We spend a lot of time looking at what’s happening to us and far less at who we have around us when it happens
Some people change your life by believing in you, others by challenging you, and the rarest ones by truly understanding you. If we need all three, it raises two questions: do I actually have those people in my life, and who am I playing those roles for? Asking who’s there sends us looking for something that already exists, and people are good at finding what’s there and much worse at noticing what’s missing. Psychologists call this the feature-positive effect.
Belief is the easiest of the three for me to recognize. You know almost immediately when someone doesn’t believe in you, and when they do, it usually shows up as opportunity. They give you the chance before you’re convinced you’re ready or trust you with responsibility before you’ve fully proven yourself. A 2000 meta-analysis by University of Iowa researcher D. Brian McNatt, covering 17 studies and 2,874 people, found higher leader expectations could produce meaningful improvements in performance. When nobody treats you as capable of more for long enough, people tend to stop raising their hand. Their goals turn into someday plans, and they talk down their own ambition before anyone else gets the chance, which most of us call humility.
Challenge is seasonal for me. It doesn’t always come from someone sitting you down to tell you where you need to improve, and sometimes proximity does the trick. I recently came back from the Women in Fire conference, and watching the presenters made me take a hard look at my own delivery. Being around people operating at a level I respect changes how I measure my own standard. Without that exposure, a missing challenge is hard to catch because it resembles success. Everyone agrees with you, and your skill set looks about the same as it did a few years ago, which may be a sign you’ve stopped pushing yourself.
Seeing the Gaps
Understanding is harder because people keep evolving, and I know I do. There’s the firefighter, the company officer, the husband, the father, the publisher, and some days I don’t fully understand what I’m feeling or where I’m going, so expecting someone else to understand every part of me may be unrealistic. Someone can understand my professional vision without knowing much about what’s happening at home. When understanding is missing, you start keeping parts of yourself separate. You give the short answer and bring whichever version of yourself fits the room, which reads as composure from the outside even when you feel alone at a full kitchen table. Being genuinely understood in even one important part of your life affects every other part of it.
Bring those same three people into the fire station. There’s rarely a shortage of people willing to tell you where you need to get better, which leaves the other two. Who’s recognizing the firefighter with potential who has never been given much reason to believe it? Who’s paying enough attention to understand the person underneath the uniform? Those gaps are easy to miss in a culture where “I’m good” is the standard answer and the member who never asks for anything is often considered the easiest to manage.
Rank makes that harder. Going from peer to wearing a red helmet changes the relationship whether you want it to or not. Group chats change, and people filter what they say around you. An officer who waits to be told what’s missing will wait a long time, so the better approach is to watch for patterns, like the firefighter who stopped volunteering for anything extra or the senior member nobody bothers to include anymore. You have to stay emotionally available enough that when someone wants to give you a glimpse behind the curtain, they believe they can.
Noticing What Others Miss
In a 2018 study in Psychological Services, Florida State University researcher Ian Stanley and colleagues surveyed 840 U.S. firefighters and found that a stronger sense of belonging was associated with lower PTSD symptom severity. A second study of 200 women firefighters found that when support from supervisors, coworkers, and family or friends was examined together, supervisor support was the only source that remained significant. Belonging depends on someone noticing when a person has started to pull away.
We spend a lot of time examining what happens to us in this profession, from the calls and injuries to the conflict, loss, and everything else that accumulates over a lifetime of service. Part of how we respond may depend on what was already around us when it happened. The event itself is easy to point to, while the absence of what we needed around it’s much more difficult to see.
The harder question is who we’re doing those things for. Maybe someone in your life already has plenty of challenges and needs somebody to believe in what they’re trying to become. Maybe someone constantly hears how talented they are, with nobody willing to push them further. That could be your firefighter, officer, spouse, son or daughter. You can’t be all three people for everybody, but you can pay enough attention to recognize the gap and decide whether you’re capable of filling it. The people who get missed are often the ones who look like they have everything because they’ve adapted, and their adaptation looks fine from the outside looking in.
The truth is, the people with the greatest impact on our lives are usually the ones who showed up with the one thing nobody else was giving us. We should know who those people are in our lives. The bigger question is whether somebody, somewhere, would put our name on their list.
