By Jason Davenhill

Performance coaching has been well proven in sports and is gaining traction with business executives. It has been adopted by the U.S. Air Force during training at its Colorado Springs Academy and across the Royal Air Forces and several other air forces. Its philosophy is about building in readiness – not just physical readiness, but the mental readiness and resilience vital in aviation.

I have been an aviation performance coach for many years. I believe it is the most powerful tool I have come across in aviation. It helps you understand yourself better. It’s like being able to watch yourself in the simulator without anyone else criticising.

Good coaching is like being a good pilot: it’s intuitive. Just as you listen to what the aircraft is telling you, a good coach will listen carefully to what you’re saying and, more importantly, what you’re not saying.

As aviation begins to explore how to help pilots maintain readiness for the flight deck it must also include coaching with which it is only now coming to grips.

Whilst psychotherapy might be seen as helping people “walk” again after an incident, coaching is about helping people be as mentally strong and flexible as they can be, so they can deal with anything life throws at them.

Let me tell you a story:

Colin was a very experienced pilot. An ex-military helicopter and multi-engine pilot, he had held loads of senior roles. He was now the senior pilot of a small executive jet organisation, but he wasn’t enjoying it. He felt that his junior colleagues were sharper than he was and that he just wasn’t ‘up to it’ anymore. His wife knew that her favourite quarter back worked with a performance coach to keep him at the top of his game.

“Why not try an aircrew coach?” she suggested. He contacted me and we worked together for a couple of sessions. By the end, Colin knew exactly how to change his approach. He is now loving it and proud once again of his competence. Colin isn’t his real name, but the story is true.

My name is Jason Davenhill. I spent most of my life in the Royal Air Force primarily as a Chinook helicopter pilot and instructor. As life moved on, I was able to teach army, navy and air force pilots on helicopters and fixed wing at every level from elementary to front line. When I left the RAF, I turned my flying qualifications into civilian ones.

Halfway through this journey, I trained to become an aircrew performance coaching. I introduced coaching to the army school of flying where I was the RAF deputy chief flying instructor. It was the first time we had had a whole course pass and, better still, 4 of the 5 prize winners came to me for coaching. My experience tells me performance coaching enables better training results but also greater ability to perform and lead on the flight deck. I think I can often achieve more in an hour on the ground than I can in two hours in the air.

Mental Blocks

When Simone Biles bowed out of the 2021 Olympics saying she was having mental health issues, it was a game changer in understanding how to approach mental health, fitness and performance. Her head was not in the game. She was not happy and had the strength to make a stand on behalf of her health and the team. It’s called being mentally blocked, like Colin, who’s head was not in the game.

Most of why we struggle in life, in the flight deck or air traffic control tower is because of mental blocks. Coaching is about having a discussion with someone who is entirely on your side. The discussion and space allow you to reveal what’s really going on underneath. Pilots are very capable and very proud. In my experience, few reveal their concerns about their professional abilities and performance to fellow pilots. That’s where coaching comes in.

Most flying instructors will tell you how they would solve your problem. Why wouldn’t they? Pilots are problem solvers. That is not what you need. Only you can solve your issues or identify the changes you need to be the best version of yourself in life and on the flight deck. A good coach will help you probe what’s going on and then create the conditions for you to find your own way forward.

What You Need to Know in Choosing a Coach

After my speech during the World Airline Training Summit in the U.S. which gathered the top trainers from around the world, I was asked to write an article about coaching as part of the mental health and performance toolkit. I was asked for some idea on how to find a coach. Many have said there seem to be a lot of people claiming to be coaches, wondering if there is any accepted qualification?

That is an interesting question. There are several organisations that accredit coaches – the Association for Coaching (AC), the International Coaching Federation (ICF), European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC), the Internation Association of Coaching (IAC), Center for Credentialing and Education (CCE) and probably several others.

The psychotherapy/psychology/coaching world is a bit like the world of aviation: flying is mostly keeping half blue, half green out of the front window. Yet pilots must pass a lot of theory exams that bear little relation to the actual business of landing an aircraft safely. Many coaching qualifications test theory rather than ability.

