I Was Force-Hired Into My Best Friend's Seat After He Died | The Confidence Question Ep. 5

James Owen: And our boat started taking on water, and my dad and I started working through those issues. He sent me up on deck. It was, it was just all hands getting our butts kicked in on this 32-foot sailboat trying to make harbor. And then my dad, out of nowhere, on the helm goes, "I'm done," and leaves the helm. I jump on the helm of our boat and start sailing. What happened to him? My mom comes up and says, "Your dad broke down there crying in your bunk, fetal position." That was the moment I knew. I was forced to know, okay, nobody's coming.

Dr. Tyler Hales: All right, James Owen, to start off by telling me about a moment you were the least confident person in the room.

James Owen: The moment I felt the least confident in who I was was day one of Long Beach Fire Department's Fire Academy. To say that I felt lower than whale shit would be probably appropriate. I had no clue what was coming my way. I knew that I just made it across the threshold and that I needed to, to remove anything that I knew before and be ready to get a fire hose of information from a new team. And how Uh, you know, of course I saw firefighters when I was growing up and got into seeing how they carried themselves so confidently. I knew that going on the crucible, becoming a firefighter, would, would, would bring out confidence but also render situations when I would have none. So comfort is where growth goes to die. And luckily I had that in my mind. The— in my book The Last Patient, uh, we have this mantra that says, situation screwed, still survivable. And I had that mantra back then. So even though the situation seemed so much bigger than me, I always remember that there's a way through and it's still survivable.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Did you always want to be a firefighter?

James Owen: Growing up, I did. I wanted to be a first responder. My mom had me when she was 17 in London, England, with an Englishman. And that started off a crucible of being a teen baby. You know, there's teen mom and then there's a teen baby. And she remarried when I was 5 to a man that was into private investigation. So growing up around him, I got influenced by him being a private investigator and also influenced by him being a sailor. But the private investigator part kind of piqued the interest as a young man. And then fast forward when I was about, I think it was 5th grade, we're living in Petaluma, California, and late '70s, and microwave had just come out and they weren't so reliable, and the microwave blew up and it was smoking. My dad was not mechanical, nor was he a real kind of emergency response guy. So we called the fire department, and up, up our driveway comes this big rig, and these guys, these big men get off, and they come in and, hey kid, move me aside, rip this microwave out, take it outside, and pat me on the head and let me go out right on the fire engine. I was like, wow, what would it be? What would I feel like if I was— felt that confident, and I could step into that. See, my life was pretty challenging as a childhood. They were, you know, like I said, I was a teen mom and a stepdad who is my dad. I rate Doug Owen as my dad. I was with him when I was 5, but I really looked up to him, and he looked up to first responders, and my mom really looked up to first responders, and it just seemed like the highest form of service that I could perform for, uh, not only society but kids that had a little bit of a tougher, uh, upbringing, a little bit tougher of a chance than I did. So I looked at those men as inspiration. And fast forward, uh, down the road, my parents, uh, came to me and when I was 16 and said, um, 'Hey Jim, have a seat.' And whenever they said 'have a seat,' that was the hallmark that, that there was some BS headed my way, okay? And I started the alibis in my mind, like, 'Oh my God, what are we going to talk about?' They sat me down and they said, uh, 'Hey, we're going to sell everything we own. We're going to move on to a 32-foot sailboat, and, uh, we're going to sail the world. We're going to save our marriage. And by the way, Jim, we're going to save you.' So I spent an entire season going down to Mexico trying to save my parents' life on their sailboat, and it was the crucible that made me into a man. The sea forged me into a man. But just after that is when I started living out at Catalina Island, and my dad got a job with the private harbor patrol. My mom was working for the, the harbor office, and they had some, uh, LA County lifeguard Baywatch Paramedics in Two Harbors, Catalina. Okay, and, and these guys were out swimming and training and doing urban search and rescue, doing the paramedics, getting a respond on boat. And I just looked up to those men. That was the, the story of how the hook got set on wanting to be a first responder. But let me just put the cherry on top here. I end up have— I end up working, uh, moving down to the other end of Avalon, other end of Catalina Island, which is Avalon. And when I moved down there, I was deciding I was going to be a first responder. And I had worked on the Harbor Patrol as well a few years past, but I had a second job working in a pizzeria, okay, slinging pizzas. And, uh, in one day walks 4 vacation drunk Long Beach firefighters, and they— God plopped them right down in my section, okay? And I'm like, hey guys, what's going on? Yeah, we're Long Beach firefighters. And they go, what do you want to be? In that moment, dude, I go, I want to be a— I want to be first responder. I want to be a firefighter. You want to be a firefighter? After 5 minutes of them shredding me to pieces, okay, I couldn't even— I was like a little stump of a boy after they got done verbally jousting with me. And they said, if you do everything we do, kid, everything that we did and everything we tell you to do, you can become a Long Beach firefighter. And you know what?

