Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Dan Comiskey. Dan, welcome to the show. Really excited to have you with me. Tell me a little bit about your impressive background from sports to what you do today in safety.

Oh, gosh. Thank you so much for the warm welcome, Eric. I’m happy to be here. Always like getting involved in safety messaging. It is my business now is really safety messaging. You know what? I started speaking way back in the CFL in the mid ’90s. I started in 1997. I guess that’d be late ’90s. They started sending me around to schools to talk to kids about bullying when I was playing for the Rough Riders. I played in the CFL for 13 years and had a great time. Really loved it. It was obviously a passion of mine. You don’t get there without being passionate. But it really also, through the different the teams I was on, I was able to cut my teeth, so to speak, in a professional speaking capacity. So, I started at schools, and then it turned into leadership programming and different breakfasts. And then by the time I was retired, this is really all I wanted to do, was get out and talk to people about important things.

That’s cool. So, let’s get into your story, how you got into football.

Wow. Okay. Well, I was a troubled kid. It’s the bad sports kid story. You’ve heard it before. I was a troubled kid. I had a brother who was sick. He had cancer, and he died. I got really angry about it. And my parents were divorced, and I was angry about that. I started getting in trouble. My dad figured out that I was in trouble, and we had a bunch of tough conversations, and one time, a very serious conversation. And finally, he said, you got to find something better to do with your life. And if you do, I’m going to help you, and made a promise that if I found something that was productive, that he would go as far as he could possibly go to make it work for me. And I found this picture of Tony Mandarich, who was an old offensive lineman back in the ’80s, who was from Toronto, and he was 6’6, he was 315 pounds, and he could bench press two and a quarter 37 times and run a 4. 65, 40. And all this stuff matters to me now, and it mattered to me then. And I just saw this guy that was indestructible, and I really thought that I wanted to be indestructible.

So, I told my dad I wanted to play football. And he just started moving mountains, man. I was living in a small town with him. There was no football team. He bought a car for my brother, turned the garage into a gymnasium, and just started buying milk and cheese, put it in the fridge, and I started gaining weight. And I spent time living with my mom and my dad, and lucky enough to play for a bunch of years and eventually ran into some people that said I was talented enough to go to the CFL, and that became a dream. And I was drafted back to Saskatchewan in ’97. So, it was probably the one thing that changed my life when I was on the wrong path that my dad gave me.  

So, Saskatchewan Roughriders, because back then, I think there was still the Ottawa Roughriders, wasn’t there?

There was not. The Ottawa Roughriders had folded. That was right after the CFL expansion. So, the CFL expansion had just folded. In 1996, the teams were in such financial peril that, and I’ve heard stories, I won’t talk about which teams, but the owners of the teams were telling players on check day because you always get paid the day after the game, right? You get handed a check back in the day. I don’t know how they do it now. And they said, go to the bank. Wow. Take this to the bank. And so, they would say, so they’d give them the check at the beginning of practice, and they’d say, take this to the bank before we go to practice. And it’s because they just were worried about checks clearing. That’s It was scary it was in the league back then. It’s a different place now. You see the stadiums and everything else, right? So ’97, I’m brought in. I’m making about four bucks an hour for the whole year. It’s not a whole bunch of money in playing football in Canada back then. And yeah, it was wonderful. I had great leaders around me. I had on winning teams and losing teams and made some amazing friends that are still great friends today and lucky enough to win a couple of Great Cups.

Yeah, it was a great career.

Excellent. And so how did you pivot from football into safety?

Well, I had some things happen in my life that were making me think about safety. The biggest one would be It was two people very close to me. One was my stepbrother. We lost him in an accident at work. He was working for St. Catherine’s Hydro, and he was electrocuted. He just grabbed the wrong wire at the wrong time with the wrong gloves. And that it was back in 2001. I was halfway through my career. My father-in-law at the time, who since passed, had a serious head injury. He was a minor. My wife and I, at the time, my ex-wife, we had kids, and we had twins, and there were some complications. Serge was her dad, and he moved his family, his wife and him, from Northwest Territories to Alberta to go back into mining after being retired so that she could be close to us because there were some health complications with my daughters. Then his first shift back as a miner. I’m 52 right now, so he was 52. I always thought he was an old fart when I met him. But he was this tough Frenchman, 6’3 or something and 190 pounds.

