I am writing this from Malta, on my own, two months after the chapter I spent nearly thirteen years building was closed by someone else.
In the last twelve months I was passed over for the job I had worked my whole career for. Then I lost the job I already had. I am 41, a father of four, and for the first time in thirteen years I do not have a crew, a station, or a title.
This is not a comeback post. I do not have the ending yet. But I do have one lesson I wish someone had handed me ten years ago, and it is worth more than anything I learned on the way up. A title can be taken from you in a single letter. What you are actually for cannot.
The year
A year ago I was Acting Fire Chief of the department I grew up in. I came to the fire service at 28 after a decade in oil and gas, joined as a paid-on-call firefighter in November 2013, went full time in 2017, and worked through Captain, Chief Fire Marshal, Deputy Chief of Training and Life Safety, and Deputy Chief of Operations. The chief's office was the one chair left.
The competition opened. I was not selected. The position was reposted and I applied again, because my team asked me to and because it was still the organization I wanted to lead. The second competition did not end differently.
Through all of it I kept doing the job. Budgets, incidents, wildfire season, four stations, and about 150 people who deserved a leader who was fully there. Some days they got him. Other days they got a man grieving at his desk, and I was not always quiet about it. There were conversations I handled worse than the person in front of me deserved, and there were rooms I walked into carrying something that had nothing to do with the people in them. They saw it. Most of them gave me a patience I had not earned yet. I am not proud of that part, and I am leaving it in because an article about vulnerability that skips it would be a lie.
The template I was wearing
Here is the part I have not said out loud in public. For most of my time as Acting Chief, I was not leading as me. I was leading as my best impression of Brian, my longtime chief and, by the end, my friend. Brian showed me how I wanted to lead. The department ran well under him, so I measured every decision against what I thought he would have done. When the fit was bad, I pushed harder on the template instead of taking it off.
The irony is that Brian never asked me to be him. What he actually taught me, over years of watching him, was that a chief could say I do not know, could own a mistake in front of the room, and could be a person first and a rank second without losing a thing. I copied his decisions instead of his courage.
It showed. The friction I felt in that period, I own most of it. A DISC profile will tell you I am a CD: analytical, driven, results first. My growth edges were receptivity, dialogue, and seeking counsel before acting. The template made every one of those worse, because a man wearing someone else's leadership cannot afford to be questioned.
It took my executive coach, Darrell, to name what Brian had been modelling all along. Darrell did not teach me vulnerability. He gave me permission to lead with the one I already had, and he pushed me to lean into it at exactly the point when every instinct said to armour up.
Somewhere in the second competition I stopped. I wrote the hiring panel a letter that said, in plain language, that I had been benchmarking myself against a legacy instead of leading as myself, and that I was done with that. I started telling my staff when I was unsure. I started asking my officers what they thought before I decided. I let the people I worked beside see the person, not the rank.
That did not get me the job. It got me something I did not know I was building.
Losing the job twice
When the first competition closed, the messages started. People on my team, paid-on-call and career, reached out to check on me. Not to commiserate. To tell me to apply again, because I was the leader they wanted. That is the only reason there was a second application.
When the second competition went the same way, they reached out again, often, just to make sure I was okay.
Then, in August, new leadership decided the department was heading in a new direction and I was not part of it. The letter was short. Nearly thirteen years ended on a Wednesday.
I want to be careful here, because this is where people expect me to settle a score. I am not going to. Organizations are allowed to change direction. Leaders are allowed to pick their own teams. I have done both. What I will say is that nobody prepares you for the quiet. You hand in the radio, the phone stops lighting up at three in the morning, and you find out how much of your identity was running on that signal.
What did not go quiet was my team. The same people who checked on me after the first no, and the second, kept checking after the letter. They still do, two months on, with nothing to gain from it. They are and always will be my team, and the care they have shown me humbles me and means more than I will ever manage to fit into a sentence.
