What I’m Noticing and What I’m Watching

Over the next three weeks, I’m preparing to teach four programs that, on the surface, look pretty different: Be That Leader Now, 20 Minutes Till It Matters, Responder Readiness, and Be Your Own Coach.

As I prepare for one, though, I can’t help seeing connections to all the others.

I’ve also spent a lot of time lately reflecting on my own Comprehensive Fitness journey. My resilience has been tested in numerous ways over the past few months. Some of that has reinforced things I already believed. Some has caused me to question assumptions. And some has reminded me that knowing what to do and actually having the capacity to do it are very different things.

So, rather than trying to tie everything into a neat lesson, I wanted to share a few things I’ve noticed recently and a few things that have my attention as I look toward the days and weeks ahead.

Things I’ve Noticed

Availability Is Not the Same as Utilization

This one keeps following me around.

We often measure wellness by what we make available.

Do we have an EAP? Peer support? Mental health resources? A gym? Chaplaincy? Financial education? Training? Apps?

Those are important questions.

But increasingly, I think the better question is:

Will our people actually use them when they need them?

Awareness matters. So do trust, confidentiality, time, accessibility, leadership behavior, and organizational culture.

A resource can exist on paper and still be functionally unavailable to the person who doesn’t know about it, doesn’t trust it, can’t get to it, or believes there will be consequences for using it.

Maybe we need to spend less time asking, “What do we offer?” and more time asking, “What gets used, what doesn’t, and why?”

Individual Readiness and Organizational Readiness Are Connected

The new Lexipol 2026 State of Readiness in Public Safety survey caught my attention.

Among 915 public-safety respondents, 78% said their agencies were prepared for typical calls. That dropped to 38% for legal and regulatory changes and 22% for major operational disruptions. The sample was heavily weighted toward leadership, with 74% of respondents in command- or chief-level positions, so I would be careful about treating those numbers as an objective measurement of the entire profession.

But the gap interests me.

We can become very good at normal.

Readiness gets tested when normal stops cooperating.

I’ve been thinking about organizational readiness as, at least in part, individual readiness in aggregate. Do enough people have the physical, emotional, intellectual, relational, and occupational capacity to adapt when conditions change?

But the relationship works in the other direction too.

The organization helps determine how much individual capacity remains available.

Which leads to the next observation.

We Need to Look Upstream From Resilience

I believe deeply in individual responsibility.

Sleep. Move. Eat reasonably well. Develop coping skills. Maintain relationships. Manage your finances. Ask for help. Train. Recover. Do the work.

But there is a limit to how often an organization can tell people to become more resilient while ignoring the conditions consuming their resilience.

NIOSH’s Total Worker Health approach is useful here because it deliberately takes a broader view of worker safety, health, and well-being. Its Healthy Work Design and Well-Being Program specifically focuses on the design of work, management practices, working hours and fatigue, occupational stress, and the physical and psychosocial work environment.

Some stressors in policing, corrections, fire, EMS, and other demanding professions simply cannot be eliminated.

That makes the question more important, not less:

Which demands are inherent to the mission, and which ones are we unnecessarily creating for ourselves?

Wellness cannot become the thing we hand employees to help them tolerate organizational problems we could reasonably fix.

What We Measure Shapes What We Think Is Working

This connects several of the programs I’m preparing to teach.

Participation matters. App logins matter. Training completions matter. Resource utilization matters.

But none of those, by themselves, tell me whether somebody is more ready.

The Lexipol survey also found that 34% of respondents said their agencies don’t consistently measure training effectiveness.

That raises a question I’ve been asking a lot lately:

How do you know what you think you know?

I don’t think the answer is necessarily another survey.

Sometimes it means triangulating. What are leaders observing? What are employees experiencing? What do records show? What does actual performance tell us?

The goal isn’t measurement for measurement’s sake.

It’s enough evidence to make a better decision.

Sustainable Capacity May Matter More Than Optimization

A recent prospective study followed 10,460 Norwegian higher-education students and examined exercise frequency, intensity, duration, and total volume. Regular exercise was associated with a lower subsequent likelihood of depression and anxiety, with exercise frequency showing particularly consistent associations. It was an observational study, so it cannot tell us that exercise caused the difference.

Read the original PLOS ONE study.

But the pattern fits something I keep seeing elsewhere.

The behavior that keeps happening has an enormous advantage over the behavior that occasionally happens perfectly.

Maybe readiness isn’t optimization.

Maybe it’s building enough physical, emotional, relational, financial, intellectual, and occupational capacity that when life asks for more, we have something left to give.

That has become increasingly personal for me over the past few months.

Things I’m Watching

The Broader Readiness Conversation

I’m interested in where the public-safety conversation goes from here.

Lexipol’s numbers are interesting, but self-reported preparedness is only one piece. I’m watching for a shift toward questions like:

What can our people actually do? How well can they adapt? How much reserve capacity exists? What happens when one system fails? How quickly can we recover?

Those feel like harder questions.