Dr. Tyler Hales: They were right.

James Owen: I became a Long Beach firefighter. And that was a snapshot of how and why I got into the fire department.

Dr. Tyler Hales: I love it. Well, great. Well, I'm Dr. Tyler Hales, host of the Confidence Question Podcast. Uh, we're honored to have James Owen here today as our guest. And he is a retired firefighter captain, many years in the service, and he's an author.

Dr. Tyler Hales: He recently wrote a book called The Last Patient, and just from the little stories that we've learned so far, you know, he's a wealth of knowledge. I'm excited to kind of dive into his experience in his life. James Owen, when was the moment you realized no one was gonna come save you?

James Owen: So I have to say, before we get to the hallmark moment of like, nobody's coming to save me, there are clues and indications that I just had not accepted. So I told you that, uh, that I sailed down to Mexico with my parents. We sailed all the way down to Manzanillo, and we were meeting up with some cruising boats down there, and our boat got robbed and took our cruising money. and we didn't have much. So my parents looked to me and said, well, um, guess what, we're going to leave you in Mexico with our boat at 16. And, uh, if you could get crew and sail across the Sea of Cortez to La Paz, to Baja Mexico from mainland Mexico, we'll meet you there. I was 16.

James Owen: So that was the first kind of indication, like Maybe I'm on my own, okay? But I didn't have the parents around, so I just was filling in the gap. Later on, we sailed back down around to Cabo. Now it's time to come back up because hurricane season's coming and we gotta go back up to Catalina to do our summertime job. And my dad had a particularly wonderful knack for putting us in the middle of storms. Like he was the storm whisperer or something like that, right? He just like, oh, Oh, there's a storm, let's go out. I just put us in the worst weather, whatever. Great sailor. Okay, he was okay sailor. All right, great cruiser, okay sailor. And I was a— I raced sailboats, so I always thought that I had that on him. We were coming back and we got— we just got pasted by the scale. We have to do this maneuver on a sailboat, it's called heave-to. And essentially that's parking a sailboat in the middle of a storm where you set up the sails in such a way that you create an eddy that comes under the boat The water comes under the boat and creates an eddy and kind of knocks down the seas. Not an enviable situation. And that was my first like, hmm, maybe I need to take over here. We're in a storm. So we got through that storm, continued sailing north for several days, and then guess what? The worst forecast of the entire trip just got— came out on the single sideband. Okay. And my dad and I looked at each other, go, we're gonna have to find our way to port, like, here really quick. Dad had done his Houdini storm magic again and had us in, uh, 40 to 50 knot sustained winds with gusts from 60 to 75 miles an hour. When, when the sea blows that hard, the whole tops, all the, the tops of the waves start blowing off sideways in a big side movement of like whitewater. It's a really interesting phenomenon. And our boat started taking on water, and my dad and I started working through those issues. He sent me up on deck, and it was just— it was, it was just all hands getting our butts kicked in on this, the sailboat, 32-foot sailboat, trying to make harbor. And then my dad, out of nowhere, on the helm, goes I'm done, and leaves the helm. And so I jump on the— I jump on the helm of our boat and start saying, what happened to him? And my mom comes up and says, your dad broke. He's down there crying in your bunk, fetal position. That was the moment I knew. I was forced to know, okay, nobody's coming. I already got that boat across that Sea of Cortez, but now I had to get my parents, this 32-foot leaky sailboat in the Bahía San Carlos, Bahía, Mexico. And he was down there, he'd stayed down there.

