650: Michelle "Mace" Curran - Building a World-Class Team, Running an Excellent Debrief, Rebuilding Trust, Feedback Loops, & How To Turn Fear Into Your Superpower

26:19I think all ends of the spectrum. But that to me is something for us all to think about is, okay, I care about these people. Now, how do I ensure that they know it, that they feel it? And I think like you're saying, showing up when it's really, really tough is a great way to do that. Yeah. And I know that was a very personal example, but I think, you know, when I think about the high performing teams I've been part of and like the best leaders I've worked for, they were the ones that knew you as a person. They weren't just like, oh, are they doing their job? Cool. They must be doing fine because I don't have any issues with their work performance.

26:57So check on to the next. But I think a lot of people will show up and their work performance will be fine. Reference my flying while I'm in Japan. But behind the scenes, they can be struggling. And they could be so much better. The level you're getting from them might be good enough, but it's not what they're actually capable of. And if you're willing to create that openness with them, and sometimes that means you have to be a little bit vulnerable yourself. I had one boss who I worked for before I went to the Thunderbirds, and he was just awesome for a lot of reasons. But I was one of the more senior officers that worked under him.

27:33And he was leading like 190 people or something. And all these people have lives going on, right? Like, people are getting divorced. People had like legal stuff that would happen, just life stuff with that many people. And he is the commander that that all falls on. And he would confide in me in a way that wasn't like betraying their dirty laundry or anything. Like I didn't know who he was talking about, but he would be like, one of my troops has this going on and it's just really hard. Like I just see what they're going through and I want to support them. And I have done all the admin stuff I've supported them in, but as a human, like I just don't know what else to do.

28:11And the fact that he was willing to tell me who was underneath him that he did not have all the answers opened that two-way communication up between us where now if I have something going on, I feel very secure in going to him and being like, hey, I'm really struggling with this, whether that's in my personal life or that's a concept in the air, I'm struggling with going through the instructor upgrade or something on a deployment or whatever. And I think as a leader, if you're going to have a high-performing team, the only way that that team reaches their full potential is if you have that two-way flow of communication.

28:46Yeah, where they feel they're comfortable to talk through it. And I want to talk about a tough moment. We're going to focus on tough moments, but let's talk about a tough moment in the air that you had, as well as how you were able to keep going. So you have a near head-on collision at one point in your flying career. Can you take me inside that story? What happened? Why did it happen? What did you do following the near head-on collision? Yeah, so I'll try to keep it as concise as I can. There's kind of a decent amount of background information, but this is my second year with the Thunderbirds.

29:21It is our winter training season. So no air shows this time of year. This is when the new pilots are coming on, which of the six pilots you see fly in a demonstration, half of those are new every year. So 50 % turnover rate, which is a whole nother thing we could talk about. It's wild. But I am now the experienced person. So I am the instructor for my new solo who has just been hired. So I'm the lead solo. He's the opposing solo. He's also new to the F-16, the jets that we fly in the Thunderbirds. He had been flying a different fighter aircraft in the Air Force. So he's already an experienced fighter pilot.

29:55Great guy. But he's in a new airplane. He doesn't have a ton of experience in that. So there's just a learning curve there that takes some time. I am new to instructing in this role. And I've spent the last year being kind of the student, flying all these air shows with a senior person as the lead solo. He's now left to go on to his next assignment. And I have moved into that role with only a year of experience, which is really not that much. And for anyone that's seen the air show, we're doing opposing passes. So that is head on pass, looks like a game of chicken. If everything goes perfect, our jets pass while we're both rocked to 90 degrees.

30:32So you're seeing like the tops of the jets or the bellies of the jets perfectly planned form. And it looks like the two jets crossed through each other. When that optic happens, we call it a good hit. We are not literally hitting each other. We're about 70 to 80 feet apart, I would say. But for perspective, we are each traveling at 500 miles an hour. So when you talk about closure, you know, how quickly you're getting closer to the other one. If we're each traveling, I feel like this is an SAT word problem. If two trains leave the station, if two jets are flying at each other, each have 500 miles an hour, they have 1000 miles an hour of closure.