And you’d see him work and he just… The guy wouldn’t take breaks. He just worked. If you’re unloading a van with that guy, the van is unloaded before he stops. He’s head breathing heavy and stinking, and moving, and great guy. Just work his butt off, right? And then he goes out for his first shift, and he gets hit in the head with a piece of rock and changes his whole life. He survived it, but it changed who he was. And those things affected me, right? So that when I got into looking at my retirement, I knew I wanted to speak. I didn’t know how I was going to become a safety guy. I didn’t even think about it. But I knew that as a speaker and a lead, I realized there’s a bunch of skill sets that I had from football that were leadership skill sets that I’d learned over 13 years, from being a rookie that didn’t know anything to being a vet that at 38 thought he knew everything. How about we just say that? And I mean, since then, now I’m 52, I’m hoping I know a little bit more. You know what I’m saying?

I’m growing as you go, right? So how was I going to transition? I got my NCSO out of Alberta, and I was approaching Shell about selling them a leadership training program, and along with a whole bunch of other people, just looking to sell my wares. And they just said, why don’t you actually come work for us and learn our leadership program? We’ll teach you, and you can learn it. And so, I actually learned how to deliver theirs, and I started delivering theirs and all sorts of different onsite stuff. And I became not only a safety adviser, but I became a cultural adviser for bigger projects. I became somebody that was really responsible for trying to affect how the How the idea of safety was going to permeate through the crews. So, all of the onboarding, all we had pause training and stop work programs and even permit to work. I got involved in all of that stuff so that I could actually understand it. But to me, it was always, how do we bring it to the point where people actually are so concerned about… They understand that safety is the number one thing while we have to get work done, obviously.

But they understand that safety is the number one thing, and that we have to make sure that they’re going to go home safe. And that’s got to be a major value to them while they’re getting the work done. And so that was really what I learned at Shell. It’s not just about stopping work. It’s about how do you keep work going, safely. It was really a… Maybe that’s a long answer to a short question, man. But that’s what happened. Is it just a transition? And then after we had an election and government changed and the oil fields got hammered pretty hard by somebody who I don’t mention very often. And opportunities left, but I started just getting on this keynote roll in both 2015, and I started doing that as part of my work. And it’s been a mainstay for me. And then I had to adapt through COVID like everybody else and took on some other roles. But last year, again, went full-time. And this year, there’s some really amazing things happening because of it. Really excited about some opportunities that happening. Really, given the safety career has been something that’s been very educational and meaningful.

But on top of that, it’s given me all sorts of opportunities.

Now you bring a lot of your lessons in leadership from your days in football all. Walk me through some of the big lessons in leadership that you use in your presentations.

Well, thank you. Great question. There’s a bunch of stuff that you learn that That’s fundamental, right? You learn about leading by example. And people say lead by example, and it’s like you wrap everything in leading by example, and that’s just an easy thing to say. Sure. But what you learn is that when somebody is actually leading by example, they know that they’re leading and misleading by example. They know that people are going to watch them for not only what they’re doing right, but especially for what they’re doing wrong. And they’re going to watch them when not only things are going really well, but they’re going to watch them when things go sideways. How do you react when things aren’t working the way you want them to work? That’s when you find out what leader you are.

Absolutely.

Right. I had some great examples of this in football. Tom Higgins, Jeremy O’Dade was another one who’s GM for Saskatchewan now, who’s just great. Just as a player, I knew him, and now he’s a GM. He’s been involved for so long because, man, he’s the same guy. He brings the weather every day. And he’s always the same guy. And people don’t catch him making those huge mistakes and finding out that he’s actually a hypocrite to what he says, which is what the problem is with trying to lead, right? If you go against what you say, you’re in trouble. So, it’s stuff like that. Leading by example, knowing who your audience is, who you’re working with, knowing how to actually reach people, knowing what their goals are, getting out of the truck and talking to people on site. I mean, that’s really about understanding who your players are. And so, a lot of this stuff, it started, I understood it in football, but then working with Shell and with so many different people at different businesses, you start understanding that there’s experts everywhere. There are people that actually really… And so, I’ve learned from everybody that I’ve ever worked with.

Good and bad, I’m sure.

Oh, certainly. Listen, man, I worked with some guys that were from the Jean Jack and Days on Pipelines, and I work with some guys that were from the Drinking Days back in the CFL and Drinking and More. Everything’s evolving, right? Everything’s evolving.

So, leading by example, I think it’s a very powerful lesson because I think it’s exactly what you said, is how do I respond to bad news when something goes wrong? What’s my initial response? So key because it’s easy on a good day to show up the right way.

