In the past year I have been working on developing a program to bring awareness to firefighter mental health. As part of that I have been trying to do more teaching and public speaking. I completed my program and decided that I wanted to get my message out to a wider audience.
Why start small right, lets go for the big time. I submitted proposals to 3 conferences with each being bigger than the next. I started with IEMSA which is the Iowa EMS Association's annual conference in Des Moines. My presentation was accepted but unfortunately I had to withdraw from that conference due to scheduling conflicts. The next 2 conferences I submitted proposals for were the IAFF HR conference and FDIC. I am still waiting to here back from the IAFF but I did get news from FDIC the other day. Unfortunately I was not selected to present at the 2014 FDIC. While I didn't have high hopes of getting selected it was still disappointing to not get selected. I was encouraged to submit my proposal again next year and to also consider submitting an article on my topic to Fire Engineering magazine. I am not sure if the folks at FDIC send out a form letter with they turn you down or not but it at least makes you feel a little bit better. In the coming months I will be working on an article to submit to Fire Engineering so hopefully I can published there. I am still hopeful that I will get to present at the IAFF HR conference. Not only would it be a trip to Florida in February but it would also be a good place to start getting an important message out to my brothers and sisters.
So even though I was disappointed to get the news from FDIC, I am still encouraged to keep moving forward. It takes a little time and effort to get a foot hold in the teaching and public speaking circuit. This is just the first step in the journey, it will take some work, but I will get there.