They also feel closer to readiness.

Wearables and Human Performance

This space is moving quickly, and I think it has tremendous potential.

A 2025 study involving police officers examined a five-week wearable-based intervention. Data from 79 officers were analyzed, with small but consistent improvements reported across 8 of 15 stress-awareness, self-efficacy, stress, and well-being outcomes. Adding daily assessments, personalized feedback, and peer support did not consistently improve outcomes beyond the more basic wearable intervention.

Read the police wearable study in JMIR mHealth and uHealth.

More recent firefighter research offers an equally important caution. A 2026 validation study tested commercially available wearable heat-stress monitors against criterion measures during exercise and recovery in firefighters wearing protective equipment. The devices could track general temperature trends, but the researchers concluded that they lacked the accuracy and precision required for critical safety or return-to-work decisions, particularly at higher core temperatures and during recovery.

Read the firefighter wearable validation study.

That’s exactly the tension I’m interested in.

Technology can give us more data without necessarily giving us better decisions.

The important questions may soon be less about whether we can measure sleep, heart rate variability, stress, temperature, workload, and recovery and more about what those measurements mean, who should have access to them, how accurate they need to be, and what decisions we should allow them to influence.

Technology, AI, and the Human Performance Ecosystem

Wearables are only part of this.

AI, digital coaching, physiological monitoring, recovery technologies, and increasingly sophisticated decision-support systems are beginning to converge.

I think there is enormous opportunity here.

There are also questions about privacy, trust, interpretation, ownership, and the temptation to convert imperfect measurements into authoritative judgments about people.

I’m particularly interested in the nexus between technology and human judgment.

The more information technology gives us, the more important it may become to develop people capable of asking:

What does this actually tell me?

And perhaps more importantly:

What doesn’t it tell me?

Fundamentals Versus Optimization

I’ll continue watching emerging recovery technologies, sleep interventions, wearables, supplements, and other tools.

I’m interested in all of it.

I just don’t want the exciting stuff to outrank the important stuff.

Sleep. Nutrition. Movement. Relationships. Recovery. Workload. Purpose. Financial stability. Psychological safety. Good leadership.

Those aren’t particularly sexy.

They remain difficult to replace.

Interestingly, a newly published randomized controlled trial offers another piece of this puzzle. Researchers randomized 497 U.S. adults to a brief self-compassion practice with or without additional habit-formation strategies. The habit-supported group practiced more frequently, developed greater automaticity, and showed several better outcomes through six months. This was one specific self-compassion micropractice, so we should not assume the same effects across every wellness behavior.

But the underlying idea is worth watching: sometimes sustainable change may be less about generating more motivation and more about creating conditions that make the desired behavior easier to repeat.

Read the randomized controlled trial in Scientific Reports.

Wellness as an Organizational Capability

This may be the biggest thing I’m watching.

I think we’re slowly moving beyond:

“What wellness programs do you offer?”

Toward:

“How does this organization protect, develop, and restore the capacity of its people?”

That’s a very different question.

It includes programs and resources, but it also includes leadership, training, work design, scheduling, trust, culture, physical fitness, recovery, relationships, financial wellness, measurement, technology, and the willingness to examine conditions that may be unnecessarily consuming people.

NIOSH’s Total Worker Health framework explicitly takes this broader approach by integrating protection from work-related safety and health hazards with policies, programs, and practices intended to advance worker well-being.

Maybe that’s one of the connections I’ve been seeing as I prepare these very different classes.

Be That Leader Now.

20 Minutes Till It Matters.

Responder Readiness.

Be Your Own Coach.

Different audiences. Different objectives. Different conversations.

But underneath all of them is essentially the same challenge:

How do we build capacity before we need it, protect it while we have it, and access it when it matters?

That’s Comprehensive Fitness.

And lately, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to test that idea against real life.

I’m still learning.

I’m still watching.

And I’m still working on it.

Do Better.

Fit for Function. Ready for Life.

Sources

• Lexipol. (2026). 2026 State of Readiness in Public Safety Survey. September 14, 2026.
• National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Total Worker Health. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Healthy Work Design and Well-Being Program. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• Grasdalsmoen, M., Johannsson, E., Hysing, M., & Sivertsen, B. (2026). Physical exercise and risk of common mental disorders among higher education students: A national prospective study. PLOS ONE, 21(8), e0353787.
• The Effects of Self-Monitoring Using a Smartwatch and Smartphone App on Stress Awareness, Self-Efficacy, and Well-Being–Related Outcomes in Police Officers: Longitudinal Mixed Design Study. JMIR mHealth and uHealth. (2025).
• Stevenson, R. D., et al. (2026). Validity and Reliability of Wearable Heat Stress Monitors in Firefighters During Exercise-Induced Hyperthermia. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.
• Susman, E. S., Chen, S., Keltner, D., et al. (2026). Habit-formation strategies enhance long-term outcomes of a self-compassionate touch micropractice: a randomized controlled trial. Scientific Reports, 16, 25100.