Good coaching is like being a good pilot: it’s intuitive. Just as you listen to what the aircraft is telling you, a good coach will listen carefully to what you’re saying and, more importantly, what you’re not saying.

Things to look for in a coach:

1. They listen to you. Listening without judgment is a rare skill. I have encountered several coaches who ‘leap on’ individual words and try and ‘fix’ those rather than listening to the whole story. That is not what you need.

2. They can work within your paradigm: your model of the world.  Our brain isn’t big enough to deal with every nuance in the world around us, so we make sense of it through analogies, stories and metaphors. Think about how we teach children right from wrong: through fairy stories. I encountered a lady teaching a course I was on, technically a senior coach, who couldn’t work with my models of how aviation supervision has a lot of similarities with coaching supervision. It was clear to me that she didn’t actually understand where I was coming from and, therefore, didn’t seem to value my perspective. Rather than walking with me, helping me unpick my metaphors, she told me I was wrong to think like that…..about the worst thing a coach can do. 

3. They have the imagination and flexibility to keep up with your stories and analogies. We use stories like buses. We get on and get off when they’re going our way.

4. They don’t try and sell you a package; they tailor their coaching to you. Lots of the coaching ‘industry’ and indeed psychotherapy world seems to be about delivering complete packages. In aviation we think that people only learn to fly if they are put through a linear course. In fact, different people learn to fly at different rates and in different ways. The same is true of coaching and mental health therapy. They are individualized and cannot then be part of a “package.”

5. They have sufficient awareness of your world to be able to work with your technical issues. Aviation is almost like a religion.  You don’t know how immersed you are in the artifacts. A good coach will find ways to ‘get inside’ the technical terminology to get to the root of the issue.

6. They can probe these technical issues to see what’s going on underneath. In life many real issues ‘hide’ behind the words we use and believe. Often, if someone says they do something it’s normally the one thing they’re not doing. For instance, politicians often say “let me be honest with you” when they’re patently not. That’s an extreme example, but if you listen carefully it’s happening all the time. We all do it, to a certain extent. Talk the talk rather than walking the walk.

7. They are affiliated to a coaching organisation. Just about everyone can call themselves a coach. Some are very good. Lots are merely ok. Affiliation to an organisation won’t guarantee the quality, but it will ensure that you get someone who cares about being the best they can be.

8. They have regular supervision of their practice. Coaches are in a very powerful position. But they are still just people, subject to their own biases and perceptions. Coaching supervision helps them reframe their own perspective, maintain their own self-improvement and keeps them ‘honest’.

As Desmond Tutu said: “We spend all our time fishing people out of the river. Why don’t we go upstream and find out why they’re falling in, in the first place?”. I suggest that coaching is about teaching people to swim and actually enjoying the water, so they don’t get themselves in trouble in the first place.

You can find me on LinkedIn or at my website: www.inflowperformance.com if you’d like to know more about helping you understand what coaching can do for you and what to look for.

Happy flying.

About the author: Jason Davenhill spent 30 years in the military first as a Royal Marines commando and then Royal Air Force pilot and instructor. A high-level track athlete and keen musician he has been coaching and supervising coaches for over a decade.

It can be learned. What you feel and think, emotions and desires, are part of being you. Assuming those desires and emotions aren’t about harming others then they are probably perfectly valid. I believe that everyone is doing the best they can within their particular perspective, it’s just many try to be someone they’re not: someone else.

The trouble is we live in a society where it really matters to us what others think. At the age of two we hear for the first time the word “No!” It causes no end of angst. Up until this point we have been masters of everything we see and touch. We’re hungry; someone feeds us. We see something and reach out for it; someone lets us have it. Our ego boundary is limitless. Then this freedom comes to an end when we reach two. People start to ‘control’ our lives, our ego boundary collapses and suddenly we’re aware of an outside world. The fear and anger in this change of circumstances manifests itself as ‘the terrible twos’.

