Overcoming Setbacks: How You Can Navigate Through Challenges and Achieve Entrepreneurial Success

0:00I was being criticized publicly told, you're a liar, you're a fraud, you're fake, you don't deserve to fly. Amelia wouldn't want to share a name with you. Amelia Rose Earhart. She was named after the great Amelia Mary Earhart. And of course that put pressure on her in life. Everything changed when I decided that it was more important than I be related to Amelia, that I instead relate to Amelia. I think you're going to love how she uses turbulence as an analogy for how success happens. The only airplane that never experiences turbulence is the one that stays locked up in a hangar. What's your thoughts on success and how it happens?

0:35Really, for me, it comes back to my flight training. I love aviation analogies. And one of the strongest for me that I learned in just the first few of my flight lessons in my early 20s was that every single plan, every single flight begins with a solid flight plan, right? We need to first identify where we want to go. We need to take a look at the environment that we want to head through. We need to see if there are storms along the way. What are the weather conditions? What are the obstacles? And then we need to assess ourselves, right? If we're thinking of ourselves involved in that flight plan, we're the aircraft, right?

1:11Do we have enough fuel on board? What kind of aircraft are we showing up with? When we set our sights on something new, we have to ask ourselves those questions. But when I find that you do a lot of the pre-flight work, right, the work on the ground, asking ourselves, are we ready to head into this environment? Doing that first is the best way to be successful once you do take flight. So let's flip that over then. And obviously in flight, there's not failures, but there's challenges. How do we learn success from failure, I guess, or from challenges? Every flight that I took from the beginning training flights all the way through my commercial license, my instrument rating, everything was about, if not experiencing real challenges in the air, simulating those challenges, which is why pilots are so focused on doing emergency procedures, right?

2:01Following checklists if and when things do go wrong. And I think knowing that in aviation, it's all about redundancy and planning for things to fail. We almost get so comfortable with the reality of things going wrong that we treat the reality of failure as equally as we do the success, right? It's an incredible feat that every flight gets to where it's going all over the world every single day, right? I think about how many things could go wrong. But the reason aviation is so safe and pilots are so successful in reaching their destinations is because we address those fears head on. How do we succeed through turbulence?

2:39And turbulence is kind of the same thing. Up in the air, turbulence is not the cause for crashes of aircraft. It's simply a disruption in the smooth airflow over the wing. Now, it can cause injury. And yes, it can be disruptive and it can be downright scary. but it's not going to cause your flight to come to an end 99.9 % of the time. So what I like to remind folks is that the only airplane that never experiences turbulence is the one that stays locked up in a hangar. Yeah. Right. And that's not what planes are built for. And I think the same is true for all of us. We can handle the bumps. We can handle a few bruises, but if we're protecting ourselves, that's the only way we're going to have a completely smooth journey.

3:21And And that's a journey that I don't really want to be on. You know, we need those challenges to grow. So how do you handle that with confidence then? Because you talk about that a lot, about handling that change and challenge with confidence. Planes experience turbulence all the time. And if you think about it, next time you're on a big commercial aircraft and you go through those bumps, when you look out at the wing, the wing will actually flex quite a bit, right? You may even see the wings bow a bit in some of that really rough air. But before that aircraft ever got certified to fly, before it ever got anywhere close to takeoff, that plane was put through stress tests that would stretch that wing so much further than we'll ever experience in a storm up there in the air.

4:03So for me personally, when I think about my own turbulence that I've been through and the major turbulence that I endured was learning that after many years of thinking that I shared a distant common relation with the first Amelia Earhart, I learned in a really public way on Twitter, in a really embarrassing way, that I actually shared no relation to Amelia. And this was right before I was about to launch on my flight around the world. And when I learned this new information, I was being criticized publicly, told, you're a liar, you're a fraud, you're a fake. You don't deserve to fly. Amelia wouldn't want to share a name with you.

4:37And I had to recover from that turbulence. I wanted to cancel my flight at one point because I thought this is too much. This is embarrassing. So I had to reframe my approach and that required a major course correction. I had to say, you know what? I'm no longer going down this heading that says I'm Amelia Earhart, distantly related to the first Amelia. I'm going to take a similar path. I'm going to still fly around the world, still support women in aviation, give out these scholarships. And everything changed when I decided that it was more important than I be related to Amelia, that I instead relate to Amelia, which was a shared interest in aviation and just going for it.

5:16And knowing that a journey can be imperfect and still be so very successful. Pretty much everything you're looking at requires the best version of you. How do we succeed at being the best version of ourselves? What's your thoughts? One of the things I like to think about is how we can ask ourselves what type of attitude we have going into any goal. Because one of the very first things you learn in pilot training is about the five most hazardous attitudes that a pilot can have when things start to go wrong. They are anti-authority, impulsivity, invulnerability. Look, all of our biggest goals are going to involve challenges.

5:56We know that. And when the frustrations come our way, we need to check, are we experiencing any of those five hazardous attitudes? Now, they can all be recovered from except for one, and that is resignation. When I throw my hands up off the controls and I say there's nothing I can do, that's the only one we truly need to worry about. And so I hope all of your listeners, when you assess how you're handling the challenges and just the problems that come your way, know that your attitude and how you're responding makes a huge difference. But if you ever get close to that feeling of resignation, that's when it's time to reach out to a co-pilot, somebody who knows your flight, who you trust to maybe take the controls for a little bit, give you a little bit of guidance.

6:39Say, hey, I can see things from a different perspective. Here's where I would go if I were you, because a co-pilot can make such a big difference. And it was only when I called a mentor, called a friend, called somebody I looked up to and said, hey, what would you do in this situation that I was able to recover from that feeling of resignation? And I felt that resignation when I learned about my name. Like I said, I wanted to cancel the flight and say, no, I'm done. But I called up a mentor of mine and he said, look, you've done the hard work. You have put in the hours. You've got your licenses.

7:10Look at this. You love aviation. Do this flight around the world because you want to, not because a genealogical connection granted you permission to, right? Just because your name is whatever it may be doesn't mean you can fly an airplane, right? And so that outside perspective, I think, can be such a great way to recover from some of those attitudes. And that's a big success podcast for today. Hopefully you took a lot of notes, learned a whole bunch. And if you need to go re-listen to it, we dropped a lot of information right there today. Big success is what it's all about. And by the way, if you haven't subscribed, hit that subscribe button so you're here with us every single week on the Big Success Podcast.

7:47I'm Brad Sugars. That's BS. Big success is what we're shooting for. Check the show notes for all the links. Make sure you follow through. Keep learning. Keep coming back. Oh, and by the way, share this with any of your friends who you know are up for success. I'll see you next week on the Big Success Podcast. You've been listening to the Big Success Podcast with the number one business coach in the world, Brad Sugars. To learn more about how to achieve business and personal success, as well as how to level up or listen to past episodes, visit www.bradsugars.com.