James Owen: So, uh, we finally made Bahía San Carlos, right, just twilight. And when it's really rough, you put an anchor and some chain, and you put a second anchor— it's called tandem anchor— and then you put your rode behind that. So you want kind of double grab on the ground. And, uh, I didn't have my dad to consult tonight, and, uh, I put all our anchor rode out and then started to— started to look to see what our compass bearings are. And wouldn't you know, we were dragging our anchor. It was still too rough, and so we need to get into shallower water. And I had to go up to that bow and heave-ho those anchors up 100 feet— a 45-pound Danforth and a 35-pound CQR plus 100 feet of chain and rode. So that's quite a bit of line to be pulling up. And I pulled that thing up, like, I finally got it all up on the deck and I was smoked. And when you talk about nobody was there, this was like flow state moment as a teenager. I took every little ounce of seamanship, prudent seamanship, that I'd ever learned or heard and put that anchor exactly where I knew for sure wouldn't drag and landed that, landed that boat secured to the, to the bottom. I sat there for 2 hours in the cockpit, looked at the compass bearings, and guess what? We didn't, we didn't drag. And fast forward to the next morning, my dad pops up literally like nothing happened. So that's how I knew that like, okay, this is gonna be me the whole way. You may get help along the way, enjoy that, but it is yourself and your self-confidence that is going to get you there by yourself. And you better pay attention the entire way. So from that moment on, I felt the rush of being a man. And, uh, and then I knew that I was going to embark on my own. When I say embark on my own, I knew when I was getting back to the United States, I was getting the hell off my parents' sailboat and I was moving out at 16. I didn't want any more of that.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Was there ever a moment going through all that where you started to question whether you could achieve it? Like, were you confident in like, I know I can do this, or were you kind of like, I'm gonna give up too?

James Owen: So I was, I was possessed with being 16 and with an extraordinary amount of testosterone at that time. You were 16, you remember what that feels like.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Yeah.

James Owen: And I knew quite a bit and I've been racing. I was a successful racer on San Francisco Bay. My boat tried out for the Olympics. We didn't make it. We just tried out, tried out to get into the Olympic trials. Okay, let me be honest about, or very forthcoming. So the feelings that I was having along the way besides the testosterone, I had the gift of desperation and fear, and that's a human element that will drive you to do things beyond what you think your capabilities are. And I began to rely on that, okay, for that, that, uh, breadth of masculine strength to come up and to stand up to the moment. And I felt that. I felt like goosebumps on my arms. It felt like strength and like blood in my veins. And that's, uh, the feeling that I had.

Dr. Tyler Hales: I think it's interesting how fear can actually give us confidence sometimes, right? Like, a lot of times we think that when there's fear, we're afraid and actually lack confidence. But in this case, right, the opposite situation where we can step up, or we have that adrenaline, or even like stress in life, right? If we let that fear or stress overtake us, then yes, that's going to affect our confidence.

James Owen: But a lot of times we can use that as a motivating factor I agree with you and I'd like to define, you know, if I haven't said it already, I'm a recovering alcoholic, child abuse survivor, divorced dad, and a retired fire captain. I possess all those, lucky me. But it does make for a rich and interesting life. And speaking about recovery, we talk about fear a lot and that's where I learned the dimensions of fear. A lot of people look at fear as F everything and run. But what I learned is to respond to fear and give fear fix everything and rise. And so, so fear has— like you're talking about— has the flip side of that coin where you can respond to the moment. You can, you can break through to a new level. Okay, when you break through and you've done something that you didn't think you could do, that, that's, that's a confidence that's going to go down as concrete. You get to rely on that for the rest of your life. I did that thing. Like, I didn't plan on my dad jumping off the helm that that night, but guess what? I stepped up to the moment. My training as a sailor kicked in. If we're looking, we understand, we acknowledge that we have fear, but we're looking for the best possible outcome.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Yeah, you probably have, uh, really one of the careers as a firefighter, uh, where you're experiencing fear probably the most out of anyone, right? And also being able to handle those circumstances. In dentistry, you know, we're not, we're not put in those circumstances, right? It's very, very uncommon to have me in a fearful situation, hopefully, if I'm doing my job right, you know, but a ton to learn from, from the experiences you're going through.

