Mistakes can be our biggest lessons
Safety Consultant with Sheldon Primus
Mistakes can be our biggest lessons
June 6, 2022
In this episode, Sheldon goes over one main "mistake" that turned out to launch his career in safety. Mistakes are your perception in the moment. Those event can lead you to great things if you look closer. Learn more at www.safetyconsultant.tv Use code "SC101" at checkout.
Keywords: Sheldon Primus, EHS, Safety, Safety Consultant, Business, Entrepreneurship, mentoring, US government, Government, OSHA, OSHA compliance, Learning teams

[00:00:04] spk_0: this episode is powered by safety FM mm hmm. Welcome to the safety consultant podcast. I'm your host, Sheldon Primus. This is the podcast where I teach you the business of being a safety consultant and we talk about safety and health concerns, it's a whole bunch of stuff that's happening in this, right. I want to welcome you guys to this episode and I thank everyone for listening. And honestly, you rock, That's it. You rock. Today's episode. We are actually going to be talking about mistakes as you can see by the headliner. So mistakes may actually be a misnomer as a word, as a phrase. We might not be thinking that we've made a mistake later on when we learned from those things, but in the moment we're like dag nab it, I just did this. So in those cases then at that point you are probably just truly beating yourself up more than anything and not ready to learn the lessons. So in this episode, what we're gonna do is we're going to go over just the mayor thought about mistakes and what they've done some things I've done in my life and that honestly, it's a misnomer that worried we probably shouldn't be using it in this context. It might be, may be used in a short term context, in the moment, it felt like a mistake as opposed to long term where you were going to grow from it. So we're going to focus on some of the things you could do with growing from it. So since it's just me, you know what I like to do if it's just me, let's just go ahead and get into it. So yeah, look at them, Get my music up as you guys can tell, I've been going back to the music because I feel comfortable with speaking over music. It helps me personally, I know there's been about a year's worth of episodes where I do not have music in the background and here you go now, hearing it again. So for some of you that aren't familiar, this is something I've done in a long time. So this is an old school thing, old school jam. So what we're talking about today is mistakes or at least a perceived mistakes. So let's say it that way, they're perceived mistakes. Here's a story for me. So as something, you know, I got into the waist order field first. It's one of the things that I was doing, I was working for the city of Orlando and working for the city of Orlando, I was a waste order operator, that was my gig and that was my job. I'm still a licensed wastewater operator today. Um when I got my masters, I decided that all right, that's it. I'm going to go ahead and uh do actual wastewater consulting. So I honestly knew that I was capable of on a high level to figure out what was wrong with the plant and then not only what was wrong with the plan, how to fix it. Yeah, that's that's the two things that you know, you got to do as a consultant. Right? So I thought that was my path and I started a business called utility compliance inc and that was the pathway that I took with that one. And with the utility compliance inc I honestly was thinking that people are going to be blowing down my doors, calling me constantly to figure out their waste order plants and and figure out what was going on and troubleshoot their process and help them with the management side and submit reports to D. P. Which is Department of Environmental Protection. Because at that time I wasn't uh I wasn't with occupational safety and health as much with the regulation side because florida didn't have OSHA regulation because there's no state ocean. So I was mostly D. O. T. Excuse me, D. E. P. Department of Environmental Protection. So in that mindset I honestly thought I had that skill set, I had the knowledge it's a job that I had been doing forever. If I had somebody who could do this job for me, I'll take them up in a heartbeat on this and that's what I was going to do. So utility compliance inc was born my first business. Um and I did everything I needed to do to keep it legal and I worked it for quite a bit and then I just could not sustain work. So what happens next is this eventually I branch off to shell road safety, which is me and my business partner Kevin Yarbrough and we still have that today. We're not working as much together, but we still have it on the books. Uh, and I added some safety components because I figured I know safety, I've been doing safety for a long time. I'll do utility compliance for E. P. A. Let me do utility compliance and utility information regarded occupational safety and health. So that was the thing that I decided to do. So when deciding to do that, I opened up a whole new career. I started really thinking about, uh, compliance issues first