Is it me or do you also feel as though we are moving more in an uncharted territory where uncertainty and unpredictability have become the new norm? The pandemic is still throwing out curveballs with new variants of the virus. Meanwhile, the financial market is becoming harder to understand. Between high inflation, low interest rates, and more liquidity in the market, nobody really knows what will happen in the next few months. Also, supply chains are still very disrupted and far from normal. Weather patterns are changing with more violent storms, record snowfalls, and temperatures that influence agriculture and our lives. Businesses, education, and transport systems are being pushed to the limit. So, how can we navigate in these difficult times? I was thinking about how I could approach this question. Then, I thought back to what I learned when I was a fighter pilot. I remembered the principles and tools that we were taught to use when we were conducting a mission with very little background information. Here I have selected the top 5 tips for thriving in unpredictable and uncertain times based on my own experience as a pilot. Let me share with you what is helping me to feel more secure, safe, and in control over my life today.

1. Schedule, Planning, Routine

Schedule

When I was a mission commander, every day I would receive an Air Tasking Order (ATO). An ATO is a document that lists all the sorties, exercises, types of aircraft involved, missions, call signs, and who is doing what strategically and tactically. This document gave all the parties involved a schedule for the day (there could be 100s of airplanes involved in multi-national coalitions). I would find all the information there that I needed to prepare my mission. As you can imagine, when we had more than 200 aircraft participating in a big exercise, we needed a schedule. We could not take off or land all at the same time. We also had to make sure that we could cover the full duration of the exercise with the aircraft we had available.

Having a schedule is crucial, especially during challenging times. You need to plan what you will do during the day and even better, plan what you will do during the week. It is important to structure your day; to know what time you want to wake up, to schedule the time when you take care of yourself, to plan the time you will spend in the office, to organize the meetings you will have with your team or customers, arrange time with your family, and schedule time for rest, meaning your bedtime. A schedule will help you to keep the big picture in mind and avoid distractions. It is easy to get distracted and spend too much time on something that does not matter or get stuck in front of the TV and forget to sleep on time. Always have a schedule in place. This will help you to stay calm and centered.

Planning

Every mission that a pilot flies is meticulously planned. As a mission commander, I spent more time planning the mission than executing the mission. I spent time programming the systems of the aircraft and preparing the briefing for the crew and all the other pilots flying in the formation. I planned different tactics based on what I thought the opponent could do. Long missions take a lot of coordination and planning. Think about a mission where you must fly for 8 to 10 hours, you need to coordinate refueling and navigate through different airspaces communicating with various control agencies to reach your target. This takes a lot of planning!

In your business, you probably have created plans or strategies to reach your goals. Every project has a roadmap, milestones, and goals. You carefully plan out all the activities needed in advance to make sure that you reach your goal successfully. But then what about your personal life? Do you have a plan for your health? What can you do to become stronger physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually? It is very important to take your well-being seriously and it is even more important when we are faced with uncertainty and unpredictability. You want to be strong, calm, and centered to make the right decisions. Do you have a plan for how to deepen your relationships with your loved ones, your family, and your friends? What do you want to achieve and how are you planning to reach it? Write it down and plan out the steps or actions you want to take to move towards your goals.

Routine

Pilots use checklists for every part of their job. We have multiple checklists for different phases of a flight. It starts from the briefing which followed a certain format (briefing checklist), then the pre-flight (on the ground), the flight (in the air), and finally post-flight (debriefing). During the flight itself, we have segments with different checklists. For example, I had a checklist for when I finished the tactical exercise in the range. I secure all my weapons, check my fuel, check all the systems of my aircraft and change the display settings for the next segment of the flight to return to home base. If we had bad weather, I would use my Instrument Approach Checklist where I would set up my navigation and brief the type of approach I would fly in order to land safely. These checklists exist mainly for safety and to prepare the pilot for the next phase of flight. Imagine you are in a training dog fight and the opponent shot you (this is an imaginary scenario, of course). Losing the fight can be upsetting but you don’t want to keep this mindset for the next phase of the flight. The fight is over. It is time to reset in order to focus on the flight back home and the approach to landing. This is how checklists help you to hit the reset button for the next phase.

Checklists are very similar to what we call “routines”. They are standard, like routines. They are important for safety and wellbeing. Having routines built into your day act as a reset button. They become the checklists that prepare you for the next phase of your day. You can have different routines during the day. You can have a morning and/or evening routine. You can have a routine when you go to the gym. You also have basic routines like taking showers, brushing your teeth, washing your hands, etc. Creating routines will help you in stressful situations. Knowing that you can fall back on a proven, structured system that will keep you safe and help you to think about the next phase will decrease anxiety and give you the confidence to know that you can handle what is coming.