31:13It's insane. So we're nose on that we have all these safety contracts where we have to be visual with one another by a certain range because there is no computer in the jet that sets our distance laterally, that 70 to 80 feet. that is purely done with your eyeballs. Really? That's all manual? Yep, yeah. Wow, okay. So it takes a lot of repetition because you have to train your brain for what that should look like when. As this closure is happening so fast, as this tiny little speck is getting bigger and bigger and bigger, as this other jet comes straight at you, you have to learn a mental pacing for, oh, I should see it start to drift towards the side it's gonna pass me on at this point.

31:57And like just how big it should be when, and all of that kind of stuff. And it just literally takes a ton of practice to do that. It's kind of like in sports, you know, learning hand-eye coordination, a specific skill for the timing. So as all new solo pilots are, he had consistently been too far away from me because your survival instinct does not want you to pass another airplane at 70 feet going 500 miles an hour the opposite direction. And this is not like two cars on the highway where we have a yellow line, right? Like there is no delineation in the sky that's like, okay, cool. As long as I don't touch that, like we won't hit each other.

32:34We do have the show line at an air show. It's often a runway that we line up on in our training range, which is where this was. It is brown tan desert, pretty featureless, but it has connex shipping containers that are like lined up, spaced out every so often so that we have a visual thing to like at least line up on. So I'm on one end of this. He's on the other end of this. We're like a couple miles from each other as we start. We're a few hundred feet in the air at this point. Now that this hasn't already been confusing enough, this is called an opposing inverted. So I am upside down. Okay, casual.

33:13So I am flying inverted a few hundred feet. I mean, we're like 500 feet. We're not down to our minimum altitude yet because he's still learning. So we would stay a little bit higher. I'm like 500 feet, something like that, upside down. He is flying straight at me initially, which is fine. I see him. He sees me. So everything should be good because my contract as the lead solo is I'm just going to line up over that show line on the ground, the Connex containers. I'm going to set my heading, my altitude, my airspeed, and I'm going to be as stable a platform as possible. he owns the job of trying to match my timing so that we pass right at the center point but also of offsetting a little bit higher than me and a little bit further away from the crowd than me so it looks like our jets pass through each other but we have that like 70 to 80 feet of spacing that's all on him to visually set that spacing mind you he's pretty new to this and I told him in the brief I'm like hey look when we look at our passes my jet is very big and your jet is very tiny because you're too far away.

34:17So people can tell you're like much further away. It doesn't look good to the crowd. We want the jets to look the same size, which means he has to be way closer. So it's like, yep, you got to get closer. You got to kill that survival instinct a little bit to get closer. And like, we would say that regularly because it's true, but you don't think that someone's just going to point straight at you and no flinch. So I'm upside down. He is in the middle of my heads up display so call it my windshield you know it's got some information in it but right in the middle which is okay initially because we're going to pass so close that for a while he's going to be in the middle and then when he starts to drift off to the side just like a car coming down like a two-lane highway at you right like initially it's right in front of you but as it gets closer closer all of a sudden it like if you were to follow it with your head you'd have like breakneck turn your head super fast as it whizzes by so that's what essentially is happening there is a point where my internal timing clock is like oh shit he should be starting to drift to the side he's going to pass me on at this point like I've done this a ton of times and he's still not moving so he is still pointed at me and I'm like he's going to hit me he's not offsetting at all.

35:34Like we're aiming for 80 feet and I'm expecting him to be further than that again, because he's learning. He's way too close. Like he's just pointed straight at me. This is what my brain says. And then in about two and a half seconds, which I think is the time we had before when I, between me recognizing this and us actually passing, I had the craziest temporal distortion I've ever experienced, which is where time slows down. Anyone who's been in a car accident has experienced this where it's like you see someone's about to hit you and like it's slow motion but it's not like you can do anything faster than you normally can but your brain speeds up super fast like oh no that is what's happening to me and I'm like okay we have a safety contract like if we all of a sudden lost visual with each other I rudder and move slightly towards my side which is the crowd side where people are actually watching the air show from he rudders and move slightly away from the crowd, kind of like rules of the road.

