Pilots are a proud breed. The expense of training, both financial and emotional, makes it quite an exclusive club. Like a lot of clubs, membership depends on not showing any weaknesses that the rest of the ‘pack’ can use against you. Pilots are therefore quite poor at admitting their concerns or therefore dealing with them.
The RAF introduced performance coaching for pilots in about 10 years ago. The concept was brilliant. It chimed with a lot I had learned through being a helicopter and fixed wing instructor, a human factors facilitator and former athlete.
Human performance is about grace under pressure. Most top sportsmen rely on performance coaches. Mo Farrah isn’t world record holder for the 10000m but he has gold medals from several Olympics and World Championships. When he lined up you could see in his eyes that he ‘knew’ he was going to win. Conversely the American sprinter Marion Jones ‘choked’ at the 2001 World Championships 100m final when she found Ukrainian Zhanna Pintusevich-Block on her shoulder after 20m, the point when she was normally ahead. Her technique fell apart and she lost.
Pilots have similar pressures. Mostly flying isn’t too tricky: as long as you see half blue, half green out of the front window you know you’re straight and level and the right way up (as long as the blue is on the top). However landing can be quite sporty and you don’t get to practise it very often. Some airline pilots get to practise 3 times a month. New pilots starting out fly circuits, orbits of the airfield, so they can keep practising landings. As flying more or less ‘grew up’ with the military the standard of instruction can be very military: anything less than perfection isn’t good enough and if you don’t get it right the instructor will shout louder. “I can do it, why can’t you” is an oft mimicked, and not entirely unfair, impression of some of the less capable instructors.
Mostly, pilots teach themselves to fly despite, rather than because of, the instructor. At least I suspect my students do. Most of the coaching I do is helping pilots learn to be themselves in the cockpit. Everyone performs much better when they can draw on all their abilities.
Coaching works best when the client, or ‘coachee’ as some call them, can identify a specific issue they want to work on.
Because of the attitude engendered by many in the flying training world most students would rather ‘man-up (or woman-up)’ and avoid any help until there is no other option. They would come to me and when I asked what they wanted to work on they would say, “I just want to pass the course.” It would take about 45 mins to unwrap the layers until I could get to the nub of the problem. It is much easier when someone says “I want to get better at my link flying” (flying accurately between exercises) or “I’m getting myself stressed when….”.
Asking for and accepting help is one of the hardest and bravest things to do. It feels like admitting vulnerability. As most people would agree though, “two heads are better than one” and in high performance occupations it often takes an observer to be able to spot what’s going on. My athletics coach used to spend hours helping me relax when performing. The Royal Marines,one of the toughest military units in the world teaches its recruits from day one to help each other. I still remember when I was doing the commando course. We were crossing a road in the dark and, having been helped up the steep bank on the other side I offered a hand to help the next man up. I caught my breath when I realized the powerful implication of someone, particularly a hoary soldier, accepting my help.
Coaching pilots (and air traffic controllers) has been fascinating. They often arrive believing that ‘they just don’t have what it takes’. I even heard a seasoned instructor who was struggling to transfer to another aircraft type suggest that, perhaps, he just didn’t have enough ‘capacity’. Capacity is a word, like ‘talent’, that those already in the club use to condemn those who “will never make it”. Very often, though, capacity is a function of knowing where to look and what to prioritise. Like the new driver struggling to coordinate finding the right gear and not stalling, new pilots, faced with a panel full of dials, struggle to know which one to look at. In ground theory it’s made clear to them. But ground theory doesn’t immediately become a motor skill. As Terry Pratchett used to put it:”…..the way his knees moved was as if he had learned how to walk from a book.”
I use a lot of imagery to identify where people might be going wrong. One Apache pilot noticed that he was tensing up just as he started approaches to land as I got him to imagine what was going on. Another pilot was struggling with PFLs (practice forced landings). We discovered, as we imaged it, that he was more worried about selecting a field to land in as per the book rather than flying the aircraft accurately. He had come to me worried about what happened at the end of the PFL and we traced it back to the start.
People’s personalities also have a huge bearing on how they fly. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator, based on Carl Jung’s theories, is a really effective tool to find out where people’s priorities are. Some ‘types’ seem to be far more suited to the style of instruction offered in the aviation world. It doesn’t mean they make better pilots in the long run. Eventually pilots ‘strap the aircraft on’ and it becomes an extension of their personality; just as car drivers mostly admit to learning to drive after they pass their test. Sometimes those who sail through training make poor aircraft captains because they have never had to develop the other, often more important skills, of crew resource managment (understanding the rest of the crew and getting the best from them).
