For twenty-three years I watched my people for the wrong kind of courage. Then a seven-year-old showed me what I'd been missing.
You know the dispatcher I'm talking about. The one who took the call last shift. The one who heard a parent screaming, or a child who stopped responding, or a deputy taking fire. The one who held the line, did the work, and walked off the floor at the end of the shift. The one who is now in their car the next morning, in the parking lot, with the headset waiting on the desk inside.
That walk from the car to the chair is the part nobody trains for. Nobody writes it up in an after-action. Nobody mentions it at the awards ceremony. The call is over. The recording is archived. From the outside it looks like the moment passed.
It didn't pass. It moved into them and they brought it back to work.
I have watched people make that walk for twenty-three years. I thought I understood what I was looking at. I didn't, until my seven-year-old showed me what I'd been missing.
Ruby is a two-and-a-half-year-old fox red Labrador, and she is wonderful. She is also, from the time we brought her home as a young pup, a resource guarder. We don't know why. Something before us, maybe. With people, she's perfect - you can quite literally take food out of her mouth while she's eating and she won't so much as flinch. With other dogs, food makes her dangerous.
We have two other dogs in the house: Hazel, a small Maltese-Poodle mix, and Greta, a mini-Schnauzer. We've worked with Ruby endlessly. We hired trainers. We fed the dogs separately in their kennels, gave treats one at a time, stayed mindful of every sight line and every dropped crumb. For a long time, careful was enough.
Until it wasn't. A piece of food hit the floor, the dogs scrambled, and Ruby - many times Hazel's size - won the scrap and hurt her in the process. That was the moment we knew Ruby deserved a home where she didn't have to eat every meal in a kennel. Our other dogs deserved to feel safe in their own house. Loving her well meant letting her go.
A few phone calls later, I was driving Ruby back to the breeder we'd gotten her from - a friend of my wife's who runs a beautiful hobby farm. She was gracious in the way only someone who truly understands dogs can be, and made the worst day as gentle as it could be made. My son Levi and I tearfully handed over the leash, said goodbye, and left, still crying heavily. I told him I'd have to go back the next day to drop off her kennel and her food and her paperwork. He asked to come.
When I picked him up from school the next afternoon, the first thing he said was, "Did you take Ruby's stuff to her yet?" I told him I hadn't. I asked if he still wanted to come. I also asked if he understood what he was walking into. That seeing her again would probably hurt more than the first goodbye, not less. That this would likely be the last time. Tearfully, he said yes.
We pulled up to a farm full of happy dogs running loose in the spring sunshine. Ruby was in a large kennel run, still adjusting, still uncertain about her new world. When we walked in, she didn't recognize us at first and let loose with that enormous, terrifying bark of hers - the kind of bark that could send a burglar back through a window in the middle of the night. Levi didn't miss a beat. "Oh Ruby, it's me!"
The bark stopped. Her tail started, and didn't stop. She came over, wigglebutt energy on full speed, immediately rolling onto her back for the belly rubs we were more than willing to give. We sat with her for a few minutes. We told her we loved her. We told her we would miss her. If she noticed we were both crying, she had the grace to ignore it and just play.
Then it was time to go.
In the car, I looked in the rearview mirror and saw my son silently crying. He was buckled in the back seat, watching the gravel drive of the hobby farm disappear behind us. He didn't make a sound. When I asked how he was doing, he told me he was sad, but he was controlling his emotions.
He is seven years old.
We talked. My wife and I have been working with him on emotions lately - he's a high-drive seven-year-old, and learning to feel hard things without being swept away by them is the work of his age. As we talked, something landed on me that I hadn't expected: he had known. He had known, when he asked to come, that it would gut him. He had known he would have to say goodbye to his friend a second time, and that the second time might be the last time. He knew he would be wrecked. He knew the cost. And he went anyway.
I drove home with a seven-year-old in the back seat and a working definition of courage I didn't have when I left the house. I wish I had learned this lesson years ago. I learned it the day before my last shift on the floor.
Twenty-three years in the comm center. The realization landed in a driveway with a dog and a child. There is something about that I am still working through.
Here is what I had been doing for twenty-three years. I had been watching for the courage on the call. The dramatic save. The talk-down. The CPR instructions delivered through a phone while a husband worked over a wife who wasn't breathing. The dispatcher who held it together while a mother screamed in her ear that her son wasn't moving. I gave commendations for that kind of courage. I wrote it up in evaluations. I trained newer supervisors to look for it. When the news cycle wanted a story, that's the story I gave them.