It is. Eric, the interesting thing is I can say that, but that still doesn’t tell you how. How do you make a bad day seem acceptable? How do you do it? And what I’ve learned, and this is through new coaching and mentorship, like I say, I continually learn. I have new partnerships all the time. The mental side of habit creation is a big football thing. It’s a habit creation machine. It grinds out habits because you’re videoed You’ve done everything you do, and your body position has to be perfect, and your hand placement has to be perfect, and your foot position, and your knowledge of the game and the playbook has to be perfect. If everybody isn’t perfect every play of the game, you lose. That’s how you lose by somebody stepping three inches too far in one play, you lose a whole game. People don’t understand how technical it is, but it’s sick. And so those habits have to happen. But not only that, the mental habits. How do you actually… And this is something that you learn in Physically in a game like that is how do you… So, let’s say you’re playing in a very important game.

I was playing in the Great Cup. I was playing against a guy named Robert Brown. Robert was my nightmare. I mean, there’s guys I liked playing because they would come right to me and just give me their chest. That’s as an offensive lineman, let me beat you up. I love that. I respected everybody I played, but Robert was one of those guys. Scott Schultz was another guy that was tough for me. There are certain guys that were just tough, right? And going into the Great Cup, I had a torn meniscus, so my knee was locking up. And I wasn’t going to sit the game because I knew I was… Well, I wasn’t going to sit the great cup. I wasn’t going to do that. And then going to the second half, first or second play of the second half, he beats me and gets a hit on the quarterback. And it’s like, how do you… So now you’re playing in front of 3 million people. You’ve just made yourself look like an idiot because you look foolish. When you get beat as an alignment, all they have to do is beat you once or twice, and you’ve had a bad game.

You got to be good every play. So how do you get that mindset get back. It’s the chatter in your head is like, Oh, you’re a loser. Oh, he’s going to get you again. Oh, you’re doing everything wrong. And it goes against everything you’ve trained with over the last however many years you’ve played and however many weeks you’ve played that’s saying, I know exactly I’m doing. I’ve watched this guy on film. I know exactly what he’s going to do next. I understand his keys. I know. So, you’ve got this internal battle that goes all the time, right? And so, the voice is in your head. We call them chatter. It’s like this chatter. But do you know how many thoughts you have in a minute? How many words-No idea.

I have a feeling it’s a lot. 300. In a minute. Scientifically proven. 300 thoughts and pictures a minute. And so, all of those pictures. So, if you get a haywire a minute where you’re getting hijacked, all of those pictures are going against you, and all those thoughts are going against you. And now you’ve got to come back, and you got to focus, and you got to get back to calm and peace, right? Sure. So that’s great for football. What does that have to do with life? Well, I think about the guy working a power linesman working in an ice storm who went to work that day, and his dog died.

That’s top of mind. That’s a distraction is using a unit of attention for you.

Exactly. How do I focus? When my wife’s angry at me, how do I focus? When my kid is sick, how do I focus? And so a lot of the training that I now do, both with teams and individually, is really about getting that chatter under control by learning to focus and figure out where it’s hitting you and where it’s hijacking you and creating tools to calm that and give you peace so that you can actually zone in and focus on the things that are important.

So, tell me a little bit more on the habit creation part, because it’s a key component. There’s lots of books written on habit creation. Tell me about a little bit from a sports standpoint, how you got to building those habits.  

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re-energize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions, Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propulo.com.

Well, like I said, for me, it was like I didn’t have to think about it because they were grinding me out of the machine. It was changing your habits or lose your job.

Right.

So, you just start realizing that number one, you realize that you can. Anytime I tell somebody, I’ve got a friend who Let’s just see. I got a friend who has too much… They like going to bed late at night. Let’s use this one. They have to stay up till 2: 00. They have to stay up till 1: 00, and then they get tired, and then they wake up like it’s an accident. I don’t know, wake up like… It’s The conversation is always the same thing with anybody like this. You say, well, and I’ve been this person, so I’m not trying to be judgmental. Say, well, you should just start getting up at 6: 00 in the morning. Well, I can’t do that. Well, you just set an alarm, and you get up. That’s literally all you do. It’s one little thing. You just set an alarm, and you get up and you have a coffee. And as soon as you have a coffee, you start your day. And now, okay, well, I don’t start work till 8: 00. Well, that gives you an hour before you start to think to maybe pray, maybe read, maybe meditate, maybe listen to some music, maybe get some exercise.