36:34Mind you, there is no one watching out there. It is just brown desert. So as I'm inverted, I have no visual cue to what side is my side, right? Because what was on my left is now on my right. And when you're upside down over a runway and there's a hundred thousand people there, it's very obvious where the crowd is but when you're training and it's a pretty featureless desert the time that i had to make sure my side was actually my side before moving was just not enough so i'm like okay i should run her to my side oh shit i don't know which side is my side if i run her to the wrong side by accident that is a worst case scenario right because in theory he should still offset away from the crowd like he's supposed to.

37:22Like surely he's not just going to fly straight at me. And so I make the assessment that it's even riskier to try to move if I might move the wrong way. So I hold the line and wait. And I just see, this is all happening so fast. I can't even, there's not really words to describe how fast all of this happens, but his jet gets ginormous in my HUD, in my windscreen. And then right as he's about to disappear below the nose of my jet, I see his wings start to tip as he starts to roll so that he doesn't hit me. And he goes below my feet, which is actually above me because I'm upside down. And I like close my eyes for a second.

38:05And then I'm still upside down and he's passed. And I'm like okay i'm alive we didn't hit each other but i'm so shocked that i'm supposed to say solos ready hit it and the hit it is where we both roll up and we get that like 90 degrees of bank where we pass through for the good hit which is for this story not a great term that we use but that's what we normally call it yeah i don't make that radio call i'm supposed to like roll out and then call like a pull and a smoke off i'm i miss like three or four radio calls because i'm just stunned into silence. Eventually I just roll up, right? I clear the line.

38:42I say five's clear. He says six clear. And now we have the moment where we like set up for the next thing we're going to practice. And we can't just like pull over and take a breather. We're in an airplane, right? So we're cruising around at 300 miles an hour. Like we'll slow down a little bit when we're not on the show line. And I'm the instructor. It is on me to be like, do we just go home? I'm like angry. I'm scared. I'm shocked. I have like all these emotions and I'm just like, oh, I'm the only one here to decide what we do now. And I was limited on training hours. We're always limited on fuel available.

39:24It's not cheap to put jets up. So we have like half our gas left. I'm like, okay, no more opposing passes like let's set up to practice our individual maneuvers and so we do like our aileron rolls and our four-point rolls and all that stuff where it's like one jet at a time and we get good training out of the rest of that flight and we go home and we land and I know had I done that to my previous lead solo he would have been so pissed so pissed I feel like he would have yelled at me or not talked to me or just like lost his shit which I get why but But during that time after that near miss and on the little flight home, which is not doesn't take very long.

40:04It's like 10 minutes. I was like, that already happened. Like, I can't undo that. That was scary. But what is the most productive way we can respond at this point to get the most learning from that? And to like not shut my opposing solo down, but to like continue to build this extreme level of trust that him and I need to have to do this job. So like we got back in before, like we go into a formal debrief where we go into a room, we close the doors, we pull up recordings from the cockpits, we analyze all the data we have. Before we do that, we just get out of our jets and walk back into the building.

40:39And as soon as he walks up to me, he's just like, I am so sorry. I did not need to berate him. He knew. And me being mad and yelling at him or giving the cold shoulder would have just extended the mistake longer. And honestly, he learned that maneuver, those maneuvers, the opposing passes really quickly because of that experience, because he had been too far away for so long. And usually you slowly get a little bit closer, a little bit closer with reps until you're like, okay, I'm about where I should be. Oh, he found the inside line. So now he has a visual reference and experience of, okay, that was too far.

41:19That was too extreme the other direction. now I have a boundary there which allowed him to find the right spot actually a lot faster not that I would recommend doing it that way yeah and so that's obviously it's a long story it's complicated and it's one that I haven't really told on social media I haven't told on a ton of interviews because there's so many little nuances to it yeah and that's why I saved it for the book but it is by far the closest call I had in 13 years flying thousands of hours in high performance aircraft. Wow. How hard was it to trust him? It wasn't really. Yeah. That didn't degrade our trust, honestly, because, but like, cause part of that, okay.

42:02Outsider, obviously never flown anything, but my thinking is like, uh, let's say if you, if I brought it to my world of like football or something, if my left tackle bust an assignment and my receiver messes something up, he's got to regain a little bit of trust because it shows that he doesn't know what he's doing or he's a mental lapse or all that. So in a way, like, especially if it's a newer situation where you have, you don't have many reps together and they're like, oh, all right, this guy doesn't know what he's doing. You didn't have that feeling of, wait a second, we haven't built up any reps together.

