Careers That Create Better Men
How Being A Paramedic Made Me A Better Man
When I was a clinical intern at the emergency room, I couldn’t hit a single IV — to all of the patients whose veins I missed, I’m sorry. The problem continued when I got to my field internship. Luckily, my preceptor Corey recognized the other qualities that made me great, so whenever I missed an IV he would always say, “You’re solid in everything else you do, so I’m not worried about the IV thing — it will come in time.” And he was right. By the time I was a paramedic in New Haven, I was nailing IVs. I knew it was something I wanted to get better at, so I practiced whenever the situation dictated it, upping my success rate to the point where I got a reputation for that skill from the nurses in the ER. Over the years, though, I noticed that, much like baseball, I could go through a “hitting slump,” where no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t put the needle in the vein. But when you're having trouble hitting the ball in baseball, what do they tell you to do? Keep swinging like you normally would, and your success will eventually come back — and it did every time, not because of technique, but because of confidence. Now I have my IVs down to where I can toss a needle in the vein of a seizing diabetic or a combative drug addict while going 75 miles per hour down the potholed 10 freeway. But I only learned that from experience and forced repetition, both of which gave me the confidence I needed to succeed.
That same confidence applies to life, from talking to a woman at a bar, to parallel parking your car, to weaving confidence behind the words I write in articles. Confidence has even helped me with Olympic weightlifting in CrossFit. Think about how much weight you could lift if you didn’t have that little voice in your head saying, “This is too heavy.” I’ve seen patients on PCP fight off three police officers with superhuman strength — not because PCP makes them stronger, but because it impairs the part of their brain that tells them “I can’t do this.” It's the same concept with the mother who lifts a car off her child in distress. In those moments, self-doubt doesn’t exist; there is only “I can.” Your faith in your abilities also has to do with the concepts of self-fulfilling prophecy and self-sabotage. Eliminate those two things and you can do anything. You shouldn't go up to a woman at a bar thinking, “She’s never going to go for a guy like me.” You need to approach her thinking, "There’s no way this isn’t going to work."
Your confidence affects everything you do, from business deals to how well you can cook a steak, to determining if you’re a easy target for criminals or even how well you’re going to succeed with fitness. You’ve heard the maxim “confidence is everything,” but you probably associate it with talking to the opposite sex. But for many of us, we don’t realize the true depth of that statement until we've applied it to every facet of our lives. Confidence. Is. Everything.
Being a paramedic gave me a different perspective on life (and death), but many of the lessons I learned didn’t have to do with medicine or saving people’s lives. Instead, saving other people’s lives affected my life in ways I never could have imagined. The choices we make are how we experience life. We know that at a fundamental level, but rarely do we embrace it. While still a licensed paramedic, I no longer practice, but I attribute the way I live my life — and the man I am — to the lessons I learned from my years of working in emergency medicine.