Leaving people better off than he found them is something Eric McCants aspires to do, but in his line of work, that’s not always possible.
“Part of our job is to make any bad situation better. You’re going to encounter people at the worst, and of course we’re going to have issues, and there are some people we just can’t help,” said McCants, who just finished eight years with the Burke County Sheriff’s Office, where he served as lieutenant of the special operations division and on the SWAT team. He heads to the Richmond County Sheriff’s Department, where he will be a sergeant of one of the crime suppression units, in January 2025.
McCants is a strong advocate for mental health and his presence on the social media platform, LinkedIn, is one place where he can leave people better than he found them.
Daily, McCants gives his more than 56,000 followers funny memes and inspirational nuggets to brighten their day, boost their motivation or check in on their mental well-being, and the feedback he gets tells him he’s doing just that, he said.
McCants’ positivity was ingrained in him as a child.
“I grew up around the church,” he said.
His uncle, who died in 2011, was an archbishop, and he has a cousin who is also a bishop. His family instilled gratitude in him early on.
“In the midst of everything, be thankful for what you have; somebody else is going through something worse,” he said was a philosophy he embraced early.
McCants’ life has seen its share of storms and challenges.
As a teen, he did a short stint in alternative school after a coach fell and was injured while breaking up a fight McCants was involved in. McCants said he wasn’t a bad kid, just mischievous. That experience, though, helped point him to the straight and narrow path, but law enforcement wasn’t something he initially planned on following as a career.
After graduating high school, he attended college to study business. It was too much for him at the time, he said, and he later withdrew. McCants has since made up for that though earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
He found a job at Kroger after leaving college. His mother pushed him to do more. He overheard the police officer working special duty talking about the police academy to someone else. That piqued his interest in law enforcement and saw it as a way to appease his mother.
“I got into it and fell in love with it, and I’ve been doing it ever since,” he said.
He got his first job with the Waynesboro Police Department at the age of 20, but he still needed to mature some, he said. He resigned after 18 months and worked safety positions at Paine College and with the Richmond County Board of Education before joining the Burke County Sheriff’s office.
While his education and career paths have taken their share of twists and turns that could’ve been discouraging, he’s persevered and made sure to focus on his mental health.
“When I was going through my dark issues and having problems in situations, I used to listen to people like Les Brown, Jim Rohn and Ed Myllet and those people inspired me to try to do the same for others,” he said.
Hitting the gym also helps him maintain his focus as does running and listening to podcasts by his favorite motivational speakers.
McCants isn’t afraid to address mental health and wants to strip away its stigma, especially among men and the law enforcement community. McCants also serves as a life coach, and he finds people often just need someone to talk to. And he said there’s nothing wrong with therapy which he describes to people as a conversation with an unbiased person about your feelings.
“I tell people communication is the biggest thing. For the longest – especially in the law enforcement community – we thought if you do therapy, there’s something wrong with you and they might take your gun and badge. I’m trying to tell people it’s o.k. to go to therapy,” he said.
While law enforcement officers often see people during their worst situations, they are also there when there’s not a crisis, and he likes to emphasize those times as well.
“We are really there to help,” he said.
Besides his social media account, McCants does outreach in the community. He’s spoken at schools, read to schoolchildren, done podcasts and recorded inspirational videos. His cousin, who is the bishop, also runs a karate school and works to inspire youth with McCants helping out.
McCants said he hopes to one day have a mentoring program and a place where teens can come and talk and be around positive male role models especially if they don’t have a father figure.
Charmain Z. Brackett, the publisher of Augusta Good News and Inspiring: Women of Augusta, has covered Augusta’s news for more than 35 years and is a Georgia Press Association award winner. Reach her at charmain@augustagoodnews.com. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Beautiful & well deserved story about an everyday hero who keeps many of us out there motivated, uplifted & cared for. He may work far away, but his check ins, and letting many of us know it’s ok to not be perfect, has saved a lot of tears & self-doubt in my day..He is a rare person in our world. .