Speaker
and it was all about yeah I mean it was it was such a cool story and actually I put it in my book with more colorful language than that but the cool part and the takeaway and I actually use this now anytime I do and an orientation the message is you know do what you can affect do it focus on what you can change what you can make progress on because if
00:24:19
Speaker
If all you ever do is focus on the things that other people don't do for you or other people owe you, your life's going to be miserable. Get us off the ground, as he said, right? Learn how to be the best at that and do it. I don't think I'd be in my career at this point where I am.
00:24:39
Speaker
if I hadn't taken that advice. And I don't always, you know, there's, I still slip back into the, this is crap. I shouldn't have to suffer through this. Yeah. You know, but I mean, it was just, it was just a really profound moment for me. Yeah. So what happened with the, you, you, you got the, you got the praise up. I'm guessing you took Nick's advice and you did the work and got him off the ground. I did, but I did it in typical, um,
Revamping Safety Programs
00:25:06
Speaker
maliciously compliant fashion for me. So the program that they had hired me for this technical data analyst position was this like mishmash of behavior based and compliance and it was just a mess of a program.
00:25:31
Speaker
And they had quotas for, they had picked five categories. I think it was excavations, crane safety, housekeeping. It must be something in fall protection. Yeah, fall protection was one of them. And I can't remember the fifth one. The fifth one was like, shouldn't have been there. Okay. So they had these categories, they had like 10 categories and they had a checklist for each category. And the questions on the checklist were compliant, non-compliant or not applicable.
00:25:59
Speaker
So yeah, I can see where this is going. Yeah. Right. So then then they had quotas for the five main five life critical categories. Right. And the inspectors, because we were an agent for the client, we didn't actually have any any tradesmen out there on the job. So we had we had guys that were just doing compliance inspections and making sure things were to code and all that. And
00:26:22
Speaker
they had to go out and do X amount of observations per week and X amount of observations in each of those categories, even if they didn't exist. I'll give you an example. So once we got done with all the groundwork, we had no more excavations. Still had to do excavation observations. Okay. Yeah, this sounds like the government, but this was private sector. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So here's the worst part about it. You had to get 95% compliance
00:26:51
Speaker
Or you weren't doing good. But you had no dirt to look at. Yeah, exactly. So I'm sitting there like, how do I make this good? And we went out on a job walk with the project manager and my manager and Nick. And we're walking around, and housekeeping on this site was just atrocious. It was not at all to the level of what our company would have expected, but it wasn't technically our job. It was another GC.
00:27:17
Speaker
And, uh, the project manager, he hadn't been out in months and he's walking around. He's like, Jason, this is, this is awful. Like there's trash cans overflowing. There's cords all over walkways. There's nails sticking out of boards. Like, yeah, I know I stepped on one last week, right. And he goes, what was our compliance percentage on housekeeping last month? And I said, 98%. And he goes, how is that even possible? And he said, cause that's what you asked for. Uh-huh.
00:27:47
Speaker
And I said, well, I've got an idea on how we fix it. And he goes, all right, well, let's do it. So we launched into this just massive training effort. Because these were electrical inspectors.
00:28:05
Speaker
civil inspectors and structural engineers and people that didn't really specialize in safety. They knew some safety stuff. Yeah. And so we gave them, I want to say like 30 hours of classroom training and it wasn't like an OSHA 30. It was like site specific.
00:28:19
Speaker
This is what our site does. This is where things are dangerous. This is what you need to look out for. Specifically what to look for. Yep. That's exactly what we called it is what to look for things to look for. And then we essentially give them a blank sheet of paper and it was it was pretty old and antiquated. It was a scantron form.
00:28:36
Speaker
But they still had to do two observations a week, but we gave them free reign to do whatever. We just said, all right, we've trained you what to look for. Go out and find stuff. Good, bad, or otherwise. And at first it was kind of, well, we ran it for two years. The first year was a terrible failure because it didn't have any accountability. It didn't have any management backing. The second year, my boss went in and had a knockdown drag out fight with the project manager and said, look,
00:29:03
Speaker
this is your program not safety's program either do it or we quit and we'll go play Facebook and I think those were his actual words and so they did they said and the cool part about it was that he came out and said guys you have to do this program you don't have to carry the cards with you just go out and look and at the end of the day oh yeah 9 o'clock I saw this write it down on the card turn it in and if you don't there'll be consequences
00:29:33
Speaker
Or he said there's going to be consequences with the program. He didn't make it a negative because it never was. We only rewarded positive things. So if a guy found a broken section of handrail and he grabbed a bunch of carpenters and had it fixed right there on the spot, he got a $5 Starbucks gift card right on the spot.
