One night while changing my
television channels to pick one, I noticed a gentleman talking eloquently and I
was for a minute moved and posed for a moment to listen to what he was saying.
And he struck me with a point of his statement I heard first “Your prosperity
is not in your education but it is in your deployment and not a job”. At this
point, I reflected on my career and education and why I went back for my PhD
and noted it was true, education only aid in knowledge acquisition to enable
you undertake a deployment. Most fire safety professionals I have met are in
the profession because it brings food on the table. Dr. Myles Monroe, as it
turns out, was being interviewed by one of the most eloquent TV personality,
Jeff Koinange in his program dubbed “the bench”. The teaching moved me to write this article
to differentiate, according to Dr. Myles, the employed and the deployed fire
professional.
The deployed and the ‘Jobbing’ fire-fighter
The life of any individual,
including the fire-fighters, revolved around three items and Dr. Myles mentions
them as: Prioritizing, organizing and discipline. To be great in doing what you love, you need
to outline your priorities even if it means changing your friends. Great fire-fighters
are those who do their deployment with passion through identifying their
priorities, organizing their activities in line with their deployment and
upholding discipline. This clearly, according to Dr. Myles, is difference
between deployment and jobbing if may call it so. Fire-fighting can be a job
but it can also be your deployment depending on how you take it. It is a job
when your education dictates so and you feel you have no option and in order to
earn you have to do the job. You are obligated to report to the job every
morning and have all the ‘leaves’, and finally retire from it feeling relieved
because you were in a prison of some sort. Deployment on the other hand, is
what you do every day and has a passion for. It is like a calling and the
purpose for which you were born. If you are a fire-fighter and this is the
feeling, then you are in your deployment.
Every fire-fighter is born for a
purpose and all of them have 24hrs and Dr. Myles notes that what you are today
is defined by how you spent your 24hrs. While most fire-fighters on job uses
the 24hrs to sleep, the deployed fire-fighters uses these hours to advanced
what they like most which is fire-fighting. And this brings out the difference
between a leader and followers. Leadership is both an art and a science
according to Dr. Myles, and every human being was born to be a leader in their
gift, therefore, the deployed fire-fighter in every essence then is a leader.
Dr. Myles also notes that true leaders never seek followers instead they
attract and they train people to be deployed and not to be employed. This is
important because the leader fire-fighter who is already deployed have their
greatness unleashed and needs to mentor others to achieve their greatness that
they think is far ahead of them while happens to be trapped within them.
Quotes to learn from Dr. Myles
“A leader will not be measured by
how many people serve you but by how many you have served.” “Greatness in
leadership is in empowering people and not pursuing power”
“Your gift is for others so that
you impact them”
“Where there is no vision people
perish but not where there is no leader. It actually doesn’t say where there is
no leader people perish”
“An average human being only uses
10% of their brain, then to be a genius you only need to use 12%”
“The wealthiest part of the world
is cemetery, filled with riches that were never accomplished. Don’t die old,
die empty”
The write is PhD student JKUAT
focusing on fire service delivery
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