Learn Stress Management From How Pilots Handle Emergencies

In Naval Aviation, at least once a year, every pilot is required to demonstrate his procedural and system knowledge through a written test and a "check ride" in a simulator - the NATOPS (Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization) Check Flight / Simulator. And to say that this simulator flight is stressful, is the understatement of the year. These "check rides" are 60+ minutes of stress, anxiety and emergencies (one after another) - from engines failing, fires, flight control failure, to complete electrical loss, every thing is free game - often times resulting in the pilot being forced to make the decision to eject from the aircraft.

The check rides were actually intended to accomplish two things:

1. Check procedural knowledge
2. See how well the pilot is able to load shed and compartmentalize in stressful situations.

Needless to say, of the many things that I learned when I was a pilot, one of the most important ones, that has definite applicability to life in general, is that when things get "out of control", the key is to slow everything down, assess the situation and then take the necessary actions to move forward - one step at a time.

Three Things To Do When Things Are Happening Too Fast

All process in aviation are built on preparation and habit patterns. Every pilot learns from the beginning of their training to memorize procedures, not just word for word, but in action and deed. You see, it's not just about which switches to move, but also where they are in the cockpit, why they need to be moved, and what they look and feel like.

So when it comes to handling emergencies and / or stress, it isn't about doing "new" things for the first time, it's instead refreshing old memories and activating pre-planned responses.

To assist in the "emergency handling", as a Navy Pilot, we are taught three things that not only have applicability in flying, but also in handling stressful life situations as well.

- Slow things down - as slow as you possibly can handle. In the fighter aircraft, this literally meant slow the plane down from 400 mph to 200 mph hour. This "slowing down" gives you something that nearly every person needs in a stressful, overloaded scenario - more time to think about how you are going to handle the situation when you get to where you are inevitably going.

In real life, this means simply, don't rush yourself. The faster you go, trying to do things quickly, in both life and in a cockpit, the more likely you are going to miss important steps and / procedures along the way. And the more likely that you will have to go back and do them a second or even third time - actually costing you more time than if you had just taken your time the first go 'round.

Bottom line, SLOW DOWN and take your time.

- Load shed everything you possibly can on others standing by to help. Besides slowing the plane down when hit with an emergency, the next thing I, as a pilot, was taught to do was to start getting help in every way I could and then load shedding some of my key responsibilities on those standing by to help.

For example, as a single seat pilot (no co-pilot), there were people / systems that were nearly always available to pick up some hugely beneficial pieces of the puzzle. First and foremost was the Autopilot. Yep that's right, one the first things I would do as a pilot in an emergency (after making sure the plane was flying safely) was stop flying the airplane and load shed that responsibility onto a computer.

Another thing that I would do is ask my wingman or even a representative on the ground to pull out the emergency checklist and read it to me - so I could concentrate on the jet itself and not have my nose buried in a book.

In real life, this means GET HELP!

So many of us struggle with the idea of "getting help" because we are taught from a very young age that our problems are our problems - no one elses. But the more you can load shed the less important / less urgent tasks on on others, during a crisis, the quicker you can get back to normalcy.

Another aspect that falls under the "getting help" part of emergency management is not letting good intentioned other pilots or ground personnel fly your airplane. For example, ground controllers who may have the best intentions for the safety of a pilot, his crew and any passengers often steer you into bigger problems - simply cause they don't know any better. As a pilot, it's important to take control, if necessary, STATE EMPHATICALLY WHAT YOU NEED and settle for nothing less.

The same goes true in life. When you are knee deep in a stressful situation and ask for help, people will come-a-running, offering everything they can to help. It's important for YOU to keep driving your life forward in the way YOU want to and not let others take over your life.

- No matter how bad things get, the simulator ride ends eventually. This is a simple fact. Just like every morning the Sun rises, you can count on the fact that "this too shall pass". No matter how much you stress you are feeling, there is always a point when either the situation ends, or something else comes along - nothing is forever. Not even a stressful situation.

My simulator flights only lasted about an hour, even though sometimes it felt like six hours. But no matter how good or bad I would do, eventually the ride would end. Sure, if I did poorly, I had to face the music, but - the cause of the stress was over.

So it will be with what ever stress you are encountering. It too shall pass.


Finally, it's important to remember that, you can't change your current reality, but you do have control over your future. So when you are in a stressful situation, recognize your inability to change your circumstances of the immediate situation, but through your choices, you begin to influence the future - whether that future is 1 minute or possibly 1 year away. Decide what YOU want to be the outcome - YOU are a willing participant in your life - not just a spectator.