00:29:51
Speaker
Whoa. Okay, cool. And that was, that was how we had accountability. And we had one or two that, that turned in some really malicious things and death threats to me because I made them do extra work and all that kind of stuff. But the second year though, this thing just, just took off. And the, the, the one difference was that we were no longer just reporting because when they found a hazard, they were responsible to fix it. So the goal became not 95% compliance. It became,
00:30:19
Speaker
fix everything that you can on a spot with a rough goal of 98% of the time, we think we can knock it out right then. If it's bigger, we're going to track it until it's in bed. So everything got tracked. And I mean, it was hard. It was a really administratively heavy program. I'm not sure that I would want to do it again, but it worked. And what was cool about the way that we structured the accountability was that these guys who are naturally competitive anyway,
00:30:47
Speaker
Started competing like oh he found he found something really big yesterday. I'm gonna find something bigger on my area you know and we started coming up with just insane stuff on a project that really Should have killed a whole bunch of people you know and I like said I won't say who it was but the same company that was the GC there and
00:31:06
Speaker
killed a whole bunch of people in that town in those same years. And they didn't kill any on ours. Wow. Congratulations. Yeah. At the very, very end of it, this guy who I'd never met before, obviously who knew me, came up and goes, hey, Jason, I just want to shake your hand. I'm like, oh, OK. How's it going? Good to meet you. And he goes, man, I've been working in this valley for 25 years. This is the safest job I've ever worked on. So thank you for that.
00:31:36
Speaker
Wow.
00:31:38
Speaker
And that was just really cool to be a part of it. Yeah, it makes the work worth it. Yeah, what a great story. And what an interesting progression in how you made that work. So you mentioned a little bit ago you put a story or a stories about Nick in a book. So Jason, you've written a book.
Writing Journey and Book Announcement
00:32:01
Speaker
I have. So I wrote a book. It was published by CRC Press in September of this year.
00:32:08
Speaker
Wow brand new. Yeah, it's brand brand new. I only have one copy and For yourself for myself. Yeah, okay So it's called a practical guide to the safety profession the relentless pursuit It was originally gonna be titled Thanks for the stories, but that had nothing to do with safety So my publisher asked me to come up with something different, but it's that's really what it is. It's a it's sort of the
00:32:36
Speaker
Well, it's a very much longer version of the story that I just told you, covering that span of years. And it starts off with Nick and the crew and just sort of how we, and it jumps around a little bit here and there. It talks about some of my Air Force experiences. It really started out, the funny part about it, was that I was sitting on my dad's porch in October of last year.
00:33:02
Speaker
And we were drinking a couple of beers, just talking, chatting. And I was reminiscing about Nick, who passed away in 2016. And I said something to the effect of, sorry, I don't mean to bug you with these stories again, Dad. I know you've heard them a hundred times. He goes, no, no, that's okay. He had a big impact on your life. And these are great stories. You need to write them down. And I said, yeah, I know, I know, I know. He goes, you know what? No, quit that.
00:33:29
Speaker
He said you've been wanting to be a writer or sane you want to be a writer since you were like seven and you're not getting any younger so I Expect you to have two chapters done by the next time I see you in two weeks
00:33:40
Speaker
Whoa! What an interesting thing for a parent to say. I know, right? At 38 years old, and he's scolding me like I'm a little kid again. So was that what your relationship with your dad was like? Was he always sort of like, hey, here's a goal, here's a date, get it done, kid? Or was this a new thing? That's totally new, because as I was writing it, I'm like, this is so weird. He's never done this to me before.
00:34:09
Speaker
He never made me do anything. My dad gave me a job. Okay. No, but like, cause I did. I, from the time I was like in seventh grade, I said, I wanted to be a writer. I said, I wanted to do, and then I've started books. I've never finished books. Um, I've got stories and stories and stories on, on drives that are like four pages long and they're probably okay, but I just never, you know, never finished them. But they, uh, my mom and dad, when I finally convinced them,
00:34:35
Speaker
They bought me this correspondence course. I think it was called the Institute of Children's Literature or something like that. You get a real author as your teacher and mentor and you get college credit for it. It was this really cool thing. It was all by male correspondence. It was supposed to take like a year to get it done and it took me almost three.