42:34And now that we have one and it was bad, this guy's got to prove it to me that he can do the thing. We were flying like 10 times a week at that time. Okay. And so maybe there was some apprehension. It doesn't stick out in my mind, though. I'm sure I thought about it the next time we did an opposing path. Just like, okay, keep an eye on him. Keep an eye on him. Make sure I know for sure what side is my side. Part of that was on me. I should have not had that moment of confusion. I know why I did, because the circumstances are not ideal for it being super clear. And part of it was also on me for the brief of being like, you just got to get a little bit closer.

43:10I should have also talked about here's your cues if you're too close my assumption that survival instinct would keep him from getting anywhere in that realm was incorrect and so as the instructor a lot of that responsibility was on me not just on him being inexperienced and making an execution error in the fighter pilot world mistakes not to that level of high stakes because the Thunderbirds just perform with such a small margin of error. But mistakes like that with people you trust, like it's a thing that happens all the time. And I don't think it's the mistake that sabotages the trust. It's if we go into the debrief and they don't take feedback and they're not willing to have an open discussion about what they did wrong and what they were thinking and what we could do next time to make sure it doesn't happen again.

44:00And it's really that vulnerability, that willingness to fess up to those errors and not feel like all this shame and embarrassment around these mistakes that just happen all the time, again, not to that level, but of any degree, that will sabotage trust. Like, I can't trust you if you're keeping secrets when you mess stuff up. I can't trust you if I give you feedback and your ego doesn't let you accept it. But if you make a mistake airborne, that's part of the learning process. kind of surprised i hate to even say this that more like crashes don't happen you fly so close together you pass like that i watched the documentary like it seems like this would happen not frequently obviously because i know you guys are super super safe but you're doing something that's not safe it's very dangerous to fly an airplane it's very dangerous to fly a plane very close together all these things or at least it looks dangerous you pass as you just said it It feels like this would happen more frequently, but it doesn't seem to.

45:00Yeah, I think it's because we have such rigorous programs that build people up in that training season and we have such specific training standards. And honestly, the last couple of years, with the progression of tools like a GoPro that we can have mounted on the canopy, looking at the jet next to us, looking at the student who's trying to learn to fly formation in a maneuver, we have so many tools that we can analyze film afterwards. I tell that story because it sticks out as like the one closest call by far of all of the time. I did it for three years. I have almost a thousand hours in a Thunderbird jet.

45:41Close calls like that were not a regular occurrence. It's a tried and true building block approach where we start further apart. We have all these safety contracts. We start higher up. We work our way down as people's proficiency increases. And that debrief culture allows us to catch things, catch trends very quickly. You know, if someone starts to suddenly join up with the other aircraft with like too much speed, or they like start to do something weird with the angle that they're doing a maneuver at, or they start to like let themselves get too slow or whatever, we will catch that probably the first time it happens.

46:21If not like the second time where we're like, okay, you've done that twice in a row now, like, let's talk about it. That really is so critical in that safety culture to not let things start to drift, where they actually get into the realm of not the inherent level of danger, but oh, we're beyond that, like something is going to happen, something's going to go wrong because of how we're doing it. I think there's so much to be taken from the debrief culture and in our military and fighter pilots and the Thunderbirds. I'd love to hear the makeup of those meetings and then how you could take from that room and put it in a room and let's say a Fortune 500 company with managers, with leaders, so that they could say, oh, okay, they say this.

47:04This is how they open the meeting. This is how they get the feedback. This is how they ensure that mistake doesn't happen again. This is how they ensure there's trust moving forward. What is that room like and what could we take from that room outside of it in more of a corporate America environment? Yeah, there's so many things. I think one thing to preface that with is before we go fly, we of course plan, but then we also do a brief, like a mission brief beforehand. Prior, yeah. And the thing that we always open that with is our objectives for this mission, our objectives for this day are. And it's usually three to five things that are up there.