For the next 30-odd years we ‘trim’ our expectations to fit in. We stop listening to our inner selves; everyone important to us tells us it’s wrong; parents, school friends, colleagues, the media. Why would we listen? Unless we’re lucky enough to have the confidence to exude the confidence of feeling complete we assume others must know better. But as is often pointed out: you are the best at being yourself. 

It’s the same with organizations. Too many try to emulate others rather than ‘being themselves’.  Wracked by insecurities many organizations look outwards rather than concentrating on what it is they’re trying to do. Just as calming practices like mindfulness allow individuals to ‘listen’ to themselves and what their bodies are telling them, a good organization, and certainly those with any power, will listen carefully to the staff, particularly the front line staff.

The Great Barrier Reef is often described as the largest living thing in the world. A bee hive could be described, too, as a living thing. The boundaries between organism and organization may not be as clear cut as some would think.

If you are someone who thinks you are special, that those colleagues on different levels are somehow inferior or, perhaps, stratospherically superior, take some time to consider what your organization, that’s everyone working together, is ‘for’. What are you best at? And when you’ve worked it out focus on making yourselves even better at it.

A team is only as good as its members; a good team rarely needs ‘leaders’ merely members who listen to each other and work together and defer to the specialist. The arms, legs, bowels, heart and other squidgy bits all have a part to play keeping we humans alive. None is more important than any other. So too an organization should value and listen to every constituent part. After all, what trouble would we get in if we didn’t have 5-senses to back up the information when one of them gets deceived?

Think of this next time you want to be disparaging of others within your team. Are you all working to make the organization comfortable with itself?

Can you have multiple aims? In my simple world as an athlete it was relatively easy to define the aims: run as fast as possible over a certain distance. There were some definite stepping stones and measures on the way – UK under 20s, county championships and Southern Counties – but of the aims of the year there was only one: do as well as possible at the English Schools. Life goals involve aligning diverse patterns each with their own modulations. The year’s ‘goal’ was the point at which all these modulations had to dove tail. For every other event something might not be quite right. Knowing an event wasn’t the priority allowed us to accept a degree of imperfection in the conditions.

When coaching I am always careful to help clients define specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound goals. Normally, I try and get them to define just one. If someone says they want to be happy I’ll ask them what that will mean to them. If they list a series of measures I’ll ask them to define the most important. Essentially, at some stage there’s likely to be a conflict between priorities: eg spend more time with the family or run every week at Park Run. If family time is the priority and there is something specific to do with family time that conflicts with Park Run then the decision is much easier to make.

The more I’ve thought about it the more I think you can only have one priority. Everything else is just conditions, process goals, and environmental factors in which the ecology of the priority sits.

Plenty of companies have goals, priorities and mission statements that either try and list everything or say nothing. The happy company is the one that is honest about its priorities. I often cite John Lewis as an excellent example. The model where all workers are partners acknowledges that the company’s priority is its people. It exists to interact with the rest of the world for the benefit of its staff. If its sales take a dip the team suffers. Sports Direct, on the other hand, exists for the benefit of its owner.

The British military will claim that it exists to protect Britain. Yet has adventurism in other people’s civil wars made Britain any safer? In honesty the military should be there to keep a trained seed corn should the country or its interests ever be under real physical threat.

Coaching is about helping people identify their focus and how to arrange their lives to ensure they honour this focus. It is the same with companies. Most have mission statements but if the mission statement doesn’t actually reflect the main thrust of activity then a degree of dissonance will creep in and it will be less effective.

I haven’t written a blog for a while, probably because I have been focused on other priorities. It’s been a busy year and, to a certain extent, it’s felt as though I have been gathering nuts and fruit and other materials to help me on the next stage of my journey. I don’t think I have necessarily lost focus but that focus has been difficult to keep an eye on in a patch of fog. I’ve had to get out my metaphorical compass and make sure I’m still travelling in the right direction.

That direction is to get myself in the best position to help others.

