Podcast: From Japan to Iraq to Los Angeles: the Universal Value of the Integrated Experience
Challenging Missions - At Home and Abroad
The CPI concept of the Integrated Experience is defined as the way behavior impacts behavior. It sounds simple, almost given, but in thoughtful practice it can be a powerful paradigm, one that generates rapport as it increases empathy and cooperation. Indeed, our guest on this episode of Unrestrained, hospital safety expert Ted Sandquist, utilized an intuitive-if-untrained understanding of the Integrated Experience in challenging situations during his time in the US Army, from collecting counter-intelligence on the island of Japan to interrogating enemy combatants on the arid battlefields of Iraq.
Back in Los Angeles, where Ted works as the national manager of training and compliance for Blackstone Consulting, he brings his seasoned expertise to hospitals in southern California. As a CPI Certified Instructor with a mandate to provide and oversee healthcare safety training, he has been instrumental in teaching hospital staff to de-escalate challenging behavior through the concepts advanced in Nonviolent Crisis Intervention® training. Ted has also facilitated many train-the-trainer sessions so that healthcare organizations always have on-staff recourses to provide CPI training as required for new hires and veteran workers alike.
What fascinated me about my interview with Ted was the way he was able to draw connections between his work in the US Army—completed before he had experience with CPI training—and the work he does facilitating CPI training in healthcare settings. In our interview, you’ll hear Ted explain how CPI concepts such as the Supportive StanceSM and the Integrated Experience helped him succeed in challenging missions in foreign countries—and then explain how he came to understand those successes through the formal concepts he learned and then taught to professionals tasked with providing Care, Welfare, Safety, and Security℠ in their hospitals and clinics.
In my interview with Ted, you’ll learn:
- How learning the nuances of Japanese culture (including the proper way to use chopsticks) while serving in Army counter-intelligence while stationed in Japan helped Ted understand how sensitivity to an Integrated Experience is critical to establishing rapport. (1:34)
- Why healthcare environments induce stress and anxiety. (15:00)
- Why there is more violence on hospital patient floors than in emergency departments or psych units. (18:25)
- What the AIDET acronym stands for and how it can bring mindfulness to healthcare workers who otherwise might be working on “autopilot” due to workload. (23:07)
- How Ted used a Supportive Stance to de-escalate a captured Iraqi bombmaker during an interrogation—and how an understanding of the Integrated Experience helped establish the rapport that helped Ted obtain the information he sought from the enemy combatant. (26:35)
- Why Ted believes “If we need to go hands-on, we’ve missed something.” (33:51)
- Why verbal intervention as a technique—and CPI’s Verbal Intervention™ training—helps healthcare workers see people instead of objects. (36:38)
"I think the success of workplace violence prevention programs are really that their effectiveness starts with our self-awareness." —Ted Sandquist
Further Listening
And you enjoyed Ted’s interview, you’ll be sure to appreciate our interview with healthcare workplace violence prevention SME Anna Dermenchyan of the Department of Medicine at UCLA health. In our interview, Anna presents a candid and authoritative overview of the problem of workplace violence—especially as it pertains to nursing staff—as well as an inspiring look at how nurses can confront the issue through constructive solutions.
Guest Biography
When I asked Ted for a guest biography, he responded, “I am currently the national training and compliance manager for Blackstone Consulting, Inc. But professionally, I like to say I was born and raised in the Army. I served for 10 years as a counterintelligence agent. Serving in Japan, I was responsible for collecting strategic level intelligence through liaison with host nation government agencies. In 2001 I began a deployment cycle in support of the global war on terrorism which sent me to Iraq and Afghanistan on multiple occasions. After leaving the Army, I re-deployed to Ramadi, Iraq as a civilian and then spent several years instructing at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy in Maryland. I returned to California to help with my father who was suffering from Alzheimer’s and worked for the County of Monterey as their range master and firearms instructor. In 2016 I joined the Kaiser Permanente family as an area training manager for Securitas, Inc., where I had the pleasure of training front line staff in workplace violence prevention. After a brief time with Dignity Health as a security manager, I was brought back into the fold by Bob Durand (Episode 35, Unrestrained) to serve as their (Blackstone Consulting) national training and compliance manager in Healthcare Security and Shared Services."