Eric Johnson (00:00)
Welcome back to boiler wild. My name is Eric Johnson on this podcast. I talk about boiler industry topics as well as personal development. I know it's been a minute. It's been about three weeks since I recorded a podcast. I have been off my game as far as podcast recording been busy. I have not gotten ahead recording podcasts like I always mean to. It is just something that I always.
seem to run out of time to record and I also just don't want to record an episode just to record an episode. I actually want to have something to talk about. And I do have list of topics to talk about but I'm also trying to get into a little bit more research on topics and trying to put together a little bit more structure into some educational topics and those take a little bit more time and putting out two episodes a week for
those topics is a little bit more difficult than just coming on here and telling you some knowledge off the top of my head or with some little research or having a guest on. I have been reached out to a couple other people, have not scheduled some guests. I have some people that I just have not.
close the loop with but I will have some more guests soon but there's no guests coming soon in the next couple weeks other than the ones I can schedule quickly but I don't have a date for recording so I will figure that out but in meantime if you want to be a guest or you have somebody that should be a guest you want to recommend them
You can email me eric.johnson at boilearn.com or you can DM me on LinkedIn or you can go to the podcast page on the Boilern website and fill out the form and I will reach out. And I appreciate everybody who has submitted a topic or and or they have left a comment. I ⁓ signed into Spotify.
And I don't know how I didn't see this, but I signed into Spotify for creators and Corey Smith left a comment on a podcast about his trades journey. So I love that. Love when you guys leave comments and I love when you guys rate the podcast five stars. So please rate the podcast five stars if you're listening and you haven't done that.
the people who are listening on Apple. We only got eight ratings of five stars. We're falling behind on Spotify. Spotify, there is 25 people who have rated it, so I appreciate all those people. And if you don't wanna rate it, I still appreciate you for listening. So today I wanna talk about being okay with not feeling okay. And this is something I've been...
Struggling to try to put something together for this and I don't know If I have talked about this before I've done enough episodes now that I don't know what I've talked about but there is this growing thing with younger people and I'm a millennial I'm 32 so I am a younger person to most people but there seems to be this thing with people just want
to run from discomfort, they wanna run from any situation that is not normal or that you're not familiar with, and when that comes to learning the trades, you have to be okay with not feeling okay. And no amount of training and education can make you know everything for every single situation. If.
that was the case, you would just be a robot. We are not training robots. We are training human beings. You are a human and you have to at a certain point recognize that you have knowledge, skills and abilities to do a job. And while you may be under trained for the job in front of you and you may not have all the perfect resources and have all the perfect scenarios for the job in front of you, you
have to be okay with not feeling okay. And what this looks like is, hey, I've got six months of training. Maybe I've ridden along in a truck with somebody. I've gone to a couple of classes. I'm doing this, I'm doing this. I'm going out to a job by myself. I semi know what to do, but I have really no idea what I'm doing. And that is normal.
And you just have to be okay with not feeling okay. And you're to get to the job and it's easy to freak out and to be like, ⁓ I don't know and freeze up and then just want to call somebody. And this is a problem. If you talk to employers ⁓ or manufacturers for their tech support lines is they will ask questions. People will call in and ask questions and
They'll say like, hey, know, what's, what's your readings? What's the pressures? What's this? What's that? I don't know. I haven't even gotten that out yet. All right. Well, what are your combustion numbers for this? Well, I haven't even turned on my combustion analyzer and it's like, wait, you are calling for technical support because you don't know the problem, but you haven't even really gotten into the problem and
I believe that stems from people not being okay with not feeling okay, but that feeling comes from people either they just want an easy button, they want to have somebody else tell them, and or they...
do not want to use critical thinking. And with the internet and manuals and information, there should be enough information out there and enough information that you can access on your phone, on your company servers, whatever your company provides you, whatever you can print out, whatever you can carry, all this stuff that you should be able to have a general idea, even with AI now.
If you haven't used the AI camera stuff, you can point your camera at stuff and the AI can tell you in general what's in front of you. If you're not using that, you are doing something wrong and you just need to stop that. I don't know how to tell you any other way and you have to be okay with not feeling okay because you...
It's easy to say, well, I just need more training. Okay, well, that's great. But how much more training? Two classes, five classes a year. Do you want to go to a two year program? Great, let's play this out. All right, you graduate from two year degree. Now you're, you get hired at another employer and they send you out there like, great.
This guy knows what he's doing, graduated two year degree, has some previous field experience, send him out there and what do you do? You call technical support, you say, hey, I don't know how to do this. And then the employer goes, okay, but we thought you had training. We thought you had a two year degree. Like, shouldn't you be able to figure it out? And there seems to be...
⁓ lack of people willing to figure it out
When I was learning, I wasn't that long ago, I can still remember not knowing anything and looking at a boiler and just seeing pipes. There were a lot of stressful days where I had no idea what I was doing in a general sense. I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. ⁓ But you walk in and you're like, yeah, that's the boiler. Yeah, you got some pipes here. Yeah, whatever.
But it's like, okay, the customer has said this is the problem and I need to figure out what's going on here. I have no idea what this control is. I gotta figure that out. There's no wiring diagram. I gotta figure that out and there's some field modifications here. I gotta figure this out. It feels very uncomfortable. Like there are plenty of times where I was like, I have...
no idea what this is, but you maybe do a Google search or you open up a manual or you maybe call somebody and ask them like five minutes of not, like what is the problem and help me, ⁓ but call them and say, hey, ⁓ am I seeing this right? I have this piece of equipment with this controller.