I made me think. A lot of people seem to have succeeded despite the hardship they’ve endured. Or maybe it’s the hardship that honed their approach. Has the hardship they’ve worked through presented them with a new challenge every day? Have they had to learn to learn?

When I was in basic training in the Royal Marines I found it hard work. I wasn’t really cut out for getting cold and wet and tired. I remember, though, how life became so much more ‘colourful’. On the odd occasion we were dismissed in time for ‘tea and stickies’ in the mess the tea was the best tasting tea I’d ever drunk. I made me realize that life is like a roller coaster. You have to have the downs to enjoy the ups; no-one would pay to go on a roller coaster that climbed to the tree tops and then trundled round at the same level.

That taught me to appreciate the ‘downs’ as a prelude to the ‘ups’. However, this coping strategy started to wane. As I was presented with new ‘downs’ I cheered myself up with the thought that it would soon get better…and then something else would happen to make it worse. I had to learn to adjust ‘on the hoof’.

At each stumble I had to adjust how I dealt with it. Nothing is ever the same. If you learn to adjust your coping mechanism and learn how to learn to adjust you can keep moving forward. If not you get stuck where you are. For most of us our parents are there somewhere in the background as a safety net or with the odd example of how they have coped. Martin Lewis didn’t have that after his mother’s death. His ‘learning to learn how to adjust’ would have been tenfold.

“But what of all those who succumb to their traumas? Lots of people have lost parents or suffered other tremendous loss and they haven’t all become successful.” I hear you say.

I believe at any one time a conservative estimate of 80% of the population will look for the safe option. They ‘choose’ not to accept the challenge. This is probably why so much was achieved in the second world war; we had no choice once committed. It’s also why a lot of skills that rely on inter-human relationships like psychotherapy and counselling, medical interventions that require ‘buy-in’ from the patient and teaching are quite slow to progress. You have two brains both with only a 20% chance of wanting to ‘learn’ and move forward. 20% of 20% is 4 %.

“What about those born into privilege: the ‘leaders’ of the country?”

Unless they go out of their way to look for situations that will challenge their strategies they will steadily slow down and fall behind. That could be why it feels like the UK and many of our much vaunted institutions are starting to fall behind, reinventing out of date concepts and indeed why the ‘factory setting’ is to look overseas for ‘talented’ and trained immigrants to fill our shortfalls. We as a nation appear to have forgotten how to learn.

As many of you will know from previous blogs I believe change starts at the core and radiates outwards. You can’t ‘buy in’ change and success. If you’d like to learn how to challenge yourself and how to learn from the experience drop me a line at the Inflow Performance Facebook page, the Breaking Free group page or the Inflow Performance website. It won’t be easy but it’ll be worth it.

Best regards,
Jace

When you encounter a new situation it is helpful to react by moving in a sensible direction. Our fight or flight response will make us stand our ground, run away or freeze. However if you don’t know in which direction you need to run you may get yourself in trouble. It is said that when a couple walks into a social setting the woman will, within a few seconds, have worked out which other couples are forming, which are falling apart, who have fallen out and who are getting closer. In the same time the bloke will have worked out where the food, the toilet and the escape exit are. If you don’t have a rough idea of what direction you’re going to travel you may run up a blind alley.

I believe this is where planning comes in. In the flying world pilots are encouraged to learn ‘immediate actions’. These are sometimes also called ‘bold face drills’ because in the flight reference cards (FRCs) they are printed in bold. However, before these immediate actions can be carried out there is an even more important requirement: fly the aircraft. The mnemonic ‘aviate, navigate, communicate’ is probably a more important priority list. The FRCs are undoubtedly a very useful check list and an excellent plan but the actual emergency might not be exactly as the engineers and the authors of the cards anticipated.

What you should do is set off in a direction but then start to review the direction of travel before it becomes too ‘set in stone’ (see my blog about changing vectors). I’ve long thought that companies that select people through their ability to solve simple problems set themselves up for problems down stream because they don’t assess the ability to deal with wicked problems: the ability to change direction when more information becomes available…or even when the original information is analyzed in greater depth. The military has countless ‘leaders’ who are wedded to the idea that changing direction is a sign of weakness; they’ll press on as the gulf between their plan and reality grows.