I'm not saying that wasn't real. It was real. Those moments matter and the people who do that work deserve every word of praise they get. But I had a blind spot, and the blind spot was load-bearing.
The courage on the call is largely reflex. By the time someone has been on the floor for two years, three years, ten years, the training has done its work. The body knows what to do before the brain catches up. The hands move, the keyboard clicks, the mouth says the right things in the right order. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug. It will get a competent dispatcher through almost anything once. The performance during the call is not the test. It is the answer to a test the person took years ago when they decided to keep showing up to training and keep practicing the thing.
The test is the morning after.
The second shift is when the body is no longer flooded. The training is no longer carrying them. The call is no longer happening, but the call is still happening - in their head, in their stomach, in the ringing they can't quite shake, in the way the radio sounds different now, in the way the hold music on a transferred line suddenly reminds them of something they didn't realize they'd noticed at the time.
The second shift is when they know exactly what putting the headset back on is going to feel like, and they put it back on anyway.
That is not resilience. Resilience is something that happens to you - or doesn't. We talk about resilience as if it's a personality trait some people have and other people lack. As if the people who keep coming back are made of slightly tougher material than the ones who don't. That framing lets leadership off the hook. If it's a trait, then the ones who break weren't built right. We screen better. We hire harder. We move on.
What Levi showed me is that the thing we're actually looking at isn't a trait. It's a choice. He didn't have a more resilient seven-year-old constitution than other seven-year-olds. He had a clear understanding of what something would cost him and a willingness to pay it because he loved his dog. That's not resilience. That's faithfulness. Faithful to his own love for her. Faithful to the goodbye he wanted to give her. Faithful to who he wanted to be in that moment, even though being that person was going to hurt.
The dispatcher who comes back the morning after the bad call is doing the same thing. They are being faithful. To their training. To their team. To the next caller, who has no idea what their last shift sounded like. To who they want to be, even though being that person costs something every time.
Courage is understanding exactly what something will cost you and choosing to pay it because love is on the other side of the bill.
That's not a soft virtue. That is the load-bearing wall of this entire profession. Every comm center in the country runs on it. And most leaders never see it.
Here is the part of this I have to say plainly, because I have been on both sides of it.
The dispatcher who walks back in the morning after the bad call is making you a gift. The gift is their continued presence on your floor, on your radio, on your phones, when they had every reason in the world to call out, to take the leave, to put in the transfer paperwork, or to just quietly stop being a dispatcher altogether. They are choosing this work, again, on a day when choosing it is hard.
If you don't see the gift, you can't acknowledge it. If you can't acknowledge it, you definitely can't thank them for it. And if you don't thank them for it - not with a speech, not with a plaque, but with the small, accurate, specific recognition that you saw what they did - eventually they stop giving it. Eventually they don't come back. Then you wonder why your retention numbers look the way they do, and you commission a study, and the study tells you about pay and benefits and shift differentials, and none of that is wrong, but none of that is the whole answer either.
Some of the people who left didn't leave because the money was bad. They left because they kept making the walk from the car to the chair, alone, and nobody on the supervisor side ever named it. They never had a leader who said "I know what yesterday was. I know what it took to come in today. I see it. Thank you." That sentence costs nothing. Most leaders never say it because most leaders never learned to look for the moment that earns it.
I'm not writing this as someone who got it right. I'm writing this as someone who got it wrong for two decades and is leaving the floor with this lesson in hand a day too late to use it the way I wish I had. You haven't run out of time. Don't waste yours the way I wasted mine.
The second shift looks ordinary. That's the part that fools you. There is no dramatic entrance. The dispatcher comes in like they always do. They put their lunch in the fridge. They check the board. They sit down at a console and they log in. From the outside it is the most uneventful thing in the room.
It is also, on certain mornings, the bravest thing in the building.
You will not catch every one of those mornings. Nobody will. But you can train yourself to look. You can know which calls were bad the night before. You can know which dispatcher took them. You can be at the door when they walk in. You don't have to make a thing of it. A nod. A coffee. A quiet "good to see you." They will know what you mean. The ones who needed to know that you saw them will know.
And the ones who didn't need it that day will file it away for the day they will.
He knew it would be hard. He went anyway.
So do they.
See it.
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