Is there a better education in the world than spending 30-plus years as a major city cop?
I spent half that time working the streets, the other half in charge of others as we targeted gangs, drugs and street crime. The things you witness as a police officer run the gambit. You see good people under bad circumstances. You see people suffer – sometimes due to the actions of others, but often as a result of their own bad choices. There are opportunities to help people. Other times, you experience the frustration of not being able to do enough.
You learn a lot from all those experiences.
A few years before my retirement, I attended an in-service training class at the Columbus Police Academy. The instructor was a respected officer that I knew well. I remember thinking that his words were respected because he was respected. That class led me to think about the critical aspects of being successful.
I came up with six components to success: Character, Competence, Self-management, Interpersonal Communication, Problem Solving, and Conflict Resolution. The first three are internal and self-focused. Then next three are external. I’ve since added another – good money management.
I began gathering quotes from successful people that were relevant to my writing. The result of this work is a manuscript I hope to have published soon, Life Lessons from Behind the Badge.
Character deals with integrity, courage, loyalty, diligence, humility, optimism and empathy.
Competency focuses on developing, recognizing and deploying the skills, knowledge and abilities needed to accomplish your goals. These two capacities form the basis of who you are as a person and what you bring to your relationships and endeavors. This is your foundation. Character is about intent and integrity; Competency is about ability and results.
To develop and improve character and competence, you also need to develop self-awareness, which is critical to growing as a person, managing your time, developing your vision, and maintaining your life in balance. This is a skill many people never develop. It is difficult to practice self-awareness until you first develop character and competency.
The next three competencies involve effective interaction with others. Whatever your life goals, they will involve relationships with others and solving problems.
Inter-personal communication is the tool needed to communicate well with others. It will assist you in getting your message right, hearing the messages of others, and doing it in a way that enhances, rather than damages, relationships.
Problem-solving is important because life is full of problems. Dr. M. Scott Peck opens his best-selling book, The Road Less Traveled, with a discussion on problems. He states: “Life is difficult… Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them?”
The truth of the matter is that many of us spend much more time complaining about problems than solving them. Problems are not only inevitable, but necessary to help us learn and grow. We must become good at problem solving in our personal and professional lives.
We are bound to encounter situations where we need to work together to solve problems, but we see things differently from each other. That’s where conflict resolution comes in. Even the best relationships involve some disagreement and differences. We can’t expect to live and work with other people without some amount of challenge and conflict.
Many people don’t handle conflict well. As a result, they often hurt others and themselves when conflicts arise. Or, they avoid conflicts and become increasingly frustrated when problems don’t go away.
Many of us discover that we haven’t learned enough about how to manage our finances and grow our net worth. This discovery often comes as a result of lessons learned from mistakes made. There are some basic aspects of managing money that can help us become more adept at handling our finances. These include the importance of living within our means by creating and using a budget, the concept of paying yourself first through savings, the danger of debt and how to escape it, the value of self-discipline and delayed gratification when it comes to spending decisions, financial strategies for major purchases, and the concept of investing and buying assets.
Future blogs will involve more in-depth, focused segments from throughout the manuscript as I share life lessons I’ve learned from behind the badge.
Kent Shafer 