00:35:03
Speaker
I think that was the point where my parents quit pushing. But the fact that I still kept talking about it for another 30 years and I think it just finally got to him and he's like, you know what, put up or shut up.
00:35:14
Speaker
yeah yeah yeah fly the plane that you have start writing with the story interesting oh that's fun so why on earth did you not pick writing as your degree choice when you were struggling way back when and decided to focus on public speaking i i don't know i think i i think there was still probably a little bit of me that wanted to uh
00:35:39
Speaker
to still do the acting thing because I did entertainment speaking. You wanted to be a performer. I did. There's still a little bit of me that enjoys that. I like doing the YouTube videos and things like that.
00:35:53
Speaker
But like I said, it's just I don't have the patience for it. It's you got to have a serious passion for that kind of craft. Yeah. You know, I can do it in little two minute blips, but I cannot tolerate sitting for 12 hours and doing a retake after retake and retake. It's just it's too much. But so in your I know you've you've also shared with me that you've written something called the Stupid Simple Toolkit. Is that something that's part of your book or is that something that separate?
00:36:22
Speaker
No, it's part of the book and I've got big plans for that, hopefully for the future. So the way the book started out, the first five chapters are kind of a rant about all the things that I see wrong with, essentially it's the things that safety professionals do that separate us from the people that we're supposed to be helping and protecting.
00:36:48
Speaker
There's tons of examples and there's some in the book. It's by no means an exhaustive list. But as I was writing the first two chapters that my dad challenged me to do, which I did finish on time. Did you give him to him to read? Oh, yeah. Yeah, he read. Well, and let me just so you kind of I can I can frame it a little bit. The very first chapter after the introduction is called F dot dot dot or get OSHA.
00:37:17
Speaker
OK. It was originally not titled that. Mm hmm. And my dad looked at it and went, you can't publish this. Mm hmm. So I edited it a little bit. OK. And it is tongue in cheek. It's not there's there's disclaimers in there. It's, you know, nothing about I'm not advocating. We don't comply. That's not the point. Yeah. But yeah, so it started out as sort of this rant. And I was actually listening to a book on tape or an audio book by David Goggins.
00:37:47
Speaker
about sports performance and all these he was a Navy SEAL and at the end of each chapter it's really just a self-help book but at the end of each of his chapters he has a challenge and I think it starts out with
00:38:02
Speaker
making an accountability mirror. So for him, he was in really terrible shape and he had this goal of being a Navy SEAL. And he wrote in dry erase marker on his, on his mirror in his bathroom, you know, I'm going to be a Navy SEAL or something like that.
Tools for Safety Professionals
00:38:15
Speaker
Yeah. And that was his accountability mirror. So at the end of each chapter, he has do this as your challenge. And they're just little progressive steps that you can take to get better as a person. And, and as I think I was like in chapter two or three of my book,
00:38:30
Speaker
And I'm like, this thing can't just be a rant about how stupid all safety professionals are. Because number one, I don't think that. And number two, that's not valuable. So I was like, well, what if I could take that idea, his challenge idea, and make some useful things for a safety professional? So I came up with this idea of this stupid simple toolbox. So there's 11 chapters in part two. And at the end of each chapter, there's a stupid simple tool. And I mean, they are
00:38:58
Speaker
I didn't make up anything earth shattering. They're stupid, simple, like, yeah, give, give us an example, give us an example of one or two of them. Yeah. So if you don't mind, yeah, one that I'm, I'm, well, I'll do this one first. The, uh, in the chapter that's called add value, not words, the stupid simple tool is be useful. And, and I go through that idea that I talked about in the construction site where, you know, you walk up to somebody and say, Hey, show me what you're doing. You know, and it's, it's just that,
00:39:27
Speaker
that kind of one-on-one breaking down the walls, being a human and having a little bit of interpersonal skill, which I think is really important. And the story in that chapter is about a guy that was just one of those in your face, cussing, yelling, screaming at you guys. And long story short, he ran out on site one day and found this Hispanic worker who didn't speak a lick of English
00:39:53
Speaker
and started just berating him for his his old crusty hard hat and it had stickers from every job that this guy had probably ever been on since you know the seventies I would imagine something he was likely proud of yeah oh yeah he was and the guy physically grabbed it off his head and I'll show you what happens when a hard hat gets gets you know worn out in the sun and he's he squeezed it and it snapped in half and
00:40:21
Speaker
It was one of the saddest things I've ever seen, you know, aside from the fatalities and serious injuries, but this guy was just crushed and he didn't even have any idea why this guy's screaming at him. So that was, yeah. I told that story to someone who will remain unnamed and said, you know, there's such a better way to converse with people and to get a message or even if you don't speak the language. And the response this guy gave me was, yeah, well,
00:40:55
Speaker
But that was just proof that I needed to finish this book and give people a reason to not do that, because there's people out there that still act that way. Right. Right. Wow. Wow. Interesting. Yeah, so do you mind sharing one other thing that's in the toolkit? Sure. And I know this is something that you wanted to talk about, so I think it's a good lead-in. Yeah. Item number three is write better.