Make Goals Actionable!

One of the key jobs of a leader is to both define the vision of an organization and to help set it's goals. Unfortunately, though, most goals set by leaders lack "Action-ability" for those whose responsibility it is to make the goals a reality.

That is to say that the goals set by leadership are great organizational goals, but the lower ranks of the organization, the employees, struggle understanding how THEIR actions can and will help achieve the goals.

So, along with the setting large "top level" goals that drive the organization in the direction it needs to go, great leaders also break down the big goals into action-able goals for each segment of the organization.

An Example From Naval Aviation

"On the average" there is at least one major accident / incident that either takes a Sailor's life or hurts him severely every time a Carrier Battle Group (the Aircraft Carrier and it's supporting entourage) prepares for and ships out for a 6-Month Deployment.

As such, to be inspirational and to change the "seemingly inevitable outcome", every Commanding Officer, preparing to deploy, sets a goal of NO Major Accidents and ZERO fatalities for the cycle. It is a very worthy goal - one that everybody on the crew can get behind.

Unfortunately, this goal lacks action-ability at the individual level.

The goal is intended to inspire the crew to "be safe" in everything they do. But too often, most sailors get a "salty" attitude after being at sea for a while that makes them think that it's not them that is going to get hurt, but instead SOMEONE else. "Salty Sailors" loose their focus on their own "personal" safety, believing the individuals that are going to get hurt or cause an accident are the "newbies" of the crew.

Although it is likely that the "green" crew members are most likely to be accident prone, on the flight deck of an Aircraft Carrier at sea, it only takes a second of inattention to detail and you could lose your life - flight deck ops are not age discriminate.

Unfortunately, very rarely is this goal of "NO Major Accidents and ZERO Fatalities" met.

As it turns out, in my last Squadron, I had one Skipper who refused to set that goal. In fact as a command (our squadron), we had no organizational-wide safety goals. He didn't like the idea of big goals, because he didn't feel that it was "actionable" by each person. Based on his experience, a command wide safety was TOO BIG, and left the average sailor dis-empowered to take action - putting all the burden on every one else.

Instead, for the deployment, he had every person in the squadron commit to setting a personal goal of coming home safely with no major injuries. He empowered each member of our squadron to achieve their own "personal" goal of a safe return . . . and it worked.

Think about it. By changing the goal from a command-wide goal to individual goals, each sailor felt ownership - could see how they were able to directly contribute to the goal.

Turn Your Larger Goals Into Action-able Plans

The truth is what my old Commanding Officer really did was put "actionability" into the bigger goal. And he did so by putting personal accountability into the process.

Large goals are important - they create eustress that draws your forward. But the when it comes to living each day, "Large Goals" are tough. It's often hard to decide what needs to be done each and every day, when the goals are "too big".

Doubling your sales and / or profits on a business level or wanting to lose 25 pounds within 1 year on a personal level is wonderful. But what does that mean you have to do TODAY.

When it comes living your goals, your "actionability" doesn't go any further than today. It doesn't do any good to worry about what you are going to do next week, next month or even tomorrow. TODAY is all you can affect.

Make sure that your goals are turned into actionable plans, that include small bite sized, manageable tasks that you can focus on and accomplish. And when you build your plan correctly, each small step you take, gets you a step closer to your Large Goal.

Bottom line - Focus your energy on what you CAN do today - the action-able little steps that make the big goals a reality over time.

Push Yourself A Little Bit Each Day To Become A Better Person

One of the biggest struggles in Naval Aviation is safety. And because flying small fighter aircraft off of aircraft carriers is dangerous by definition, the Navy and all of its leaders do everything they can to keep mishap rates down. But even with their best efforts, the mishap rates still averages between 1-2 mishaps per 100,000 flight hours.

But unlike the airlines, we have to train in all conditions, because you can't decide when the enemy is going to attack you. We have to be ready to fly anytime, day and night - in any kind of weather . And that is where it gets pretty scary. I've seen flight ops in winds as high as 60mph, rough seas when the ship was bouncing plus or minus 30 feet, and clouds so low, the first thing the pilot saw as the tower was it went behind him after he caught the wire.

Good or bad, I had the luxury of being both the Operations Officer (the advocate for flying every day, no matter what) and the Safety Officer (the advocate for never flying) - obviously at different times in my career.

