One of my craziest stories

Picture this.

Saturday night, I was playing with a band, onstage, in front of a room full of people.

It was a hot July night in SC, humid enough that it felt like I was swimming every time I stepped outside. 

I’d just finished up a guitar solo and the crowd leapt to their feet in a standing ovation (jk).

All of a sudden, something was missing. The low end dropped out.

The bass player had stopped playing.

I look to my right.

And was not prepared for what I saw.

The bass player was in the middle of dropping his bass and slumping to the floor!

I shrugged off my guitar and handed it to the guy on my left, rushed over, and grabbed the guy. 

Now, he was a big guy, probably 280 lbs. 

It took me and the mandolin player both to get him on the ground.

He wasn’t breathing. And there was no pulse.

He’d suffered a heart attack.

I yelled something about calling 911 while starting to do CPR. 

Luckily, there were 2 other people on stage that knew CPR and we started taking turns every 10 beats. 

And we needed those short breaks. 

It took over 40 minutes for the ambulance to arrive.

We artificially kept his heart beating the whole time.

Unfortunately, he didn’t make it despite the response team doing everything they could.

He was in his 70s and went out doing something he loved. 

That’s honestly more than I can hope for.

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The other wild part of this story is that I had just taken CPR training at work earlier that week.

Yeah, pretty crazy timing!

But, besides knowing the mechanics of CPR, I had also been running a practice in my head. 

Something that I have been doing since I was a teenager. 

I call it “Scenario Simulations.”

Basically, I will step through a particular scenario and map out exactly what my action would be in that case.

For CPR, I was in a situation a few years before the on-stage incident where someone had a heart attack in front of me in line for the cashier at a gas station.

I had no idea what to do, and that was a bad feeling.

So, once I got trained, I stepped through that scenario in my mind and went through all the steps of CPR. 

For 1, it helps to learn a skill faster if you have a real world application for it.

Secondly, if you go through this in your mind about 3 times, you’ll build in a bit of muscle memory helping you to react quicker. Why 3x? Because that has been shown to be the number of times it takes, on average, for someone to commit a new learning to memory.

And that’s exactly what happened that day on stage.

I knew exactly how to react and then executed.

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This applies to so much more than medical emergencies though.

It can be used for:

• Social media comments

• Objection handling

• Customer interactions

• Etc

All you have to do is:

1. Imagine the scenario in your mind, or even write it down

2. Be as detailed as possible.

3. Simulate the possible actions you can take at every step.

4. Once you have a course of action, repeat the scenario along with your planned reactions in your head x3. 

You never know when you’ll be in a weird emergency (or non-emergency) situation that requires you to think fast on your feet.

It helps to prepare as much as possible.

Cheers,

Swanagan