For many, just showing them their type is sufficient for them to relax and be themselves. The left handed child who joins a tennis club where everyone else picks up the tennis racket right handed will assume he has to play right handed. When he learns his preference for being left handed he can chose either to start playing backhand when the others are playing forehand or realize he’ll just have to work harder to play right handed but, boy oh boy, when playing on the left side of the court “watch out world!”
Often pilots take the outside world into the cockpit with them. Their single minded focus on flying can ferment problems at home and in their wider life which they’ll worry about. One bloke I worked with using Gestalt technique (one of the many ‘techniques and tools’ of coaching involving being aware of everything in the room) became quite uncharacteristically emotional when he realized that his angst with his mum’s talking about his dad was actually his own self-loathing for not properly grieving for his dad.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is another technique I work with. Just asking people to recall moments of high stress and work through more ‘helpful’ ways of reframing that particular concern helps them to build and strengthen new neural pathways and develop their automatic response.
As an adherent of the Human Givens approach I have used Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell’s teaching to help pilots overcome the trauma of landing without hydraulics (effectively stiff controls which the pilot has made stiffer by tensing up under ‘trauma’) in simulated emergencies. I’ve used their teaching to help people deal with sleep and anxiety issues. It’s quite important for pilots and air traffic controllers to be properly rested.
Prof Steve Peters’ book The Chimp Paradox and Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow are often quoted as the ‘coachee’ and I have a rummage around their thought processes and realize a lot of it is being directed by their inner chimp: the emotional, digital, self-loathing, insecure and often lazy inner primate. So often pilots say to me: “I know it when I’m on the ground, why did I forget it all in the air?” or worse: “….why did I do it that way? I never do it that way.”
Steven Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People gets an airing quite often as does Terry Orlick’s In Pursuit of Excellence. We often use ‘Orlick’s Wheel’ to help clients identify where they’re most concerned.
People get mostly distracted with focusing on the bits that went wrong. Of course it’s a popular misconception to assume that pilots can’t make mistakes. Actually aeroplanes and helicopters these days fly themselves often better than the pilot. Even when they don’t the best thing a pilot can do is ‘sit on his hands’ and engage brain before acting. If he focuses on what went or could go wrong he’s not focusing on what he can do about the situation. It’s a really useful exercise to get people to focus on what they can affect in their current circumstances rather than bleating about all the things they can’t. Many pilots have left a session clutching my crude sketch of a brain: it’s only big enough to focus on either what it can influence or what it’s concerned about. Much better to fill it up with ideas of what it can do.
Many in coaching, psychotherapy, mentoring and every other ‘brain learns how to repair itself’ specialism get really excited about labels and crossing boundaries. When I last upgraded I had to convince my supervisor that I knew the difference between coaching and mentoring. I often think of that meeting when I drift from to the other.
Ideally a coach knows nothing about the subject they’re coaching in as it means they’re completely unshackled by preconceptions and avoid any temptation to ‘tell’ a client how to act. Everyone does things best their own way so someone else’s ‘way’ won’t be necessarily optimum. As a flying instructor it would have been dead easy for me to ‘tell’ someone how to ‘just get better’. Fortunately I’m not that ‘talented’ and I have to work quite hard at how I do stuff. I suspect few would thrive doing it my way. I do, however, offer what works for me occasionally. If nothing else, it gives them a ‘right of arc’ and an idea of how extreme they could be with their ideas. It’s interesting though, adopting the mantel of ‘coach knows nothing about flying’. Asking questions about how to do things or what abbreviations actually mean (and, believe me, there are a lot) helps me start to look at the whole subject with fresh eyes. It’s hugely enlightening.
Just sitting and listening to pilots work their way through mental blocks has really opened my own eyes to how the flying world does business and, by extension, the wider world. I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse. It’s exciting realizing the power of thought; it’s depressing watching ‘world leaders’ making the same mistakes pilots make in their cockpits. Being able to draw on a variety of coaching, counselling, mentoring and even psychotherapy techniques has been hugely beneficial. Just a sitting in a cockpit requires finger-tip access to a plethora of strange skills; coaching pilots is similar.
Those who have been involved in coaching will recognize how powerful it is. Adrian Ryecroft, the man who created aircrew performance for the RAF was a genius.