2. Reserves and contingencies

I led missions that had many uncertainties. I didn’t know the weather in the range which would influence the tactics I would use. I didn’t know how many opponents were going to show up or how many airplanes. I didn’t know what tactics the opponents will use and what type of weapons they may use (long-range radar missiles or short-range infrared missiles). Sometimes, the weather at my home base was unpredictable, changing every 15 minutes. For all these uncertainties, we plan reserves and contingencies.

Reserves

If the weather was a challenge, I would make sure I had extra fuel in case I had to fly to an alternate airfield or fly a holding pattern over the airfield until the weather got better.

If you have a business and you are hit by uncertainty (like supply chain issues, costs of materials, workers getting sick, demand slowing down) the most important thing is to create reserves. This could be financial reserves, time reserves (more time scheduled for a project in case there are delays in the supply chain), inventory reserves (keeping extra spare parts or materials in inventory). Knowing you have reserves will give you peace of mind. It will help you to stay calm and make decisions based on the long-term objectives instead of short-term “emergency” actions at the last minute. In business, we often try to optimize everything. In times of uncertainty and unpredictability, we need another mindset. We want to consolidate what we have and not optimize.

Contingencies

This is the “what if” scenario. What do I do if, during my dog fight, I haven’t checked my fuel gauge and I am now low on fuel and unable to get back to my home base? What do I do if the weather in the range is not what was forecasted? What do you do if your opponents (competitors in business) use unexpected tactics or arrive in greater numbers? What do I do if my radar stops working in the middle of the mission? This is the contingency planning; what to do when…

Surprises are great for birthday parties. In business, they are not so much! Human beings were not created to fly or to be underwater (scuba diving). Both elements induce a certain level of stress to the mind and body. We, pilots, have a saying: “when we are in the air, we are three times dumber than when we are on the ground.” It is true, and it is the same under water. I teach scuba diving. During deep dives, the partial pressure of nitrogen in our body greatly impacts our thought processes and decision-making abilities. Our brain is extremely slow and not always logical. Any problem is harder to resolve. To counteract these effects, we think about what could go wrong before we go diving. We plan contingencies to avoid the surprise effect that induces stress and poor decision-making. We make sure we have a scenario in place and that we have mentally rehearsed beforehand.

For your business, think about the “what if”. What do I do if my cash flow is getting lower? What plan do I have if the supply chain is interrupted or delayed? What do I do if my competitors lower their price? What is my exit strategy? When you have a contingency plan in place, it will be much easier for you to handle stressful situations. This works as well in your personal life. Think about your family. Do you have a contingency plan if someone gets sick? If you live in an area where fires or floods are a threat, what is your contingency plan? Now, don’t dwell on it, and don’t become paranoid either. Think about it, create a plan, write it down, share with anyone involved (your family members or your team) and secure it in place that it is accessible to all when (and if) it is needed.

3. Focus on what you can control

I was once on a training mission over the North Sea. Tornados and F-15 Eagles were our opponents. I was flying a small F-5 Tiger with two infrared missiles and two 20-millimeter guns. I didn’t have long-range weapons like the F-15. It took many decoy maneuvers to come into close range with the big F-15. The F-5 has a very small silhouette, making it harder for the F-15 pilots to see us in the sky. There I was in close-range to two F-15s in formation. I shot the first one with an infra-red missile. Then I engaged the afterburner, pulled up, and pointed my noise to engage the second F-15 with my 20-millimeter gun. I almost had my opponent in my visor when suddenly my speed indicator showed zero speed. I slid back and fell into a spin. I was out of control and the aircraft spun down quickly. The only way to get out of a spin is to respond with what I could control: my flight stick, the rudders (pedals), and the throttle. I took idle, brought my control stick to neutral until the nose was below the horizon, then pushed forward whilst pressing the paddle towards the opposite direction of the spin. One and a half turns later, I was in control again of the aircraft. Was it scary? Hell yes! Did I panic? No. With training and experience, I knew how to respond to an out-of-control flight situation. I acted upon what I knew, and what I can control.

Life is not very different. When you get into an “out of control situation” or fall into a spin (figuratively), there is always something that you have control over. Knowing what you can control will help you to respond instead of reacting. The only time we need to react is when our physical safety is jeopardized, and we need to react fast. Our survival instincts will trigger our reactions.

If you are caught by surprise, always follow those 4 steps: stop, breathe, think, and then act. In the thinking phase, look at what you have control over. What is it that you know you can do right now to get the situation back to normal? What can you do to minimize the consequences? If there is a small wildfire near your house, don’t focus on what you cannot control (wind, rain). Think about what you can control. You can clear dead branches around the house, you can hose down the ground, the trees, and bushes around the property. You can prepare the access for the firetrucks. You can collect your valuables and plan an exit route in case the fire intensifies and your safety is compromised. In any situation, there is always something you can do, something you control.

