uʍop ǝpısdn ƃuıʎlɟ
I bring two (well, three, if you count the dog) personal practices with me to work every day. One is my meditation practice, which continues to be a wonderful tool for dealing with stress and aggravation, kind of like having your own private beach right there in the office. I should probably talk about that a bit more, but I’ll save that for another time.
The practice I want to talk about today is flying, or more specifically, aerobatic flying. In so many ways, aerobatic flying is truly what flying is all about. Exploring every dimension, every corner of the airplane’s capability; loops, rolls and spins; right side up, upside down, straight up, straight down. Part of the journey in aerobatic flying is learning to comfortably fly upside down (see image above, which is actually taken from a video of me flying upside down), because flying upside down, or inverted, is totally different from flying right side up. The control inputs are opposite and your perception of right and left and east and west are completely skewed. In fact, pretty much everything our brain thinks it knows is wrong, and it has to relearn some pretty basic concepts on the fly. Keeping that in mind, here are just a few things that I’ve learned from my inverted aerobatic experience and some disciplines they can bring to business decision making.
Flying your business point of view upside down means introducing totally new and fresh behavior patterns and make them your own. It’s not easy. It’s a challenge to overcome the brain when you logically predetermine a sequence of steps but your experience tells you they are the opposite of what you should be doing. Second, in a time when all of the rules have changed, you should stop assuming anything based on your past experience. Just stop making assumptions. Stop thinking you know the answer because chances are you don’t. In a world turned upside down, we actually don’t know jack.
A week or so ago, I was practicing flying inverted on my own. I was nice and stable on an easterly heading and I told myself to turn north. Well, don’t you know it, but I found myself heading south. Duh! And then I burst into laughter. Upside down, hanging by the straps, almost in tears with laughter, because suddenly I realized how cool this all was and how aerobatics is just like business and just like life. If you find yourself in an upside down world, you better make your decisions based on being upside down - if you don’t you’ll be turning left when you need to go right and going down when you want to go up. How well we fly and how well we run our businesses, marriages and lives when everything is topsy-turvy depends on how well we practice. Unusual attitudes and inverted flight teach us a whole lot more than we give credit. I’m still not great at it, but I am getting better. And I think my clients also appreciate the fresh perspective on their challenges.
And about the dog? Well, right now he is gently snoring on a soft bed in the corner of my office. A perspective on business that perhaps we all could use…..
