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Effective, professional policing isn’t inspired by the mind, but is enabled through the heart. Heart-centered policing is the foundation for a meaningful and fulfilling career. It also offers the greatest hope for officers to recover from traumas and reach retirement well and at peace.
What is heart-centered service?
Heart-centered service is intrinsically connected with the principle of spiritual wellness and resilience and is essential to maintain overall wellness throughout one’s career. The heart is our spiritual center and our wellspring to do good.
Spiritual wellness is one’s capacity to love, to be helpful and useful, and to be driven by one’s heart to selflessly serve to make a meaningful difference. It is one’s capacity to consistently affirm the good within and the drive to do as much good as possible with every call for service. It is the ability of one to be connected — connected to the purpose of policing in protecting life and helping those in need. It means maintaining positive, supportive connections with the community and with one’s colleagues.
The whole purpose of policing is to serve and to do good while having the will and the compassion to help others. The officers who will truly love this job throughout their entire career and who will find it fulfilling — those who will be at peace and get the most out of this honored profession — are those who have learned how to selflessly serve with their heart.
Compassion is the DNA of service because it empowers the good that can be done. The number one lesson I learned more than any other in 30 years of police work is that this truly is a vocation of the heart.
Officers risk their lives to protect life, to alleviate suffering, to help those who can’t help themselves and to serve those in need. Simply, they are the good amid all the bad and are the foundation for a civil, peaceful and free society.
The desire and ability to protect and serve others comes from the heart. Therefore, if an officer is not putting their heart into their work with every call for service to try to make a meaningful difference, then the job is likely going to eat them alive.
In my experience, which is corroborated by science, every good, positive, compassionate thing an officer does to try to do good in compassionate ways tends to erase much of their past traumas. It’s just how our brain works. Otherwise, the daily traumas of the profession can work to suffocate one’s heart, leaving them angry, bitter, hardened and depressed.
How to serve with your heart
Nearly every officer I ever met became an officer out of a desire to help people, protect life and serve their community. Tragically, far too many officers by the time they retire have forgotten that purpose. Over the years, they have grown to hate their job, despise their agency and even hate people. It takes persistent effort to keep this job from eating you alive and robbing you of your peace, health and well-being.
One of the most basic human needs is the primal need to be useful. Mindful officers have opportunities to be useful and helpful many times a day. How an officer fulfills that basic human need — which is fulfilled through one’s heart — will determine the quality of their career and the quality of their life. Within these daily opportunities for an officer to be useful, to serve with a purpose beyond their self-interests in doing the most good, lay the keys to a fulfilling career.
Heart-centered service is all about awareness and the willingness to respond to a need. Whether an officer is dealing with a kid who crashed on a bike or a murder scene, they have opportunities to not just do the bare minimum required by the job, but to maximize the good with their heart to try to make a difference.
Officers should silently ask themselves during a call, “What good can I do here? What can I do to be helpful in this moment?” Ideas will come and then, by choosing to respond helpfully to whatever may be needed of them, they are doing something about a situation rather than allowing the circumstances to eat away at them.
Compassionate service doesn’t mean officers shouldn’t arrest people; it’s just that there is a lot more about this job than making arrests. It means solving problems, fulfilling needs and never losing sight of why you became an officer in the first place. It means we refuse to allow the darkness of the profession to extinguish the light within.
Compassionate, heart-centered service means we care about people and that an essential component of our profession is to alleviate suffering; to protect, serve and help those who are either too mentally ill, too drug-addicted, too ignorant or too impoverished to help themselves. It means focusing on the good and the good that can be done in any given moment.
The most meaningful moments of my career were those times when I did something I didn’t have to do but wanted to do because it was a way to be useful; to give a part of myself — my heart — to help in some meaningful way. It will be for you as well.
Conclusion
I know numerous officers who are retired, and it seems a lot of them spend much time trying to forget all the bad they experienced over their careers. While you’re fortunate enough to still be working, center your heart on doing as much good as you can with each call for service. That way, when you retire, you’ll not only likely be well and at peace, but you can feel good about all the good you were able to do.
Dan Willis
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