47:41And they are very much aligned with SMART goal format, right? They're specific, they're measurable, they're probably attainable for that specific mission. But I think really the measurable and the specificity are super important. And those three to five objectives support the overarching commander's intent is what we call it. And that is coming from some higher level being like, our goal for today is to destroy 80 % of this country's surface air missiles so that we can get to, for everyone that's seen Top Gun Maverick, right? to go in and take out 80 % of those surface-to-air missiles so that our strikers can get in or something like that.

48:24Like it's a big, our mission is successful if we do that. Clear goal. But to do that, we have to have other objectives that feed to it. So that's important to set up because as we get into the debrief, A, there's no distractions, no phones. It is like sanitized. You're going to be there until it's done. No interruptions. Like it's kind of intense at first, but you very quickly get used to that being how it is there. And it doesn't matter who you are. If you participated in that flight, you're going to be there. So whether you're a brand new lieutenant like I was in Japan, who's truly a beginner, just trying to learn everything for the first time.

49:01Or if you are the wing commander who might be like a one star general who oversees the entire base, but is a pilot by trade, they still have to fly a certain amount of times per month. They could be number four in a four jet formation going out to do a mission. And they're going to sit in that brief who's probably led by like a mid-level experience, super tactical captain major as far as rank. But people don't know rank. They've been flying for like four to eight years. They're like where the rubber really meets the road. They're the experts. Your brigadier general, he's just not that good because he has so many other things to worry about, right?

49:40He might have a ton of experience, but his skills are rusty because it's not his number one priority. So rank comes off. Status comes off. and the flight lead, so let's say that captain, is going to get up there and be like, okay, we went out and did this mission. Our objectives were, those are on the board, and then they're going to start running through. And the first thing they ask about was like, hey, did we have any questions from the brief? Was there anything where people went out the door to execute this mission with a question mark above their head? Did you understand the plan? which I think is a key thing that a lot of people don't talk about.

50:17They're like, oh, you messed this up. And you start to peel back all the layers of why that person messed that thing up. Turns out they didn't really understand the plan before you even started executing the plan. So that's the first thing we ask about. You have to clearly define what success looks like. Absolutely. And someone has a question, we'll say like a question mark above their canopy. the odds of them executing incorrectly in the high paced high stress environment that is the flight are very high so you talk about that and then you go through the mission and you're like okay that went great we executed that well everyone did what they were supposed to does anyone have any questions or feedback from like that segment so it's an opportunity like when something does go well maybe it went well but we got a little bit lucky and there was actually something that was a mistake that was made an execution error but it just worked out so we still will talk about that and then we'll move on to we're taking it like logical segments right for us it might be like oh take off taxi like departure good there okay now the actual mission we'll divide it up or whatever so that's going to look different depending on what you're talking about.

51:32But then let's say we failed at something. We lost friendly players, right? Like we're simulating an air to air fight and some of our good guys get shot down. So we're going to look at why that happened. Why did they have the protection? Why didn't they defend themselves? Why didn't they run away when they're supposed to? Like there's different criteria for all of that. And it's, did they not have the information they needed to make that decision? Did they have the correct information, but they just made the wrong choice? Or did they have bad information? Like looking at it very specifically and pulling that back to not just, oh, Lieutenant Taylor screwed up.

52:12Bad on you, Lieutenant Taylor. Do better next time. it's okay he chose to prioritize this instead of the correct thing because this radio call was made at a really poor time that distracted him we will just peel back the layers you've probably heard if you just keep asking why if you ask why like five times yeah probably got into like the actual cause and i think a lot of people stopped before that so we're all we're big on that now you get to the end and we're like, okay, did we meet our objectives? And we will go through each of those. Did we have no more than two friendly losses? Did we have bombs on time on target?

52:54Did we have whatever? And we will grade those. And if we didn't meet them, that should have been reflected in that discussion. We should have gotten into the why. And then we come down to the root cause of the ultimate thing that failed, if that is true. And that is like, our biggest thing was lack of communication between this entity and this entity. And we've already like gotten into the nitty gritty of the Y, Y, Y. And then I think something super important is we always walk away with a lesson learned. And the lesson learned might be like, if I was a student doing a dog fighting training flight.