James Owen: The bravery of doing the job as a first responder and firefighters in particular, we train so hard on all the different things that we do that oftentimes there isn't room for emotion. There's more an algorithmic list that goes on in your head about things to accomplish, things that are becoming more emergent, objectives that are becoming— that need to get met by a certain time. And that's what I love about firefighting, by the way. I mean, you are on right now. You don't know when it's going to be, and there are lives on the line. And it is— it is— our currency is time. Right? So the faster we can do our job, the, the faster we're going to get somebody to the hospital, the faster we're going to save the property. So that is an interesting portion of fear. I'd like to add also that there are some times when fear does keep us pinned. If fear does give— keep us pinned, we fall to the level of our systems and our training. So if we don't train at a high level for situations that could put us in fear, okay, then when it comes up, we don't have the memory muscle to deal with it.

Dr. Tyler Hales: So in your book, you wrote that failure taught you the most was believing you could outrun your own pain. Walk me through a day you couldn't anymore.

James Owen: There's been a lot of days like that. One in particular that comes to mind because it's the 8th anniversary of a, of a colleague's, uh, murder on the job. Um, maybe perhaps that's fresh in my mind. Uh, Captain Rosa passed on, uh, 8 years ago on a date of this taping, and I received that news after I took a Battalion Chief's exam, a promotional exam that I didn't pass, but I was, uh I had just taken it the day before, drove out to Las Vegas to sit by a pool, try to off-gas after all this very difficult promotional process. And that morning, um, that morning we got there at night, and that morning at, uh, 6 in the morning my phone rang from my ex-wife. And I wouldn't have answered anybody's phone call, uh, but, uh, my ex-wife— I didn't know if it had— was connected to my son. And she was the one that informed me that Captain Rose had been shot and killed over on a fire. I think we've all been there when you get news that's so devastating that it, it doesn't have a place to land initially. Much like when you get hit across the head physically and you can hear ringing in your ears, that's much like how I felt that day. And that fear It broke what I thought would be the floor of loss as a firefighter. Now, Captain Rose and I were paramedic partners before we were on Long Beach Fire Department, so we've known each other a super long time. Um, we were for Adams Ambulance, which got bought by AMR. We worked in Vernon together as paramedic partners and both got hired on the Long Beach Fire Department. Both worked in, uh, North Long Beach, which is a Station 11, North Long Beach, is a storied place to be a firefighter. That's where they send the cowboy firefighters, and he and I were cut from the cloth up there, and both captains at respectable truck stations. And Dave was my buddy and also swimmer, and he was a fellow, uh, part of my assignment as a fire captain. I was a lifeguard rescue boat captain, and, uh, Dave Rosa was a qualified relief for that as well. And we swam our qualification swims together. We saw each other on vacation at Catalina occasionally. And that day of getting that— my floor readjusted lower to what could happen, the type of loss that I was going to experience in my career. It set a— it set a feeling like a trapdoor, like if you're falling down a cliff and you hit a branch and you think it's going to hold you and it snaps and you go to the next one. It's, it's that tumbling down feeling that, um, that really is the— it's like taking a bottom turn on a wave when you're dropping into a wave. Like, if you're not going to make it, you're going to make that hard bottom turn to get in, to get into that wave. And when that news lands, if you can't make that bottom turn, uh, just like a wave, you're going to get, you're going to get smoked. And, um, That day I wasn't ready to, to deal with that information. And it took, I mean, all the way to where we, we, the entire department showed up for his funeral, every, every single member. And, um, and I was still dealing with that, that, that fear of unknown, um, about my career, about, uh, I'd never been through anything that painful before. Um, because it just, uh, caught me off so off guard, and like it did a lot of members of the Long Beach Fire Department. And like to say, Dave— Captain Dave Rose was my buddy. He was everybody's buddy. I mean, he was just a very well-liked man on the fire department and, uh, a very great firefighter. Um, I'll just add, um,

