The Guns & Yoga Podcast gunsandyoga

Welcome to the Guns and Yoga Podcast
Today my guest is a former co-worker of mine, Police Officer Nate Schweitale. Nate has worked for the Wichita Police Department for the past 23 years and started the agency’s HOT team, which stands for Homeless Outreach Team. 
Nate is also now a consultant to other agencies looking to implement a HOT team and an author of a new book “Rooster: What a Homeless Man Taught a Cop” which he co-wrote with his childhood friend, Mack Severns. 
Nate and the HOT team have helped over 1200 homeless get into permanent housing contributing to an 86 percent decrease in the area’s chronic homeless population.   I had always known of Nate’s work with the team, but between our conversation and reading his book, I was in awe of his dedication, vulnerability, and courage.
Nate shares some of the stories from the book, his path to creating a nationally recognized program, and his personal journey of forgiveness.
LINKS:
Amazon Link to Nate's Book - Rooster: What a Homeless Man Taught a Cop
Safe Night LLC - Improve Trust, Safety, and Public Safety Practices
Nate's Email: bluelinellc2047@gmail.com

If you find value in the show, please share and give us a review.  As always, if you have questions, feedback, or an idea for a future episode topic, email me at wendy@bluelineyoga.com 
And remember, we are better together!
Wendy

Welcome to the Guns and Yoga Podcast.  My name is Wendy Hummell. 
My guest today is a true inspiration.  Her name is Katherine Boyle, and she created Beyond the Uniform and also hosts a podcast with the same name. Her mission is simple – to support police officers and their families. However, I believe her message and content is relevant to all first responder families. Her emphasis on the importance of creating a healthy, stable, and happy home-life is an extremely relevant, yet often overlooked, aspect of first responder wellness and wellbeing. 
LINKS:
Beyond The Uniform
Linkedin
Instagram
https://theltsdaughter.myflodesk.com/btucommunity
 
If you find value in the show, please share and give us a review.  As always, if you have questions, feedback, or an idea for a future episode topic, email me at wendy@bluelineyoga.com 
And remember, we are better together!
Wendy
 

Tactical Tip Tuesday
How will you upgrade in 2024? 
 
Today is Tactical Tip Tuesday where  I share a tip, tool, or dose of inspiration for your week.
LINKS:
Live Your Best Life Using Your Strengths - Gallup Poll
Bring Your Strengths to Life & Live More Fully - VA
Law Enforcement Agency and Officer Resilience Training Program
I hope you enjoy the show, and check us out on Instagram at: @guns_and_yoga_podcast
Wendy