And then all of a sudden, those hours that you put in at the end of the day between 10: 00 and midnight are 6: 00 to 8: 00 hours. And so, it’s a tiny little change. And it seems, well, that’s a huge change. Well, no, it’s actually it’s like setting an alarm. And as soon as you do that, your body says, well, I need sleep. So, guess what? By nine o’clock, you’re saying, I’m going to bed. Listen, I’m not enjoying watching TV anymore. You’re falling asleep, right? It’s the same with… It’s really the fundamental, I think the biggest thing people do is they try to do too much. So, let’s call that a big shift, right? Let’s call that a big shift. How about we do something like, there was a guy I was coaching, and he was late for every meeting, and he was executive, right? And he’s like, I’m just late. He was on site, and on site, you’ve been on site. Things are crazy on site. Things are Everybody’s always late. This guy’s an executive. He’s high up there, and he’s not just a little bit late. He’s like 45 minutes, an hour late for everything.

Guys are waiting for him, and he’s slow and work down, right? And so, we’re talking, and he says, Yeah, this is my biggest weakness. That’s a process. Getting too that’s his biggest weakness is a process. But let’s just start there because it’s easier for this conversation. I said, well, what is the reason for you being late? He says, well, I get in these other meetings and why do they go longer than it’s supposed to? Why do they go longer than they’re supposed to? Well, because I feel like when I leave a meeting and somebody is still trying to talk to me, I’m being disrespectful.

Sure. 

I get it. It’s human, I feel, I often feel that way. Can’t get off the phone with somebody. You know people like that, right? There are certain people in your life that you just can’t get them off the phone. I can’t say goodbye, right? And so, what do you think we can do to change that so that there’s no disrespect Because the disrespect is the key. It’s the key. The key to that whole thing is he doesn’t want to disrespect, but he doesn’t realize he’s disrespecting the people he’s making later, right? And so, we came up with a system, and I can’t remember him or I. I’d like to claim it, but it was probably him. He walked into every meeting, and every meeting had a deadline that he was walking out. When he walked in, he said, can you come see me today, Tony? Yeah, I can come see you. But I can get there at 10: 00. When he gets there, he says, I’m leaving here at 10: 30. I’m walking out the door at 10: 30 because I’ve got another commitment. He doesn’t have to tell him what the commitment is.

I’ve just got. Within three months, he started getting promoted because all of a sudden, he’s on time for every meeting, and he was a very exceptional executive. He’s a great guy, and he’s a hard worker, and he knew what he was doing, and he’s smart, and all of those things. That tiny little habit changes your life.

Sure.

How many of those do we have that we can work on? And then it’s like, well, you should probably just try one at a time. Because until you get the one- small steps. Yeah, small steps. How do you eat an elephant? One step at a time. So, to me, that was all from football. The interesting stuff for me is getting into the mental, the gymnastics of creating habits that calm the storm, that calm the hijacking. What is your reaction to, I just got bad news? What is your reaction? How do you bring peace in? You ever see the old Seinfeld episode where I think it was Jerry’s dad, Serenity now. Do you remember?

I don’t, but- Yeah.

He had a… I don’t know. Anyway, I guess it doesn’t matter.

So that’s what you do now, Serenity now. 

Well, no, there’s visualization, but everybody’s going to have their own method, right? But you have to figure out what brings you peace. Is it pictures in your mind of… I have one friend who he pictures Jesus holding him as a child, and that’s what brings him peace. And he just goes to that. And he’ll take five minutes. People used to go for a smoke break when they’re upset. Well, people don’t smoke anymore as much, right? So, go for a breath break and take a breath and then what is it? What questions do you ask yourself? Where do you put yourself? Some people it’s music. Some people have a book, right? Just get yourself back out of that hijacking and into life. And then obviously, if you’re working on the line or if you’re working like a micro break is part of the job. If you feel like there’s a risk that you’re bringing to the work site and you’re actually working the shovel, working the tools, working the trades, then you have to be able to pause. Say, I’m the danger because I’m hijacked right now. So, let’s have a conversation about what’s going on around us so we’re safe.

So, to me, it’s like that’s the… In Shell, we used to call it the pause moment. I’ve seen stop work. Stop work, pause, just recenter on what we’re doing, what’s the task in front of us, what are the risks, so forth. A hundred percent. And so now can we do that because the risk is actually an emotional hijack decking. And that’s the training to see that as the key that gets you to pause, right? 

Because the distractions are a big part of what happens immediately prior to a serious event in many cases. And distractions are units of information that are distracting you from what you have to do in front of you. It could be, how are you doing that day?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Like I said, I’ve never seen a guy in a good mood when his wife yells at him on the way out the door. It doesn’t work. Well, I have, but maybe those guys are.