James Owen: I, I state there in my book The Last Patient, um, I talk about getting force hired, which means if someone's not there, um, we got to have someone sitting in the seat, right, doing, doing the job of firefighting. And, um, 2 weeks after his passing, uh, they, they couldn't— I got force hired back into his spot with his crew after he passed. And that was, uh, I think that was like the moment where I kind of started to reconcile everything, that what was going on and like what my place was in that. And let me just say, like, his handwriting was still in the logbook. Um, I heard that his wife had come a couple days before and cleared out his locker, and you know how emotional that was. And, um, we were all torn up about that. And I was out on, uh, I was out on his, on his engine, and you know, they missed his flashlight that was in the door. You know, it still said Rosa on the flashlight in the door. Those little hallmark indicators that he was there. And that night, you know, I laid in his bunk and, uh, and that, that's where I got to, to have a spiritual moment with Dave and to consolidate, uh, my pain with my version of higher power. That type of fraternal loss is the most stinging pain I have ever felt in my entire life. I felt it several times. There Like I said, there's 7 line of duty deaths, but that was the, that was the typified moment of hearing Dave Rose's passing and trying to process that for the next 2 weeks through his funeral and that working in a station.

Dr. Tyler Hales: And as you're going through really having that pain, suffering from the loss, what helped you to really overcome that or to kind of get confidence back into life?

James Owen: What I decided to do is what I always do, I've done before. I treated it with alcohol. I don't think I completely recovered from that. I had other things going on in the fire department. I was suffering from post-traumatic stress. I was suffering from addiction, and the department had questions about me and my behavior, rightly so. Okay, so I was They were looking at some internal affairs investigations. It wasn't until I finally retired and, and, and could not outrun the pain and not out-medicate the pain— no longer could I medicate the pain. There wasn't enough alcohol to drink, there wasn't enough drugs to do, there wasn't enough whatever, whatever it may or may not have done, there wasn't enough of it. And I finally concluded the last patient I've been hearing in my mind I've been hearing this, this, this like voice. Remember Kevin Costner in that movie where they say, "He build it and they will come," and he builds this Field of Dreams, right? So I'm hearing this, "Save the last patient." I'm like, "What are you talking about? Save the last patient? Why am I hearing this in my mind? Save the last patient." And then in the middle of that, in the middle of that depths of despair, when I was in the disciplinary process, when I was in the middle of my addiction process and I was running on the LA River, I heard that voice again, and then finally it cracked my chest open like a, like a bolt of lightning. And I just fell down on my hands and knees. It was pouring rain. The LA River was flowing with pesticide, dog poop, and, uh, earbuds fell out. And I was just crying on control because I finally, finally understood the last patient that I needed to save in this first responder career was me. And it was my turn to heal, and it was my turn to give myself all the love and all the effort that I had given the public, my co-workers. It was time for me to lean in. So as I embarked on getting sober, as I embarked on getting spiritually fit, as I embarked on working on my spirituality, confidence started to get laid down in a much different way than it did the fire department— more like layers of paint.