Surviving Retirement with Police Psychologist Dr. Medina Baumgart
 
Today, I have a guest who is a subject matter expert on the topic, Dr. Medina Baumgart, an in-house psychologist at a LE Agency and author of “Surviving Retirement: Finding Purpose and Fulfillment Beyond the Badge”. In her role as an in-house psychologist, she conducts counseling, works with peer support, and builds relationships with sworn and civilian members while embedded in their patrol stations. 
But it is her personal experience as the spouse of a retired LEO that inspired her book and course. She openly shares her husband’s struggle with depression and alcohol after retirement as well as her own.  Despite having the tools as a psychologist, she felt helpless to help her own husband. 
Dr. Baumgart walks us through a framework in the book she wants all retirees to know about, which she learned from Dr. Riley Moynes. 
It consists of four phases all retirees can expect to go through: vacation phase, the loss or grief phase, trial and error phase, and if all goes well the reinvent and rewire phase.
Although she never set out to write a book, we discuss how she asked her husband to write everything down that he wanted other cops to know about retirement, and the course and book were born from there.
Although different for everyone, Dr. Baumgart tells us the re-establishment of routine, going to the gym, and tackling projects outside of his comfort zone are some of the ways her husband achieved those last steps in the framework above.
Besides her personal experience, she spoke with over 200 retirees as she researched her book, and many of the issues and challenges were the same.  I shared with her my own struggle with identity and the shame and embarrassment I felt surrounding that.   According to Psychology Today, our identity is a unique blend of our memories, experiences, relationships, and values that create our sense of self.  This mix creates a steady sense of who we are over time, even as new facets are developed and incorporated into one’s identity.  Although I thought I was pretty diverse, if I am being completely honest, my role at work was a big part of who I was. 
I remember hearing one time that you can love your job, but your job can't love you back.  It reminds me of something in Dr. Baumgart's book that her husband said when he turned in his equipment prior to retiring, “I gave you my life, and you handed me a receipt”.
After investing so much, working holidays, overtime, shift work, and trauma exposure the end can feel so cold and transactional. 
The lesson here is preparation, understanding, and support can lend itself to a smoother transition. 
We also discuss the impact our careers have on our physiology and just because you retire, doesn’t mean your nervous system got the memo.  This is something I talk quite a bit about on this podcast, and I have linked an episode covering a variety of tools in here the show notes.
If we don’t provide an outlet or a way to process or complete the stress response, it will come out in ways like arguing, picking fights, anger, and other maladaptive coping mechanisms.  Since our nervous system is wired to protect us from harm, we must learn to self-regulate, which is something Dr. Baumgart addresses in her book. 
I hope you enjoy this episode.
LINKS:
Dr. Baumgart's Website:  www.medinabaumgart.com
Her Book: Surviving Retirement: Finding Purpose and Fulfillment Beyond the Badge
Her on-demand course: www.drbaumgart.com/surviving-retirement 
Her Linkedin
TED talk w/ Dr. Riley Moynes: 4 Phases of Retirement
Guns & Yoga Podcast: Second Mountain Masterclass Series - Finding Meaning Health and Vitality in Retirement:  HERE
 

Welcome to the Guns and Yoga Podcast.  My name is Wendy Hummell. 
Before we get into today’s episode, I’d like to share a few things with all of you:
I will be presenting a couple of free webinars on Justice Clearinghouse. For those of you that don't know, Justice Clearinghouse is a peer-to-peer educational platform geared towards CJ professionals. 
On December 8th, I will be presenting “Building a Wellness Program from the Ground Up”.  It is free to watch live, and if you are Justice Clearinghouse member you can access the replay anytime. Please see the link below.
The December webinar will be an overview of what it takes to implement an organizational wellness program from the ground up. If this is something you are interested to learn more about, I will be releasing a longer course on the Justice Clearinghouse platform early next year, so stay tuned.
Also, I recently presented a webinar on Justice Clearinghouse called “Side Hustles and Second Careers: Reimagining your Professional Passion After Retirement”, and as a part of the Second Mountain Master class series,  which focuses on retirement I will be breaking down the sections of this webinar in future microcasts and will incorporate additional content, so stay tuned.
We recently did a giveaway for a guns and yoga hat.  Thank you to all that entered and joined the email list, and congratulations to the winner - Katherine Boyle.         . 
Now on to today’s episode where I share a conversation with David Kennington, the Manager for the Professional Wellness Section at the Nashville Metro Police Department.  David is a licensed professional counselor and manages civilian counselors and the sworn arm of the wellness unit.
Not only is David a trailblazer in the first responder wellness space, but he has come to be a trusted mentor and friend.  We met a few years back when I was early into my role as the Health and Wellness Manager at my agency.  Through a program called CRITAC, which we discuss in the episode, our agency was paired with David’s along with another subject matter expert, Sherri Martin, National FOP Wellness Coordinator, who was a previous guest on the show.
David and I continue to stay connected and he has been an integral part of our wellness programs success.  Because of his guidance, an unexpected benefit of our relationship through the CRITAC program, which included site visits, was our own unit’s expansion.  We were able to go from one full time person, me, to now three full time employees in our unit, one of which is an in-house therapist.  This not only speaks to the legitimacy of the program, but to our agency’s leadership and buy in, a crucial element for any agency wellness program I also discuss in my upcoming webinar, Building a Wellness Program from the Ground Up.
Some of the highlights from our conversation are:
The growth of his agency’s wellness program, which began with the behavioral component, or in house therapists to the recent addition of the sworn section, wellness checks, training, peer support, family support, succession planning, and the importance of having a menu of services to offer employees.
David shares the core values of the Nashville Metro PD’s wellness program: Relationships, resources, and resiliency. 
Whether you are interested in how to start a wellness program at your agency, enhance what you already have, or you are just interested to learn more, I think you’ll find a lot of great information and value in this episode. 
If you found value, please share and give us a review.  As always, if you have questions, feedback, or an idea for a future episode topic, email me at wendy@bluelineyoga.com and register to receive our upcoming free guns and yoga newsletter coming in 2024. You can sign up on the link included below.
And remember, we are better together.
LINKS:
Building a Wellness Program from the Ground Up
Side Hustles and Second Careers: Reimagining Your Professional Pa