It’s a different story, different problem.

Maybe I’ve never been in a mood when I’ve been yelled at on the way out the door.

Any other lessons in leadership that you bring to some of the speaking engagements, the training programs that you do?

Well, there’s lots, right? I mean; to get into them, I have a website. You can go to www.dancomiskey.com. And there’s all sorts of stuff on there. The reality is it’s… I mean, there’s so many, right? I can get into… Well, I’ll give you a couple more. So, a lot of what we have to really acknowledge is how powerful we are. And that really comes with understanding how powerful your decisions are, because we can’t do anything without a team around us, but everybody affects the team, right? Sure. One of the things I talk about in some of my presentations is the butterfly effect. And I’ll bring my brother into this. So, my brother was a linesman, and he was up in the bucket. And the common practice of the day was to change out of his double-insulated gloves into leather gloves at the end of the day to clean. And that’s what they would do. When they’re tidying up at the end of the day, that’s just one of the common practices of the day. Okay. And on this particular day, it was really hot. It was Saint Catherine summer, and it was, whatever, let’s call it 100 degrees.

But it was the area swim through. Essentially, he lost his balance. He grabbed the wrong wire, and he died. And so, the question to me was, how did he have those gloves on? At first, you’re angry that he had the gloves on. The guy was a hard work. He was a great brother. He was a great son to his father. He was a great son to my mother. He’s a really good man. But you ask that question, right? Why did he have those gloves on? And so, something’s missing. So then how many people knew that that was a common practice? Because if you work in electricity, you know that’s a risk.

Yes.

Right? And so, if I said it’s 100 people a day, like 100 times a day, somebody thinks we shouldn’t do this, or 100 people that are in that business know that that’s a risk, and they know it’s a risk that’s happening every day, right? That means every day there’s a decision for people to not do anything about it. And so, if you go 300 days in a year, you got 30,000 opportunities where somebody could have stepped in, and they could have done something. That’s a lot of opportunities. That’s the domino effect in reverse. How many things had to go wrong for Augie to die. How many people had to not talk for Augie to die? We’ve got these opportunities to intervene all the time. I’ll tell you another personal story here. I had a daughter who was very sick, and she was born with multi-organ failure. She was in the NSEU. We were 94 days in the hospital with her. In those 94 days, she had 72 procedures. She had heart surgery that put her in a coma. She’s there, and she’s there and she’s in a coma. And the doctors kept on saying to my ex-wife and I that we’re going to have to unplug her.

So that’s awful. It was an awful time. When you’re looking at this kid, she’s in a coma. Well, but she’s like, what’s the right thing to do? After a few to four times, we started thinking, okay, it’s time to unplug her. And we’re doing last rights. We’re praying on her. And the nurse practitioner, Cathy, comes running in. She says, what are you doing? Well, we’re going to unplug her because this is what we’re told, right? She says, No, you’re not. We have to have a meeting to make sure that all of the doctors are going to agree with this because she’s for every organ. She’s got brain damage, heart damage, liver damage, kidney damage, stomach damage, every organ. She had eight organs that were… We get this meeting together, and all the doctors agreed that the organs were working within reasonable amount, but they weren’t communicating, and they didn’t know why she wouldn’t wake up. So, the conversation went from, do we unplug her, or do we give her time? We gave her time, and now she’s a creative writing student in university. She So you say, well, who helped that? Who saved her?

And so, did Cathy save her? If you ask Cathy, she was given that procedure by the doctor who wanted us to unplug her as a safety net. She had the power to call that meeting. So, she called that meeting. So, was it her or was it the doctor that created the procedure? And then you go to him, and he says, well, you played in the CFL, you’re broke, right? You want to thank somebody for saving your daughter. Thank Tommy Douglas. Because Tommy Douglas is… So, was it Tommy Douglas or was it the doctor? Because I’ve got this is a $3 million baby. How do you How do you rectify that? Well, Tommy Douglas was an immigrant from Scotland. Do you know Tommy Douglas’s story?

Yeah, I do.