James Owen: And those layers of paint will go on, go on one meeting at a time, one common honest conversation, a masculine conversation with another vetted male that has my back. And then I begin to realize that, uh, what an incredible story, because when I looked out into the world, not only were first responders struggling with understanding that they're the last patient It seemed like most of society is looking outward all the time to say, well, you're wrong, and that's wrong, and this is wrong. But what I, what I didn't hear is like, well, what's wrong with me? What can I fix? What can I improve for this world? And not only do I want to prove it for myself, I wanted to prove it for my son. Okay, I've got a teenage son that's looking up to me, and, um, that's a hell of a thing to stand up and, as you know, being a father and being, uh, that, that fatherly moment. So as I began to put more and more of these— initially what I thought were hocus pocus or not necessarily modalities for me— it started to put some layers of paint down and confidence that I was going to be able to do this one day at a time, that I was going to be able to become somebody that didn't treat themselves, their pain, that didn't medicate their pain. My relationship with pain had to just change dramatically. Pain is wonderful and cathartic. Pain is our teacher. It's the rails on the sides, okay, that keeps us alive. And I let that pain change me into the man that could write this book and be honest about all my recovery start stops. Recovery is not necessarily linear for, for a lot of people. They try, they go to rehab, they fail out, they feel like failures, and they stay, stay down. That's not, that's not what, that's not what I was, that's not what I lost, that's not what I found, that's not what I, my heart told me. What my heart told me is it's going to be okay if I do the work. It's going to be okay if I'm honest about what's actually going on inside of me with trusted men, right? And, uh, some of those trusted men are on the fire department, but it's hard to tell. But I have other groups of men in recovery, and then I belong to a men's accountability circle called the Kaizen Dojo. When I found some true brothers that could hold mirrors for me and show me where the arrows are in my ass so I could pull them out, all the better.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Yeah.

James Owen: And each time I pull an arrow out of my ass, I get that much more confident because I did it. I mean, you know, it's being— it's amazing being a published author. I don't even think I got to do that when I started. It just started to go on layers of paint at a time. And I think that that's the best way to lay down confidence. It's a daily, if not hourly, practice of a constant monitor of negative self-talk.

James Owen: I mean, you wouldn't talk to other people like that, how you talk to in your brain, right? So you know what I mean? That, that voice up there that's got that whip We gotta set that one down. And in my investigation and recovery, when we're talking about confidence and pain, I was introduced to this program, another 12-step program that I wanted nothing to do with. It was called Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families. And if you were to tell me, since I read that book, I would say, and fire departments. Because once I put fire department in place of family, it made a lot more sense to me. But we were talking about like how, how to get through pain to get to that confidence. Well, unbelievably, ACA— Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families— taught me that there are certain traits about people that grow up in dysfunctional families, and those can be overcome. And the way that we overcome those is when we have a challenging childhood, typically What I found in my experience is most have a negative self-talk about— self-image and self-talk about themselves, want to outwardly change. But I learned all, all the answers are on the inside, and that's where I had to go look.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Yeah, you definitely have to put in that work, right? And you got to be resilient. And you say that resilience now is quiet, right? Daily discipline, like you said. Tell me what that actually looks like on a Tuesday at 9 PM in your kitchen.

James Owen: Tuesday at 9 PM in my kitchen might be the quietest place in the entire world because I go to bed at 8:30 now. I saw every damn hour as a fireman over and over and over again. I was awake for 2 damn decades. So at 8:30, I'm going to bed. But I will tell you, my discipline starts off first thing in the morning, and that's what we need to do is first when I open up my eyes, I have to remember one thing. The first thing I need to remember is that I'm an addict. And it is my job to stay sober and to carry the message of recovery to other people that need recovery. My day involves a constant conversation with a loving parent voice inside of my head that encourages me and gives me that confidence. Says, "Hey man, you did that before." "Oh yeah, I did that." "But what else could you be? What avenue? What way could you get better?" Like, you know, if you're gonna go on, uh, if you're gonna go on a Smile Artists podcast, you brush your teeth like 3 times before you come in here, you know what I mean? It's all about the preparation. So these are the things that I lay down. I try to look at every single interaction that I have at the end of the day and see where I was right and wrong and see where I can improve. And that's an important thing that I'd love for the audience to take away, is that If we don't stop and daily reconcile what happened in our day and what lessons we learned, okay, we're liable to keep repeating those. And we keep repeating these mistakes in our life, it sets us up for victimville. And last time I was in victimville, nobody's healing in there, right? No victims are healers.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Yeah, I think it takes a lot of intention Right? Like you are very intentional with how you approach your day, you know, and I think when, if you look at people who are successful, they're all intentional, right? They have a schedule. They're very particular about that schedule and their time.