What’s missing from the Public Safety Conversation – My Two Cents:
Welcome to the guns and yoga podcast.  My name is Wendy Hummell.  Today’s microcast is inspired by my belief that organizational wellness should be at the forefront of the public safety.
Lately I have been paying attention to what many of our local politicians in Wichita KS are saying on the topic of public safety, in particular the conversation surrounding staffing shortages.  It is a priority topic this campaign season and I have heard higher pay, recruiting, and retention mentioned quite a bit.
Competing for qualified applicants is a trend we see across the nation, and it’s no different for us in Kansas.  While you will never hear me argue that cops, firefighters, detention deputies, paramedics or dispatchers shouldn’t get a raise, this is just one component of a multifaceted problem. 
The landscape for public safety has changed over the past several years.  Covid and rallying cries for police reform and defunding the police in response to police shootings and high-profile cases such as George Floyd in May 2020 impacted law enforcement across the nation. 
On January 6, 2021, protestors stormed the Capitol and many of the officers working that day were injured; some lost their lives.  One of the officers who died by suicide was Jeff Smith, a DC Metro Police Officer, the first suicide death to be classified as a LODD and eligible for benefits from the PSOB or Public Safety Officers Benefits Program.  Legislation to include suicides was enacted in August 2022.   We have data that tells us suicide is the leading cause of death amongst law enforcement.  We have only begun to track this data in the past decade, so the numbers are likely higher than we know not just for cops, but other public safety professions as well.
My call to action is for community leaders and politicians to recognize that we must invest in those doing the work.  While we need to recruit, we absolutely must focus on not just retaining those workers we have, but going a step further and supporting their mental, emotional, and physical health so they want to stay and thrive in all areas of their life. 
A lofty goal I know, but I have seen too many of my friends and co-workers suffer due to stigma, lack of agency support, or lack of knowledge and limited access to resources. 
In a report done by Lexipol, “Stressed & Short-Staffed: Challenges Facing First Responders and the Impact on Community Safety” in which they surveyed 9,400 police, fire, and EMS workers the results were not suprising to those of us in the trenches, but we need to make sure this gets in front of our community leaders as well:
Here is some of the data from the report and I’ll include the links below:
94% of firefighters have experienced staffing challenges in the past year
87% of police officers work in departments that are not fully staffed based on authorized staffing numbers
86% of EMS professionals say their departments have experienced staffing challenges in the past three years
45% of police officers report that their time-off requests are being denied more often
67% of firefighters and 51% of EMS professionals said their stress level is negatively impacting other aspects of their health
68% of police officers are more concerned about on-duty safety due to short staffing
50% of police officers and 54% of EMS professionals plan to leave their jobs in the next 5 years
In order to get off the hamster wheel of low staffing, mandatory overtime, chronic stress, poor lifestyle habits which leads to diminished efficiency and quality of services, we need to do better.  We need full scale organizational wellness programming.  Of course we need to recruit and pay a competitive wage, but keeping people healthy and cared for so they want to stay until retirement must be considered as well.  Often the first responder culture is referred to as “toxic” and having “low morale”.  I’ve used