53:33And I was like late to try to employ my weapons against my instructor. And so I missed my opportunity to take a shot. I might be like, today I flew, it's already XYZ. I did not take a shot when I had the chance. Next time I will. And it's going to get into like probably three-ish really specific teaching things that can keep it from happening again. Next time I will assess this amount of closure, like this many knots. Next time I will look for this visual reference on his airplane. Next time I will whatever. In a corporate environment that might look like, oh, our communication was shitty. And I didn't let the finance department know that I needed the invoice paid by this date.

54:21Next time I will create a timeline. I will bring this person in as a backup to make sure this happens. I will blah, blah, blah. And it's like rubber meets the road, tactical, super tangible things that they can take. The last piece is that don't keep a secret for the thing that you learned. Like share it with the rest of the organization, the rest of the team that wasn't part of that mission. And so some squadrons, like back in the day when I was young wingman, we had a bulletin board and we would fill out these post debrief sheets that were in that format we just discussed and you would put it up on the board.

54:59And so if I was going to go fly that mission that my buddy just flew last week, I would go to the bulletin board and find his sheet and be like, okay, what did he mess up? And what did he learn so that I don't have to make that same mistake? And obviously you can do that digitally now. Yeah, I love that. So that we don't have to make the same mistakes. We can learn not only from our own, but learn from others. I was going to ask you, for example, I worked in sales in corporate America before doing this full-time. And there's a rep level, there's a manager level, there's a director level, and there's a VP level.

55:31And sometimes for the really big deals, you might bring all of those people on the sales call. When it goes bad, what happens is there's not enough planning. So there's not the pre-meeting brief. There's like, all right, this is a big one. Okay. You're going to run it and we'll support you. That's sometimes how they go. All right, your point. And then we're just going to come in here and support you as opposed to actually having a plan. And then you get out of it. And maybe the VP, who's a little out of school because they're doing all the VP stuff and not the sales stuff. And they maybe not know what they're talking about, but they think their power or title can add and then they don't do a good job.

56:04But the rep or the manager is still like, can I tell them? I don't know. And it certainly depends on the VP. Some of them want it and are good at that. And some of them don't. I've had both in my career. How is it in that room when you have the mid-level person with the senior person, You could use ranks if you want. But how is that communication up and down the chain when doing the debrief? I think it only works because it's so ingrained in that culture. Like that senior person, they came up through the ranks. And you are taught when you are going through your initial training course to learn to fly the airplane.

56:42And you're being debriefed every flight because you're a student and you're just bad at everything. That like, hey, we fess up when we make an error. We talk about the mistakes. We learn from them. We apply them next time. And you'll often hear people say like more learning happens in the debrief than actually does during the flight itself. And then you have to go, of course, fly again and apply the skills to really solidify it. But if you are the top person, the general or whoever, you've probably been doing this for like 20 years. And so you are very much bought into that culture. the egos that people see in hollywood around fighter pilots i think there's some external confidence there that can come across as arrogance but what they don't show and what people don't associate with us necessarily is the humility that has to happen behind the scenes like among your peers i think of the scene in the original top gun he's like hit the brakes and and he'll fly right by, and then he engages and gets them.

57:46And they're in the debrief, though, and Charlie is like, that was way too reckless and dangerous or whatever. Like, I would imagine that's obviously dramatized. But that's like a look at a debrief, I would assume. Yeah, and that would happen. Like, if someone did some super aggressive leg roll upside down thing to rejoin with their flight lead when they could have just drove forward and slowed down, people aren't going to be like, whoa, bro, that was so cool. they're going to be like, why would you take on all that unnecessary risk? Like that was reckless. I better not see you do it again. Yeah.

58:19Yeah. Michelle, I could talk to you forever. I love this. And I appreciate all of our conversations in between last time we recorded in this one. I'm so pumped for your book to come out. But before we get to that, I just have one more question. That is, let's say you're meeting with someone who's maybe early to mid-20s, maybe a college grad, maybe in the military, but they want to leave a positive dent in the world, but they're not exactly sure how. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to them? I think when you're young, there is a period where you have to be a little bit more focused on yourself and on learning and honing skills and making some progress and starting things before you feel ready and stumbling through and making mistakes and figuring it out.