James Owen: Routine.

Dr. Tyler Hales: And their routine, right? Because I think when you start to get just comfortable or flow or you're just reacting to the situation, right, then a lot of times you can, whether that's relapse or whether that's just not have the confidence, because then you're just kind of flowing through life without really, I feel like, achieving it or seeing those achievements even. Sometimes you do achieve things, but you're not noticing it because you're not intentional with it and you just all of a sudden are past it or you're living, you've missed those life experiences, you know.

James Owen: That is such a good point. And I'll double-click on that, that certainly don't take enough time of reflection. And to your point, we need to be able to pat ourselves on the back, but at the same time have a very honest and disciplined conversation with ourselves about what worked and what didn't work.

James Owen: And that, that generally, uh, revolves around relationships. It seems to be the stickiest part for human beings. Um, I would say I, I would codify my confidence. Okay, what did I do today? Because that's the time to pat myself on the back, right? Yeah, there's going to be some Okay, here's, here's, here's the, uh, here's the baggage that we need to take out. Here's the, the riffraff. But what worked? And to that point, think of how many people make it through an anxiety attack every day. I mean, there are so many people that have anxiety daily and make it through anxiety attacks, and they'll get to the end of the day and go, man, I made it through 3 anxiety attacks, and, uh, I'm learning, I'm growing. It may be infinitesimally small, the movement, but we celebrate all progress.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Well, James Owen, I want to play a little game with you right now.

James Owen: Let's do it.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Take a little bit of a detour. So, um, you wrote earlier, earlier that confidence was armor, right? Real confidence is letting yourself be seen. We're going to play a quick game. I'm going to describe a behavior, and then you and I are going to call it either armor or skin. Okay, so armor is the protecting aspect versus the skin is the revealing aspect. All right, gotcha. All right, so a captain walks into a fire scene yelling orders he isn't sure are right. Is it armor or skin?

James Owen: Armor.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Okay, a father tells his son everything is going to be okay.

James Owen: Skin.

Dr. Tyler Hales: I'm gonna lean towards armor on this one, right? I think not everything's always gonna be okay, right? And then what we're trying to do is we are trying to protect them in a way.

James Owen: So you're saying protecting their innocence?

Dr. Tyler Hales: I think protecting their innocence.

James Owen: Yeah, I can see that. But what I also like is to— you know, go back to my mantra, okay? Situation screwed, still survivable. That's what I'm trying to employ, right? It's gonna be okay. It's— it may not be okay for the foreseeable future. I mean, when does it never get okay?

Dr. Tyler Hales: We—

James Owen: let me— let's go back to an example is Dave Rose's death, Captain Rose's death. Okay, it doesn't feel any less painful than it did the minute I heard that he passed. But how I deal with that, how I interpret that, how I use that information usefully, I think is why it's a skid moment for the kid. We're saying it's going to be okay.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Yeah, I definitely see that. All right, a man who shows up to every workout even on the days he's broken.

James Owen: I do love a committed man to show up no matter what, but you know what, there's, there are sometimes when you're broken and you need not— you're a liability and we need to know where we're at. Okay, are we helping the team or are we hurting the team? Maybe we need to ride the bench.

Dr. Tyler Hales: I love that. I love how I think skin, right? I think like, for me, someone with that desire, right, reveals really who that man is, because there are some people that sit out when they're not even injured, right? They want to sit on the sidelines or they don't want to do the hard things. But yeah, I love your perspective too, or safety reasons, right? Like, take a break, let us handle it. So, all right, a leader who admits to his crew that he doesn't know what the answer is.

James Owen: Skin. That's an easy one.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Yeah, skin. Someone who writes a book about the hardest years of their life.

James Owen: Ah, total skin. I know at least one author. This author.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Yeah, I know a pretty good one. I know a good book about that too. Yeah. Called The Last Patient.

James Owen: Yeah, which is available anywhere that you can buy a book, by the way, and an audio version. So check your Spotify, check your Audible. Shameless plug, but I'll let that one go by.