And at home there was Chelsea. In the past year my partner has seen me at my best and at my worst, and these last six months have mostly shown her the worst, the versions of me I have described above and a few I have not put on the page. She stood right beside me anyway. She lifted me up when I was at my lowest while carrying challenges of her own. She is my best friend, my biggest fan, my rock, and the one who told me to get on that plane and take this time for myself. I do not know where I would be without her, and I do not think I would have made it through. My biggest thanks go to her, for her unconditional, unwavering love and support.
For a few weeks I applied for every senior role that looked like a version of the one I had lost. A deputy chief job here, a director job there, roles in security and at an airport that had nothing to do with fire. I told myself I was being strategic. I was trying to get the chair back, any chair, so I would not have to sit with who I was without one.
The work that was never in my title
Somewhere in those weeks I made myself answer a simple question. In thirteen years, when was I most alive?
The answer came fast, and it was not the chief's office. It was wildfire mitigation. It was writing Alberta's first FRIAA FireSmart coordinator grant for a municipality outside the traditional forest protection area, then watching it become the proof of concept for a province-wide funding stream. It was overhauling the province's advanced FireSmart home assessment program on top of my day job, because I believed in it, then delivering train-the-trainer workshops across Alberta to build local capacity and close out a key deliverable in the provincial wildfire mitigation strategy. It was the King Charles III Coronation Medal, which I received for that work, not for anything that sat on an org chart.
I had treated it as a specialty inside a bigger career. It was the career. The title was the thing I was chasing. The mitigation work was the thing I was for.
So in October I stopped applying for chairs and started building a practice. Frontier Resilience Canada does three things: wildfire resilience and FireSmart programs for communities, emergency management and fire service reviews, and leadership development for people who are, as I was, wearing someone else's template. I incorporate next week. The work in front of me closes a loop I never planned: the grant I wrote became the model Alberta now funds, and I am building the training program for the new FireSmart coordinators that model pays for. I have never been less certain about my income or more certain about my work.
Why Malta
I did not come here to think. I came here to stop.
I had never been to Malta. I picked it because nobody here knows what a Deputy Chief is, and because a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean seemed like a reasonable place to set down thirteen years and leave them. I booked eight nights, alone, with one rule: the next chapter does not get to start until this one is properly closed.
Closing a chapter, it turns out, is not dramatic. It is sitting with the parts of the year I would rather skip, the second no, the letter, the weeks of applying for chairs, and letting them be what they were without arguing with them. It is finally not rewriting the letter I was never going to send. It is walking until the noise in my head runs out of things to say.
I fly home on Thursday with a clean slate, which is not the same as an empty one. I know what I am for. I know how I want to lead. And I know, in a way I could not have known a year ago, that neither of those ever depended on the chair.
What I would hand you
Whether you are in your first year, in the middle of the climb, or sitting in the office I used to want, here is what this year cost me to learn.
Know what you are for before someone else decides what you are not for. Write it down. If what you wrote is a title, keep digging. A title is a role someone lends you. The craft is yours, and it travels.
Lead as yourself now, not once you feel safe enough. I waited until I had lost the first competition to take off the template. The people who reached out afterward were responding to the version of me that showed up late. Imagine if he had shown up in year one. And find the people who will tell you the truth about yourself. I had a chief who modelled it and a coach who named it. Not everyone gets both, which is exactly why you should go looking.
When the loss comes, do not reach for the nearest chair. Every application I sent in those first weeks was fear with a cover letter. Grief wants a job. Give it a trip instead, or a long walk, or one honest conversation. Then decide.
Close the chapter on purpose. Nobody will do it for you, and the next one will not open all the way until you do.
Be the leader your team cares about. Be the one they check in on, even after you are gone. A title does not earn that. Showing up as a person does. Not everyone liked me, and that is okay. But the people who reached out after the first no, and the second, and the letter, will always be my team, and I will always love and appreciate them for it.
I spent nearly thirteen years working toward one chair and I did not get it. I would not trade a day of the climb, and I would not go back. If any of this lands with you, I would like to hear it. And if your community sits outside the forest and nobody is talking to you about wildfire, I am building something for exactly that. Let's talk.