59:05because that experience, it's not self-centered to spend that first six to eight years in your career doing that because now there's going to be a point where you've built your competence because you've gotten the reps with whatever skill you're honing. And that has inherently given you some confidence. Like you've proven to yourself that you have a track record that, yes, I can do this. And even if I mess it up, I can learn from that and that's okay. And I can keep going. but then there's going to get to a point where you realize you've gained a little bit of wisdom and that doesn't have you don't have to be like 40 of that right like i think a lot of people start to experience that as they get to their late 20s early 30s and now you get to reach a hand back yeah and you get to get with that new grad or that new hire or that person that you can see yourself in and you remember how scary it was and how uncomfortable it was.

1:00:00And you can be that mentor. You can be that person who goes with curiosity and vulnerability and is like, hey, I see you. I remember when it was like that. What are you going through? What can I help with? Is there anything you're struggling with right now? And I think it, of course, helps that person you reach a hand back to, but it also becomes one of the most fulfilling things for you as well. I mean, you went from year one to year two. So year one, you're kind of being trained to year two where you become the teacher, the trainer. I found, I'm curious to hear from you, when you shifted from year one to year two, when you're teaching somebody else, and you know this because you're speaking on stages all over the world, you got to know your stuff.

1:00:42So there might be no better tool for learning than teaching, right? Than being the mentor, than helping others because you want to be useful. You want to be helpful to other people. And so when you're in that role, whether you're on stage or you're in year two as a Thunderbird, you're the one who's actually probably learning a ton. Yes. And I think that was one of those things I didn't have perspective on at first. I always was like, oh, the IP, as we call them, the instructor pilots, they just know everything. Like I put them on a pedestal and then I became an instructor pilot. I was like, oh my gosh, I have no idea what I'm doing.

1:01:14I had all of this like performance anxiety myself, even though I was the one grading the student, because reference that near head-on collision, a lot of onus is on you as the instructor. And your students will teach you more than you probably learned and in a different way than when you were a student. And I think that first year of being a brand new instructor pilot is stressful, but the growth that happens for the person doing the teaching during that time is immense. Yes. All leaders should put themselves in the position of being a teacher on a regular basis. You learn so much. Michelle, a book's called The Flip Side, How to Invert Your Perspective and Turn Fear into Your Superpower.

1:01:58I know you've worked like crazy, not only on writing it and putting it together, but also on launching it big. I'm pumped for you. I think it's going to be huge. It's super well-written. It's enjoyable. it's useful entertaining kind of checks all the boxes so again excited for you and i know we're going to continue our dialogue as we both progress absolutely this is fun you asked a bunch of questions i haven't been asked before so well done cool thank you all right we'll talk again soon see you

1:02:29it is the end of the podcast club thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club If you are, send me a note. Ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Michelle Curran. A few takeaways from my notes. The pre-mission brief. What is our objective? What does success look like on this mission? I love how they are crystal clear on what their goals are, and then they build the plan to hit those goals, to hit the objective. The debrief afterwards ensures that they learn from both the success and failure from each mission. Did we hit the objective?

1:03:11What went well? What went right? What didn't? What can we learn from this? I think we should all do this in our business lives. lives. We could have a pre-session brief. What are we trying to do as our group goes on this sales call? And then afterwards, we debrief it to ensure that we're learning from it. Next, don't keep it a secret for the things you're learning. I love that they actually have an actual bulletin board hanging up where people could post their notes and key learning so that others could learn too. A learning culture is a healthy culture. Now, you could do this digitally. You don't need a bulletin board, but I think having some place for people to share mistakes and key learnings and what they learn for both the success and failures of what's going on within their worlds could help the team and the company overall get better.

1:04:03And then the idea of curiosity plus vulnerability equals community. One of the ways you can show someone else love is to be genuinely curious about them. Ask them specific questions. Listen. Ask follow-up questions. Show them how much you care about them by how curious you are about them and their story. And then you got to be there for them, especially when times are hard. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Michelle Curran. I think she'll help you become a more effective leader.

1:04:45And because you continue to do that, and you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and you subscribe to the Learning Leader Show, and you're rated hopefully five stars, and you write a thoughtful review by doing all of that, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.

1:05:14Thank you.