00:41:16
Speaker
sometimes that's the only way to get through to people.
00:41:24
Speaker
So I've got a little writer's guide and it's page and a half. And it's my theory on how, as safety professionals, we should structure procedures, guidelines, and standards. And it's the idea, like standards, these are the rules that you want people to follow, but don't just copy OSHA. If that's all we needed to do, they don't need us.
00:41:51
Speaker
You know, write them in plain English and, you know, when you're on the site, we expect you to do X, Y, and Z. And I think there's a big value in structuring these things into those three categories because a standard shouldn't have any prescription to it. It should just be a requirement, right? And then the procedure is how you uphold the standard. So in a procedure, my big thing,
00:42:15
Speaker
And the title of this chapter is called, quit using a shawl, you're not Shakespeare. Yeah, I'm not like the reverent safety professional by any means. So in procedure, my first guideline is never use the word shawl, should, must, or will because, well, three reasons. They're legal terms. We're not lawyers.
00:42:37
Speaker
they're antiquated and old. Um, so they don't resonate with today's workforce. But the most important reason you shouldn't use that is because there's statements about what you're going to do, not how we do it here. And yeah, and it's not, when I say that people like, Oh yeah, that actually makes sense. Um, but we use shell so much and it just bugs me like a worker sees shell and it feels oppressive. You know, it feels like,
00:43:07
Speaker
the employers trying to get one over on me, or they own me. And then for guidelines, I just gave kind of a
00:43:16
Speaker
guidelines for me would be an interpretation document. Maybe you go out and take pictures of how to do a sequence of steps so that people have something to put with the words. And in the words of Stephen King, there's always something to take out. So these things should be short, concise, to the point. If you have a lockout-tagout procedure that's 80 pages long,
00:43:40
Speaker
guarantee you your site is not using it properly. Right, right, right. Yeah, so you're giving a practical guide to writing for safety professionals. Right, that's part of it. So there's 11 of those tools like that.
Writing Process and Creativity
00:43:52
Speaker
And they're all just basic human stuff, you know? Yeah, fascinating, fascinating. So Jason, for people who are listening, who are like,
00:44:02
Speaker
man I wish I had a dad who told me to go write a book because I've always kind of been itching to be a writer or maybe there are there are safety professionals who are writers right now and you know I'm fascinated by writing love to do it myself so I love to hear how other people approach writing what's
00:44:20
Speaker
Like how do you do it? How do you get your inspiration? Do you sit down and crank stuff out? Do you get your butt at a keyboard every day and write? Or what's your writing process like? So I write most days. I don't have like a word limit. I know a lot of people, fiction writers in general, set like I want to write 2,000 words a day. Yeah. That's just not feasible for me. Maybe someday it will be. There have been days when I've written that much, but I try to
00:44:50
Speaker
I try to get an idea every day, and then you may have caught it, but one of my favorite kind of heroes in writing is Stephen King, not so much because I love his stories. I did catch that. But he wrote a book in 2000 called On Writing, and I think it's called A Memoir of the Craft.