As Safety Officer, I was responsible for preventing accidents. And the truth be known, the only sure way to avoid an aviation mishap is to NOT FLY. But to be honest with you I was not the best Safety Officer in many Senior Official's Eyes - they used to say I was entirely TOO "Operationally Focused". Not because there was ever an accident when I as on the job, I believe it was because I believed that sometimes you had to press the limits as much as you could, during controlled situations, so that when the situation became "uncontrolled", you were ready to handle it. Truth be known, I hardly ever advocated for flight ops to stop - however, I was savvy enough to know who was ready to handle which conditions and who wasn't. Sometimes that hurt some of the pilots egos, but it was never my job to coddle egos.

Then, as Operations Officer, I was always pushing the envelope - trying to fly in the toughest of conditions to get the other pilots ready for anything. Unfortunately, this very often meant sometimes pushing guys to the edge of their ability - so that they could become better and more adept to the possible conditions they may face in combat.

Did I push some guys too far sometimes? Maybe.

Did I ever get anyone hurt or even put them in any real jeopardy? Absolutely not.

Did they become better pilots for the experience? Definitely!

Looking back, I think it was a huge benefit that I was able to have both of these jobs during my tenure in the Navy - it gave me a perspective to see both sides of the fence - understand both sides of the argument.

Frankly though, when it comes right down to it, Pilots are meant to fly - just as you and I are meant to live. Yeah, they may have hiccups now and again - and they may even make a major mistake that costs an airplane or even a life every once in awhile (I have a half a dozen really good friends that have had to eject for one reason or another), but if you don't push things regularly, then you will never grow - you will never get better. YOU WILL NEVER REACH YOUR POTENTIAL!

Funny, the quote says, "what doesn't kill us, makes us stronger". No where is that more evident than in Naval Aviation. And now, as a Coach, I've found it to also be extremely relevant in everyday life. Much more than people realize.

We all have a Safety Officer and Operations Officer that live inside our heads - one telling us to push forward, the other telling us, it's too scary out there - your gonna get hurt. They both have good arguments, but remember, you were put on this earth to just be another warm body - you were given the gift of life to live. I'm not advocating pushing yourself to the extreme every day. But I am telling you that you should be looking for ways to test the edges of the envelope and do your best to live by a quote that is hanging on my refrigerator - a gift from a very dear friend of mine:

Do one thing everyday that scares you.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Living is an active participation sport. Push yourself to be a little better everyday, by finding that ONE thing, and just doing it - no matter the outcome.

Make Sure Tomorrow is Better Than Today

Yesterday, I talked about Briefing and the power it has to shape your day. But Briefs are only half the story. Briefs make what ever you are getting ready to do better. However, if you want to make everything you do even better tomorrow than it was today, then you must first reflect on what happened. And you must, as much as possible, do it as objectively as you can. In the world of Aviation, we gave that reflection a name - the Debrief.

If the Blue Angels are the masters (in my mind) of the Brief, then Top Gun is the gurus of the Debrief.

In Naval Aviation, our budgets are cut more each and every year - forcing us to figure out how to do more with less - something I wish more people in the Government should be trying to do. As flight hours and training time gets the biggest slash every year, our entire community has focused on making sure that we get every bit of training we can from every flight. To do this, Naval Aviation, led by Top Gun, has perfected the Debrief.

What is a Debrief? It's little more than systematically reviewing an event (or an entire day) and finding "Goods" and "Others" that you can take away as lessons learned.

What's a "Good" and what's an "Other"?

A "Good" should be obvious - it's something that you did well that day - something that worked for you in the course of doing what you briefed you were going to do. While an "Other" (in the true politically correct sense) is those things that didn't go quite as well as you had planned they would go - literally things that didn't work for you in the course of the event or day.

Now, in any given event (or day), you could probably find 100 things that were good, and 100 that didn't go so well. But, since most of us (especially Pilots) have short attention spans, let's keep the list of each to 3. Yep, I don't care how well your day went or how poorly it went, the key to a Debrief is finding 3 of each - every time.

So, after your event / day is done, sit down and take 10-15 minutes to reflect on your "Goods" and "Others". Write them down and if you are really bold, review them as part of you next Brief. This will help you keep your "Goods" happening and increase the likelihood that the "Others" won't happen again. Or you will at least make an effort to correct them.

If you have any questions or comments on Briefing and Debriefing, please leave a comment. I look forward to what everyone thinks.