It Was Never About the Coffee
The last couple of issues have been heavy. Data, collision rates, the gaps in our training culture that nobody wants to name out loud. Important conversations — but heavy ones.
Today I want to slow down a little. This one is about coffee. Except it was never really about the coffee.
Ten Minutes
Let me ask you something before we get into it.
When did you last take ten minutes in the middle of a training day — not to debrief technique, not to set up the next exercise — but just to step away from the task with your student?
If you're like most EVO instructors I know, the honest answer is: not recently. Maybe not at all.
We fill the day. Cone course, debrief, road work, debrief, emergency response, debrief. There's always something next. The ten minutes feels like a luxury we can't afford. So we cut it.
And in cutting it, we lose something we didn't know we needed.
The Officer Who Didn't Drink Coffee
Early in my career I was riding with a young officer who had been struggling. Not dramatically — just the quiet kind of struggling that shows up in hesitation, in tension, in a driver who isn't quite present behind the wheel.
Midway through the morning I said what I always say in those moments: let's go for a coffee before we set up the next session.
She looked at me and said simply: I don't drink coffee.
In my world, going for a coffee had nothing to do with coffee. It was a reset. A debrief. A way to step out of the car, lower the pressure, and have a real conversation before heading back out. It was so ingrained in how I operated that I hadn't considered it might mean something different — or nothing at all — to someone else.
She had been in Canada for about ten years. The cultural shorthand I was using didn't translate. And in that small moment of disconnect I learned something important about assumptions.
I knew what I was doing — the coffee was never for me, it was for her. A reset. A chance to step away from the pressure before heading back out. But the invitation only works if the other person understands what's being offered. She didn't. And that was on me for assuming she would.
Tim Hortons, Fifteen Years Ago
My partner and I ran into a young officer at Tim Hortons one afternoon. She'd been solo for maybe six or eight months. We had trained her earlier in her career so there was already a foundation of trust between us.
She was struggling. Not with driving — with policing. With what the job actually looked like versus what she had imagined. The gap between expectation and reality had been quietly wearing her down.
We sat down. We listened. Thirty minutes, maybe. Not a formal conversation — just two people who had been in the car with her, who she trusted enough to be honest with.
At the end of it, my partner and I suggested she consider asking for a transfer to a different division. A fresh start. She took that advice and made the request herself.
That was fifteen years ago. She is still on the job today — a highly respected, capable officer who has worked across different areas of the organization.
Now ask yourself: when does that conversation happen if we never take the ten minutes? If the day is back to back exercises and the student never gets the space to say something real?
It doesn't. The moment passes. And we never know what we missed.
The Inspector's Walk
A few years into my time at Peel, an inspector walked into our common area and said four words I wasn't expecting: let's go for a walk.
Three levels above me. Unannounced. My first thought was that I was in trouble.
I wasn't. What followed was a walk to the cafeteria, a coffee outside the normal office environment, and one of the more valuable conversations of my career. She wasn't summoning me to her office. She was choosing informality deliberately — creating a space where she could tell me exactly where she stood without the weight of hierarchy making it feel like a directive.
It wasn't a one-off. She did it on many occasions over the years. A walk, a coffee, a conversation that felt like two colleagues talking rather than an inspector and a subordinate. I didn't fully appreciate it in the moment. I miss those conversations now.
What she understood instinctively was something I've come to believe is one of the most underused tools in any leader's kit: change the environment and you change what's possible between two people.
The Cone Course Reveals the Technique. The Coffee Reveals the Person.
I've thought of myself for a long time as more of a psychologist than a driving instructor.
Early in my career I wanted to just tell people — stop doing that, you're going to get yourself killed. Direct. Efficient. Completely ineffective.
Over time I developed a different approach. Instead of telling someone they were wrong I learned to invite them to try something different. Here's what this technique does. Here's why it works. Here's what it might do for you. Let's try it.
That only works when there's enough trust in the relationship for the student to be willing to try. And trust doesn't get built on the track. It gets built in the in-between moments.
Here's what I've noticed about instructors who skip those moments: they use themselves as the reference point. They're comfortable with the task, confident in the environment, unbothered by the pressure. So they assume their student is too. They wouldn't need a ten minute reset — so the student probably doesn't either.
But we're not all built the same way. We've known that about driving skill for years. We talk about it constantly — don't use your own ability as the student's benchmark. Meet them where they are.
The same principle applies to connection. Your comfort level with pressure isn't the standard. Your student's need for a reset isn't something you get to decide for them.
The best EVO instructors I've known understand this without being told. They read the student, not just the drive. They notice when someone is present and when someone is somewhere else entirely. And they know that before a student will take instruction, they need to feel seen.
Before they'll admit what they don't know, they need to trust who they're admitting it to.
That trust doesn't get built on the track.
It gets built over a coffee that one of them didn't even want.
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Hugh Anderson EVOC Trainer | Author of Emergency Vehicle Operation Instruction: 5 Steps to Enhancing Your EVOC Training Grab the book on Amazon