The initial ‘plan’ is part of the work we should do to strengthen our core. The more we rehearse a direction of travel the more likely we are to follow that direction when we encounter something new. For example we inadvertently have a ‘direction of travel’ when we meet someone new. If your ‘planned’ direction is to distrust everyone ‘below’ in the hierarchy or of a different gender, ethnicity or age they’ll notice that distrust and refuse to trust you in return. Better to train yourself to set off in a neutral direction until you have had a chance to refine the plan.

I wonder whether there is a place for integrated planning, like my idea of integrated learning (see blog on Linked In).

y = m is a straight line on a graph. The plan never changes. As Blackadder says “would this be the plan where we climb out of the trenches and walk very slowly towards the enemy?”

Refining the plan in the light of a post-event debrief is akin to integrating it once:

y = mx is now a line with a gradient. The plan is changed by constant increments. But it relies on people being prepared to change the plan and even if they will change the changes are subjected to a rigid process.

Training your ability to review and plan ‘on the hoof’ and accepted that changes need not be linear integrates the equation further:

y = mx squared.

It’s probably all to do with having a plan that allows you to use all three parts of your brain. The fight or flight response needs a direction to go. The chimp will want to defend a position so it needs something to keep it busy. Then the human brain, when it catches up, can review the work of the other two brains and refine the plan or maybe change direction.

In essence planning to adjust the plan in the light of new evidence is very important. After we have ‘aviated’ (put the aircraft at the right speed), navigated (pointed in a safe direction), and communicated (told someone, even the rest of the crew of our plan) it’s good practice to ‘sit on your hands’. Do nothing until your human brain has caught up.

Many people criticize ‘unworkable’ plans as ‘planning to fail’. I disagree. A plan is often a basis for change but you have to know what you’re starting from before you can make any realistic changes.

Many years ago I was training officer on the Chinook operational conversion unit. We ‘converted’ pilots, mostly fresh out of the box with newly minted wings, teaching them how to fly and operate the Chinook. The collective inner chimp in the ivory towers generating policy thought it was best to run large unwieldy courses. The usual approach was to crisis manage the courses all the way through, sticking rigidly to ‘sensible’ plans and ‘sensible’ planning assumptions and then push the end of the course back when it didn’t work properly.

I approached the problem a different way. It was quite labour intensive initially as I planned the whole course in detail before we’d even started. I built in chunks of flex time so I had a bit of room for manoeuvre. It allowed me to allocate the same instructors to the same students for large portions of the course so there was continuity and even the chance that individual instructors would tweak their delivery as necessary confident in the knowledge they could pre-load or pick up missed exercises when conditions warranted. Plenty of people told me how foolhardy I was doing all that extra effort and… “anyway, it’s bound to come off the rails at some point.”

The beauty of this approach was that when something did change – aircraft refused to work, British weather took its toll – I was able to adjust the plan knowing what the knock-on would be. Despite the changes I was still able to ring fence people’s leave or unexpected weddings etc. Sometimes, I even brought forward other elements. Unfortunately, I had one of those bosses you dread. Not clever enough to keep up with the original plan he waded in with his size 8s (I think he had quite small feet – indicative of brain size I suspect) and tried to force me to go back to a ‘sensible” way of planning. That caused extra work I hadn’t budgeted for. I didn’t really change my approach because it was benefiting everyone else, but I had to put more effort into disguise.

In essence, and exactly as Tim Davies would say: fail to plan; plan to fail. That said, understand that your plan isn’t a digital ‘thing’. Once it’s made there’s no reason it can’t be changed in the light of new evidence. Plan to re-plan as necessary.

Coaching is a lot about challenging assumptions. If your life plan or whatever plan you’re working to isn’t getting you what you want have another look at the plan. If you’d like me to help you review your options please drop me a line either through the Inflow Performance Facebook page, the Breaking Free group page or the Inflow Performance website.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Jace