Does this do that and that do this and this is how they work together. Like am I seeing that right? All right, great, thank you. That's all I need to know. And you you get started off in the right direction. Get some small wins in. Start getting your footing and start running through your troubleshooting process. And that's essentially what I would do of just like, you gotta start and pick a point on the map somewhere to start. you...
to start bouncing around and guessing, are going to have some wild results and you are gonna feel lost. But you have to feel okay with not feeling okay, but the best way to start feeling okay is you pick a point on the map and you start right there to troubleshoot and you start working towards what you think the problem is or discovering the problem.
And as you gain more experience, you start building a muscle of resilience, of being able to figure out problems that, yes, they will get easier because you have more experience and knowledge, but you will also be presented with larger problems. And I don't think there's ever going to be a day where somebody knows everything. And even the people who are 50, 60 years old don't know everything.
and they don't just walk into every single problem knowing everything and knowing every solution. So waiting for the day where you have this mythical amount of training and this mythical amount of confidence to fix problems is never gonna exist if you always just push off problems and the hard times for other people and or.
you just start guessing and you're not actually troubleshooting. the being okay with not feeling okay, you can start building that muscle through the reps of doing hard things in the boiler room, but also outside of the boiler room. Like it is hard to go to the gym three times a week or even five times a week or even eating correctly.
most of the week. Try to stick to a diet, like all that stuff. And living slightly uncomfortable is good for you. It starts training your mind, you can train your body physically and mentally, and you start being okay with, once again, not being okay. And that's what I am really trying to do is, with Boilearn I started Boilearn about three years ago now, and...
The process of trying to figure out how to do training different than what the general industry is doing is difficult for me. It is very uncomfortable for me. It is something very new, very something, something different because I am trying to relate to people who not necessarily have the drive or the skill that I have, not that I'm very skilled.
were very driven, but if somebody were to put a problem in front of me of like, hey, like go figure this out, I would go figure it out. But there are some employees out there and I'm not saying this is wrong, but they just want to show up to work, do their work. And then the second they clock out, they clock out, turn off their brain. And.
That is fine if you want to do that, just don't expect a lot of success from that and or a lot of career growth because.
Being around boilers is a very difficult career and you can't really just show up and be average and avoid hard things because employers need people who are gonna go out there and do hard things and.
when I build training or when I look at training and on paper there is a certain sequence of A to Z, yes this should work in theory, but applying that A to Z to the current training environment, to the current employee, employer environment and culture of like, you know, we're only gonna take
two days off for training and no more, oh, we're only gonna train during slow periods or we're gonna train when we somehow allocate budget towards it. I don't understand why training isn't part of the hourly rate for the budget, but that's another conversation for another day. it is very difficult for me and I feel very under prepared and unqualified.
to be doing what I'm doing right now because...
It is wildly different than what I'm used to and.
Doing that every single day is hard. It may not seem hard. It is mentally hard. I wouldn't say it's physically hard. Most days, being a service technician, definitely physically harder, but the mental task of me trying to problem solve and to try to put training together that actually works, that does solve problems for you, the listeners, other.
employers, all this stuff.
That is me.
struggling and not being okay. And I have to choose to be all right. I don't know. And nobody really knows. Like there's no right answer. If there was a right answer, then we'd already be doing it and we would have an excess of people in the industry. But we don't for all kinds of reasons. So I have to wake up every single day and say, all right, this is what I'm going to do today. This is the, you know, my list.
five things that I'm do and this this is what I'm gonna do and you know for the last three weeks podcasting is not been on that list but
These are the lists I'm gonna do and this is how I'm gonna move forward and this is what I'm working towards and it is very difficult to do that and it is very, very uncomfortable and going from being a service technician to now doing training and education, it is a total different way of thought because what works for me and what I understand can be different for other people and I can't just assume everybody is gonna understand.
think the way I do. So I have to present things in different ways and try to explain things as simple as possible when talking about boilers and steam and piping systems and all this stuff and that can be very difficult. But I have no choice. It's either that or you know I guess go get a job or something else. But I big big plans for Boilearn and
what the company is gonna do and what I wanna do and in this season of growth, in this season of figuring stuff out, I have to be okay with not feeling okay and you do too. And there are, I talked to some pretty seasoned people every now and then and they will tell you that they're learning every single day and they will have some uncomfortable moments.
If you have, you know, if you're in like leadership of company, you'll have uncomfortable decisions. You know, I've never made this decision where you'll be put in these scenarios where you're like, I have no idea what to do. There's no right answer and all this stuff. And that's just part of. Part of life, part of business right now and part of the boiler industry. But being okay with not feeling okay is.
the difference between figuring it out and moving forward or just handing off problems and being unreliable. And we would want to strive hopefully as a listener to this podcast, as somebody who wants to strive to learn and be reliable and be the person and be the problem solver. And that starts with being okay with not feeling okay. And
I think I need to say anything more about this. We'll keep this one decently short and sweet. But if you are new, if you feel like you have no idea what you're doing, I see these posts online all the time. Hey, I'm six months into this. I'm two years into this. I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. That is normal. You are in the right direction. You have to just keep going. At a certain point, you will start
getting over the bridge of, all right, I start to know what I'm doing. But then you may expand your mind a little bit. You may expand your job opportunities a little bit. And once you move into some new activities, you will go back to, whoa, this is new. This is weird. This is uncomfortable. I don't know how to do this. And then you will be like, ⁓ man, I either have to choose to be okay with not feeling okay.
Or I have to give up and go back to my safe spot and hopefully you all want to achieve all your hopes and dreams and achieve your goals for life, your marriage, your kids, wherever you want to do. And that will include being uncomfortable. And part of being uncomfortable is being okay with not feeling okay. So that's all I have for you guys. I will have more episodes.
Soon. I appreciate you all for listening and stay wild.