00:45:10
Speaker
And he really gets into his process and how he got to where he got busy. If you read his material, he is one of the most technically proficient writers that I think has ever been. He's just grammatically, lyrically, everything. He's just amazingly proficient and very, very talented with words. So I try to, I wouldn't say I try to emulate that because I don't know if I ever will, but I want
00:45:37
Speaker
all of the words that I string together in a particular order to make impact. So if there's something in there that doesn't add value, I'm going to take it out. Even if I really like it, everyone sounds really cool, it doesn't add to the story I'm going to take it out. But my process, and this is one where I think I did catch from him, from Stephen King, was he has this idea of letting the little people upstairs do their work.
00:46:07
Speaker
So what I do is I write down, like if I'm writing a blog post or even a chapter in a book, you know, I'm working on the second part to the practical guide. I just write down the title of the chapter and the title might change, but I write down the thought of, you know, I want to write something along this category and I just leave it set.
00:46:26
Speaker
and think about it obsessively. Like you're daydreaming in the shower or you're daydreaming through everything and you're thinking about it. And a lot of times for me, I get that starting point and I know I want to make an end point, but I don't know what fills in the middle and something will happen or I'll see something funny. One of the big goals with the book and with my blog is that I try to
00:46:52
Speaker
I try to make them entertaining and funny. I'm not going to make light of injuries and death or anything like that, but life is fun and funny and fun to experience, so I want to convey that.
00:47:04
Speaker
And then right at the end, stick you with the really poignant message. So I wait until something either occurs to me, I remember something, or I see my daughter do something crazy, or yesterday I wrote a post about having a break into my house because I left my keys. And that clicked with something else.
00:47:24
Speaker
But that's really my process, is I'll sit and I'll figure out what I want to write about. The one that I wrote yesterday has been sitting in the queue for, I don't know, a month and a half. I just come back to it, I read through my list of potentials and I go, eh, not ready for that one today. Then once I put something together, I'm pretty fast. I just sit and bang out the guts of it. Then I spend a little bit of time editing.
00:47:53
Speaker
The biggest resource for me for editing is I usually read everything I write out loud to my wife. She's critical but in a good way because she's not a safety professional. She doesn't completely understand what it is that I do. After 15 years she gets it.
00:48:13
Speaker
If it doesn't make sense right away to her, then it's not right because it needs to be accessible enough to where I'm not speaking academically or speaking down to the audience because people will turn off.
00:48:28
Speaker
So it's kind of a chaotic process for me, I would say. My writing process is very similar, Jason. Something will pop in my head or I'll observe a story. Something will happen in life or with someone else.
00:48:45
Speaker
and then i'll think wow i gotta like that's good i want to write about that and it's not always that it's like this really big big thing that happened but it's usually something tiny that was impactful but in a really tiny way um and then you know what can you know how can you blow how can you blow that wider or dig into that deeper and then i usually wait for some kind of sentence to come into my head yep
Importance of Self-Care for Creativity
00:49:13
Speaker
And once that sentence is there, I write it down because otherwise I'll lose it. And I write it down usually in the notes pages of my phone. Yeah. And then I go back to those sentences and like, OK, what was that again? Oh, yeah, that was the thing. And it was tied to that story. And sometimes it doesn't go anywhere because it's like, yeah, I thought that was a great idea that day. But no, but the ones that keep itching and digging at you are the ones that you. Yeah, that I tell you about. There's one in my blog list that's been sitting there since April. And it's going to sit there, but I don't think I'll ever
00:49:43
Speaker
I'll ever get there. The one thing that I've found as I've really, I would say, really become a writer in this past year is you've got to take care of yourself because when you're in your head that much,
00:50:02
Speaker
It's a really fine line between severe anxiety and ultimate fulfillment when you complete a project. At least it is for me, and it's something that I've learned. Yeah, say more about that. And I think it's... So my day job is safety. My night job is safety and social media about safety. So it's always being on.
00:50:31
Speaker
I got to the point earlier this year where I just couldn't sleep anymore and I make the joke and I'm like I don't sleep anymore I just hang upside down like a bat for a couple hours. But I mean you really have to take care of yourself and I think a lot of artists in any genre have that problem because they're so focused on putting something great out. It's funny because if I finish a really good blog post
00:50:58
Speaker
and publish it or set it up to publish the next morning, you know, on the timer. I can usually sleep okay. If I'm like halfway through and I'm going through all the conversations and the funny, witty banter that I want to put in it or the really poignant message, whatever it is, and I don't finish, I struggle. So, I mean, you just have to manage that. You've got to get it out. Yeah, you have to manage your time and you have to kind of
00:51:25
Speaker
learn how to shut it off and I thought I was really good at shutting it off and I think the case was actually that I just never really turned it on.