Dr. Tyler Hales: A guy in his 50s who learned to surf because he never let him— because he never let himself try.

James Owen: Skin.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Skin. A man who says I love you first.

James Owen: I'm trying to see where that could be armor in any way, but it could, it could be manipulation, but wholesale I'm gonna say skin.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Yeah, I like to look on the surface, right? Just take it for what it is, hopefully. But so, James Owen, you've been on a lot of podcasts. You're a great speaker, great author.

Dr. Tyler Hales: So I always love this question. What's the question every interviewer asks you that you're tired of? And what's the question you wish they'd ask?

James Owen: The question that bothers me is, why did you write The Last Patient? Because The Last Patient is an invitation and permission slip for men to go get help, for masculine men to go get help, because it is masculine to seek help and to ameliorate. The question I wish was asked to me is, how much of that book do you feel is fiction or non-fiction? And I would say I put as much truth in there to leave clues for other men that feel broken. And let me just say this: men, men don't break, okay? Men don't break. I've been around a lot of men under really emergent, tough situations. Men get out of alignment. Men get bent, okay? And bent things can get realigned. Broken things can't get fixed. And to say we're broken, that's beyond repair. And definitely out of alignment with the situation screwed, still survivable motto of mine.

Dr. Tyler Hales: We can all be bent throughout this life, right? And we are constantly being bent. I think every day, right? We're bent in a certain direction, whether that's bent to be more crooked or bent to be putting us back into alignment.

James Owen: Right, consistent with our chosen values. With when we were unemotional and made decisions about how we wanted to conduct ourselves as men, businessmen, as fathers, the whole aspect of being a man. And are we congruent with that? Where are our actions not matching our words? Right there is the precipice of all questions, right, to self-discovery.

Dr. Tyler Hales: Yeah, and that's, that's important. Self-discovery is going to lead to confidence.

James Owen: Absolutely. And the more, for me, the more I establish a loving parent voice in there, an arm around the shoulder, okay, and back to our 'it's going to be okay.' Because before it was like, 'You're POS, you can't get this done.' And that's a lot of mental baggage to get through, don't you think, to get to the other side? So My advice is protect your peace at all costs. Walk on the sunny side of the street. It ain't that bad out there. Walk on the sunny side of the street. See who you can help out. See what, see what men we can grab from the basement that are feeling broken. Those of us that know that we're just bent need to reach back to those. I mean, and especially for me being a first responder, because being a first responder is like living life on a high-interest credit card and paying the minimums, eventually it's due. Okay? And I think that a lot of us have that due moment when it's just all due and meet that moment with that confidence, whether you got it or not. Some, some confidence is faked for a moment, but try it on. See what it looks like if you were to wear that confidence and you were to achieve that goal. What would it feel like on the backside? What would that feeling be? And what were those— like we're talking, I was talking about putting those layers of paint down, how many layers of paint is that gonna accomplish for us?

Dr. Tyler Hales: Before you go, let me bring this all together. 3 things James Owen said today that I can't stop thinking about. First, nobody's coming to save you, and that's not bad news. James was 16 in a storm when his dad walked away from the helm, so he took it.

Dr. Tyler Hales: He got that boat to the harbor, set the anchor himself, and sat watch for 2 hours to to make sure it held. Help along the way is a gift, but the person who gets you there is you. Second, fear has two spellings. Most people read it as forget everything and run. James Owen learned to read it as fix everything and rise. Same fear, same moment. The difference is what you do inside it. And every time you break through something you don't think you could do, the confidence sets like concrete. You get to stand on it for the rest of your life. And third, confidence goes on like layers of paint. Not one big moment, one honest conversation, one kept promise, one day at a time. And watch how you talk to yourself while you're painting. James Owen said it best: you would never talk to another person the way you talk to your own brain.

Dr. Tyler Hales: So here's the work this week: catch the negative voice once, just once, and answer it the way a loving parent would. That's a layer of paint. I'm Dr. Tyler Hales. Follow the show so you don't miss what's next. This question doesn't have one answer. That's why we keep asking it.