with states and counties. And then eventually I got into compliance issues with OSHA did some OSHA training so I could get my 10 and 30 hour and teach people the 10 and 30 our material for OSHA and general industry and construction, uh, started going that route. So was it a mistake? And the time for me to get that utility compliance, it was done. I needed that. I needed that to launch me to give me the confidence to leave the job I was working with with the state of florida and start working for myself. So I don't think of that even though I had to close out the business and do the paperwork to legally shut it down. But that to me isn't a loss. It isn't a mistake. It helped me grow me mature me some of the things that I've seen on that in that process started building in me an idea and I took it and I ran with it and here I am. So I'm grateful for that. There may be some things in your life that's as far as you're concerned in a moment. Could be a mistake. Maybe you shouldn't have done this. Maybe you shouldn't invest it here. However, in hindsight or as time goes by, you're like, oh wait, there's something I could do with this thing or you're so disgusted if you want to use that phrase with yourself, as some people might say. And now you decide that you're gonna, you know, look for the good out of this. And then as you're searching for the good out of the situation just to give yourself a break, then you can find out. All right, All right, we did good here. I know it didn't look good at first, but now I can see that I got important information from this activity. So that's the key glean information as you can. Sometimes you're too close to see it. So if that's the case and you're too close to see it, you might have to go ahead and talk to someone who does the maybe a little bit further away from it, ask them to help you out. Give you some perspective on what your decision was. That's trillion stakes no matter what you do in the moment may seem like a mistake I shouldn't say no matter what I need context or else it's hyperbole whatever that word is. So the moral of this podcast is try to learn make it a speculative loss. If anything goes down and you feel it's a loss, let's make this thing a speculative loss meaning there is a hope of something you could glean from this event. So that's my that's what I'm trying to say. Clean something from that event, be like the phoenix and rise from the ashes, beautiful bird once again. All right gang. If you can subscribe to this podcast, share it with three or four of your closest friends, let them know if your associates when you're in a SSP meeting or National Safety Council meeting or something else. Talk about the podcast saying, hey have you heard about this safety consultant podcast? You need to look it up, spread the gospel spread the word on the safety consultant podcast for me. That'd be awesome. And while you're there of course subscribe and wherever you're listening to me leave me a comment that will really help me. So those are the things I'm looking for that that you have to do those things, it'll be really awesome. There'll be a way for you to thank me for anything. If I have you gotten any value from this show and I also want to point your attention to the safety consultant tv. So safety consultant dot T. V. That's a product that I created that helps me and helps people who want to be a safety consultant kind of get their mind set on the business of safety. Also some topics on safety and health and then how can you practically run a business? So I give you client information and everything to and templates so you can literally download the templates that I use for my clients and put your stuff in there. So that is going to be safety consultant dot tv. You can watch it on T raku, you can watch it on amazon, you can watch it on fire tv. You can watch it in all kinds of stuff. It's an app that's available in your app stores and it's online safety consultant dot tv. So when you're there, choose your plan that works good for you. If you want to do an annual or monthly it's up to you. And what you're gonna do is you're going to put in the code S. C. Sam charlie one oh one so S. C. 101 and that's going to give you 30 days free to check out the service. Right? So that safety consultant dot tv this is Sheldon Prime Minister, thank you so much for being part of the show. Go get them mm hmm. This episode has been powered by safety FM.

[00:11:22] spk_1: Okay.

[00:11:23] spk_0: The

[00:11:23] spk_1: views and opinions expressed on this podcast or broadcast. Are those of the hosting its guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within the past hour are only examples. They should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available as they are based on very limited and dated open source information, assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast or broadcast may be reproduced, stored within a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the creator of the podcast or broadcast. Sheldon brightness? Mm hmm,

[00:12:10] spk_0: mm hmm.



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