00:51:34
Speaker
So yeah. Yeah. So what does self-care look like for you then? How do you shut that? How do you shut that off? I'm still learning. Yeah. So I mean, like this week is a perfect example. You know, doing stuff like this is key when you get to converse and tell the stories and get it out with other people that understand. I think that's huge. So, you know, just in referring back to that post I wrote yesterday,
00:52:00
Speaker
I think it's about your friends and your connections. One thing that my wife and I have started doing this year is we go to lunch once a week and just don't talk about work, which sometimes means we don't talk.
00:52:19
Speaker
which is fine. But getting away and being able to just shut it off, turn off your mind, go to enjoy something else, have a sandwich, drink a beer, whatever it is, and just not think about safety. Or fill in the blank with whatever you do. Right, right, right, right. So that helps.
00:52:38
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That's, and it's, it's so, it's so critically important. And I think it's very, it's critically important for just as a, as a human being to take care of yourself and to recognize that you need self care and then what works, you know, what works for you because we're all, we're all wired differently. I, I tend to want to get in nature, you know, like if I haven't been in a woods or on a trail or near a tree, um, you know, I'm like, Oh, I just sort of, I sort of ache for that.
00:53:08
Speaker
sure and yeah and sometimes it's just also just being quiet and and doing something mindless like organizing a drawer you know i don't do well with quiet i tend to slip back into things but one of the other yeah things you just reminded me so my nature is the gym and and i i say this because i'm kind of missing it right now because my my gym buddy is uh working nights and i we haven't seen each other in like three weeks but
00:53:36
Speaker
So I made really good friends with a guy that's at the same level as me, which is important, but also is forward enough, and we are in our relationship. If I get to talking too much, or even if he does, because we both work at the same place, if we get to talking too much about our frustrations or whatever's going on, we'll just tell each other, shut up. All right, we're done with that now. It's time to lift. Yep, yep, yep. I get it. I get it.
00:54:05
Speaker
Yeah, that is another great outlet. It sounds like you and I are both weightlifters and that is definitely a place to go and I was having a little anxiety about not being able to get to my gym this morning for my normal 6am shtick because there was a snowstorm and I live in the Midwest and couldn't get there.
00:54:25
Speaker
And so, you know, last night before I went to bed, I went outside and shoveled snow. I'm like, okay, that's part of the workout. Got up this morning. I'm like, I'm tromping through this snow, the deepest snow I can find. And I'm imagining I'm Rocky when Rocky was training in what, Siberia or whatever. You know, and whatever. Yeah. Anyway.
00:54:44
Speaker
Ah, Jason, this has been so fun. I just really appreciate all that you've shared with our audience. And I want to make sure you've mentioned your writing, you've mentioned your blog posts. If people want to find your blog, is it at RelentlessSafety.com? Is that where people should go? RelentlessSafety.com, it's got all the book links as well.
00:55:07
Speaker
the books available on CRC Press and Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all kinds of places. Sure, and you're in the process of writing the second practical guide to the safety profession? So the second one is, not very far along, but the second one is really going to be aimed at executives and leaders and because to my knowledge there's never been a book directed at them on how they should
00:55:34
Speaker
be a champion for safety. So that's where I want to go with that. So I'm doing some research there. It's critical. Yeah, it's critical. Fantastic. Jason, thank you so much for everything you shared today. Thank you for having me. No, this was tons of fun. I appreciate you having me on.
00:55:52
Speaker
Yeah, all right. And thank you all for spending your time listening today. And more importantly, thank you for your contribution, making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day. If you'd like to join the conversation about this episode or any of our previous episodes, you can follow our page and join the Accidental Safety Pro community group on Facebook. If you're not subscribed and want to hear
00:56:15
Speaker
Past and future episodes, you can subscribe to our podcast in iTunes, the Apple Podcast app, or any other podcast player that you'd like. You can also find all the episodes at vividlearningsystems.com slash podcast. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more safety professionals like you and I.
00:56:37
Speaker
If you have a suggestion for a guest, including if it's you, you can contact me at social at vividlearningsystems.com. Special thanks to Will Moss, our podcast producer. Until next time, thanks for listening.