4. Metrics

When I started to fly at the age of 15, we didn’t have a GPS onboard to help us navigate. We used maps and ground transmitters to help us navigate (VOR, NDB). We calculated during our flight planning the heading and the altitude with which we needed to fly. We calculated the speed and time to fly from point A to point B. We looked at the fuel used between each navigation point. We would look at the wind forecast and make heading corrections or speed corrections to counter the wind. All this information was handwritten on flight plans that looked like spreadsheets. Then, during the flight, we would often check all these parameters. If we had a long leg between two navigations points, we would break down the leg into smaller legs in order to spot any deviation quickly. The sooner we could see a deviation, the smaller the correction needed to be. If I saw that the side wind was pushing me off track early, I could adjust the heading by a few degrees against the wind. But if I waited too long to check my actual position, I would be so far off track that I would need a larger adjustment. This would then mean that my flight time and my fuel consumption would increase. It could even mean that I may not have enough fuel to reach my destination.

In anything that you want to achieve in life, put a metric in place. If you want to write a book, set up a metric. If you want to write one page a day, track it. Don’t wait until the end of the month to see that suddenly you are missing 20 pages. This will be hard to catch up. But if you track every day where you are, as soon as you miss a day (one page), you can catch it up the next day or in the following days. It is the same in business. The sooner you see a deviation in your cash flow, sales, inventories, or expenses, the sooner you can react and the smaller the correction. Relationships are the same. The sooner you address something that bugs you, the easier it is to fix it. The longer you wait, the more difficult it will become.

5. Expand your comfort zone

Flying low in the Swiss Alps at 400 miles an hour is intense, difficult, and dangerous. We have very narrow valleys and high mountains that require extreme focus. This is even more intense when there is bad weather. I remember as a young pilot having a certain apprehension and a certain fear of low-level, high-speed navigation flights. Somehow, this was a healthy concern. It forced me to be extremely well prepared (flight plans) and laser-focused on the mission. The way I learned to fly low-level and later started instructing to young pilots involved pushing and expanding the boundaries of our comfort zones. We started to fly with an instructor in the back seat, in good weather, at 1,000 feet ground. Then we flew lower at 500 feet, then 300 feet, and finally to the lowest allowed which was 100 feet over the ground. We flew as a wingman until we gained enough experience to become a leader. It took time. We expanded our comfort zones through many missions until we mastered low-level flight.

Facing unpredictable and uncertain times can be stressful, overwhelming, and scary just like flying very low for the first time. The way to deal with these feelings is to take baby steps towards expanding your comfort zone. If you need to change the strategy of your business and you are not sure or comfortable, think about starting with a small step and trying it out at first. Experiment and see how you feel.  Observe how it goes and make small mistakes. Then adjust. When you feel more comfortable, expand more. By doing so, you will not only control your expansion, but you will gain more competence and confidence. Another way to expand your comfort zone is to educate yourself. Ask people who are ahead of you, those who did it successfully. Listen to podcasts, watch videos, read books. Find a mentor or a coach that can help you through the process. There are so many resources available. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or guidance, but make sure you ask people who have the knowledge or have already done it.

Stepping out of your comfort zone is something we hear all the time in the personal development world. This is how we grow. Yes, I agree. But going too far too fast out of the comfort zone can have a reverse effect causing fear, loss, confusion and in some cases, it can even be traumatizing. I always tell my clients that want to step out of their comfort zone to create goals that are big enough to challenge them but small enough that they can reach them. That is the best strategy for sustainable growth.

Conquer the uncomfortable zone by expanding the boundaries slowly from your comfort zone. Don’t cross the boundaries to see how it feels and then run back because you are scared. Do it with control. Make sure you are gaining confidence and competence along the way. Slow and steady is the key.

Final words

Stop, breathe, think, act. That is what we often hear when we face a challenging situation. We teach these four steps to scuba diver students. But guess what happens when you fly: you cannot stop. The aircraft continues to fly, and fast. Most of you reading are on the ground. So, use the advantage. Don’t let the circumstances or people push you to rush. Pause first. Set the pace. You are in command. You are the captain on board. And if you think you are not qualified to be the captain, let me reassure you that you are. You have more resources than you think. You have accumulated knowledge and life experiences. Look how far you have come in your life. Isn’t it incredible? Look back at your journey and all the challenges you have overcome. You are more capable than you think. You can figure it out. Have faith in yourself. Be agile in your mind and how you build systems and processes in your business. Unpredictability and uncertainty will continue to play a bigger role in your life. Accept it, don’t fight it. Find a way to be responsive in life and not reactive. It is up to you, and only you, to decide what will be the next step. Remember that fate or challenges in life do not dictate your destiny. Your actions do. So don’t be afraid of unpredictability and uncertainty. Tame them. You have the power and the control to dictate your destiny.

- Hubert
YourHPcoach

P.S. Hey guys, Hubert here!

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