So, he’s an immigrant from Scotland, right? He’s brought into Canada. He’s just outside of Winnipeg. And He has an injury to his leg that turns into an infection. They’re going to have to amputate his leg, and they don’t have anybody to do… They don’t have any money to pay for a surgery. There’s a doctor coming through town who’s going to start a school of medicine in Winnipeg. He’s got students with him, and he says, I’ll do the surgery and save the leg if I can, if I can let my students watch. Parents agree. Leg gets saved. Tommy becomes a boxer. Tommy becomes passionate about medical assistance for everybody in Canada and creates the system. So you go, well, how far back does it go? Because is it the doctor? Or was it his parents? Or was it… How far? And you just realize, well, number one, it’s a miracle. I’ve said it a couple of times already. I’m a thank God guy, and I don’t know how you wouldn’t if you were me. That’s first. But I think also God created this procedure, where all these people are involved in saving my daughter. And then you look at it and you say, well, so now what’s she going to do with her life? 

Who’s she going to help? Who’s she going to save? And who am I going to save? And Eric, who are you going to save? What are you going to do? Is it the kid next door? Is it somebody that’s broken down on the way to the cottage and they’ve got no gas in the car, or they’ve got a flat tire? And maybe it’s cold enough that if things go just wrong, they die because I know what it’s like up north. Or is it saying the right thing? Or is it saving a guy from wearing the wrong gloves 10 years from now? Because you don’t have to change the whole world with everything you do, but everything you do can change the world.

Everything you can. Yeah.

Right. Right. So, to me, people forget how powerful they are. So, when I go out and I speak, what I try to do is I try to empower the audience. I do safety presentations. I do leadership presentations. I try not to get into the sad stuff. There is sad stuff. People have sad stuff. Everybody’s been punched in the stomach by life, and that’s part of life. But I try to leave them with that understanding of that it’s not just It’s power, but it’s responsibility to actually take part in taking care of people, whether that’s interventions, helping somebody that’s working with you, whatever it is, that’s the empowerment part of it. When I talk about the butterfly effect, that’s really where it hits for me.

I think that’s a really powerful one because when you’re thinking about your brother as an example, there’s a brother sister’s keeper, which people keep talking about, but often don’t interpret it this way, which is each moment opportunity. But you’ve got leaders who are seeing something, not saying something. And so, everybody has an opportunity to step in. And you may choose not to, but there’s an entire poem that was written on that.

Yeah, you choose not to, but it’s still a choice.

It is a choice, right.

And that’s a domino.

Correct. That’s a domino. Or you can say something and the power of that can be substantial.

Yeah, exactly. Thank you for listening and understanding.

So, you’ve got a podcast. You mentioned your website. If somebody is interested in reaching out to you, what’s the best way to do it? And also, how do they get to your podcast?

So, you can find my podcast on YouTube. But I do have to say that some things are changing in my business, and there’s some amazing… I’m involved with an amazing new partnership that I’m really excited about, and it’s going to change the direction of my podcast, too. One of the things that happened the last year since I started the podcast is I’ve spoken to a lot of men about mental health and women about mental health, leaders about mental health. And I’ve realized how much of a… There’s such a connection between safety and mental health. 100 %. Most of what we talked about today, resonates on that line. So, I’ve gotten together with a fellow named Ian France. He approached me about doing an across Canada tour. We’re calling it Breakfast with Champions. We’re going to bring experts in, leaders in the field of mental health, as well as people who have just persevered. We’re going to be talking. We’re going to be putting breakfast together in every city that we can. We’re starting in Edmonton and Regina. It appears that July will be the start date.

Good time to do that, not December, January.

That’s right. You read my mail now. Those are going to be the Florida trips. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to not only give people motivation and someone that understands that there are mental health issues, but we’re trying to give them tools. What can we do with these mental health situations? We’ll have keynotes at every event. It won’t be me necessarily, likely won’t be me. It’ll be somebody that’s local that’s prevalent who’s in that arena of mental health. Like I said, we leave people with resources, and we’re looking to change the country because we know that right Well, I’ll just say it. I’ve seen too many of my friends from the CFL die, not only on the streets, to addiction, to depression, and that’s just a game. In Canada, it’s a huge deal right now. There are so many things going on. Eric, you see in Toronto, but in small towns, the homeless situation is insane. It all starts with people getting lost. We got to make a change. We’re trying to make some big domino effects with that.

Excellent. Excellent. And on your website, again, if somebody wants to get in touch with you or would like you to come talk or present to them.

Thank you. https://www.dancomiskey.com/. I’ll throw in the description on anything I do, but yeah, https://www.dancomiskey.com/. So, if you think Comiskey Ball Park, same spelling.

Excellent. Well, Dan, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your stories from football into safety. I think it’s been a Really good overview of themes, ideas, and quite motivating. So, thank you.

Thank you very much for your time, Eric. I appreciate you having me on.

Excellent. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.