Ep#41: What Can Skydiving Teach Us About Leadership?

In this episode, Peter steps into the spotlight, recounting how his skydiving experiences shaped his perspective on courage, self-talk, goal-setting, and teamwork. As Peter Peter reflects on this skydiving journey, he draws parallels between skydiving and working in organizations. 

In this episode, you will 
• discover the power of visualization for driving outcomes
• understand the importance of finding your community 
• learn how the ritual of regular debrief can drive productivity and performance 

Transcript

00:00.84

drdani

Hey Peter.

00:02.16

Peter

Dani how are you?

00:03.36

drdani

I am good, how are you?

00:04.72

Peter

I'm very well, thank you, yes.

00:08.54

Peter

nervous with anticipation.

00:11.88

drdani

Yes. We alluded to this in a previous episode that today Peter's going to be in the hot seat.

00:21.69

Peter

Yeah, it's my turn.

00:25.26

drdani

So I usually ask you what we're talking about today.

00:28.99

Peter

Oh, okay. Well, shall we flip things round entirely? Dani my turn to ask you, what are we talking about today?

00:37.52

drdani

So Peter today, we're going to be talking about the lessons you learned in skydiving.

00:46.50

Peter

Okay.

00:47.18

drdani

that apply to business.

00:52.12

Peter

It's

00:59.13

drdani

So for those of you that may not be aware, Peter is a master skydiver.

01:08.25

Peter

even I've done lots of skydiving. don't know if there's a technical term that is master skydiver, but I've done lots of jumping out of airplanes.

01:17.14

Peter

I haven't done any for quite a long time, but for quite a long time I did quite a lot.

01:25.79

drdani

okay.

01:23.67

Peter

I was described as ah an experienced skydiver. That would be what we'd call it.

01:28.06

drdani

So Peter is an experienced skydiver, um, to the point, just want to put this in a perspective that non skydiving people will understand. So when you start skydiving, you usually jump, put someone one on your back, but you have skydived enough that they just let you jump off by yourself.

01:47.82

Peter

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Yeah, and actually you that tandem skydive where for the most part, in certainly New Zealand, that's the way that almost everybody does their first ever skydive or parachute jump. I've never done one of those. I've only ever jumped out of an airplane by myself and I did my first parachute jump as it was technically not a skydive.

02:15.07

Peter

long enough ago that it was what's called static line so it was jumping out of an airplane a round parachute my back and ah and a reserve on my front and the parachute was attached to the inside of the airplane and as I fell away from the airplane it detached automatically and opened automatically so I literally just had to fall out which as it turns out was a good thing to begin with.

02:44.36

drdani

Cause I imagine that first jump you're probably going to forget to pull the cord.

02:49.69

Peter

Well, should we get into it? Shall I tell you the stories?

02:53.66

drdani

Well, okay.

02:55.32

Peter

I mean, that that definitely a story, we can come to that if you want. Where you want to start?

02:59.35

drdani

Okay. So let's start with, I know how did you get into, how did you become a skydiver?

03:04.40

Peter

Yeah.

03:06.68

Peter

How did I get into skydiving? Well and This is not unusual but it might sound very surprising and hopefully it's interesting but I'm actually scared of heights. I'm on top of a tall building or on a cliff edge or near a cliff edge I'm not great and I'm especially not great if there's other people around me.

03:30.98

Peter

I just have a fear of, but probably not fear of heights, but a fear of falling.

03:37.57

drdani

Hmm.

03:38.32

Peter

So I've always had that. I first really encountered it when my dad took me and my brother, one of my brothers, to see a um soccer football game in

03:47.23

Peter

and We were quite high up in the stadium and I was not happy so I was pretty scared about and I got the same feeling over and over again in my childhood going to concerts or theatres and What I did do when I was in my early teens, I joined in Britain what's called the Air Cadets or the Air Training Corps. Because I was, despite my fear of heights, I was ah ah always interested in the airplanes, interested in anything that flew. I'm not sure if I'd, I think when I was a really small child, I might have been in an airliner, but I'd never been in a small airplane up to that point.

04:24.50

Peter

So I joined the air cadets and one of the things you got to do in the air cadets was go flying in small planes that was with the Royal Air Force at the time and flew in tiny little single engine propeller chipmunk and we used to go you once every month or a couple of months to an RAF station and Every time we went, we would have to get a safety briefing, and part of the safety briefing was watching a video, and it was like a public service video from the 1970s, old school haircuts and

04:53.27

Peter

and was a military thing, it was very precise instructions.

04:55.48

drdani

Amen.

04:56.21

Peter

It told you exactly what to do to put your parachute on before you got on the airplane, and it was one of these old style ones where the parachute was under your bum, so you'd be hunched over walking out of the airplane.

05:06.85

Peter

It told you how to get in the airplane, how to be strapped into the airplane, what to do, what not to do. And part of the video briefing was what to do in an emergency, in one of the emergencies and you might encounter, but very rarely unusually, but it would be if the plane broke down in such a way that you would need to get out of the plane while it was flying in the air and actually use parachute.

05:30.94

Peter

So ah So ah it would tell you everything. It would tell you you the instructor or the pilot will slide the cockpit canopy back. Your job is to keep it going. have to undo the seat harness, but not the parachute harness. And you have to stand up and you should dive over the back of the wing. And and this point, everyone's kind of starting to chuckle if the plane's going to be flying straight and level, just ready for you to jump off the back of the wing. You're probably going to get flung and as it's tumbling towards the earth in some disaster. But what made us chuckle even more was that was pretty much the end of the safety video. They never actually said in safety video that um should look for the silver handle that's on your parachute harness and pull it, because that's the thing that's actually going to save your life a little.

06:19.00

drdani

So it's not just wearing the parachute, you actually have to.

06:20.91

Peter

Yeah, that's not going to say. I mean, it's like a soft cushion on your bum, but and and unless you actually pull the rip cord So that always made us laugh. But what I discovered was I actually loved, even though I was scared of heights, I loved, I really adored flying of any But I was always curious about could I, you know, if the worst did happen, I actually jump out of this airplane and save my own life?

06:42.88

Peter

So there was that, there was that

06:42.92

drdani

Wow.

06:45.13

Peter

ah ah I remember when I was growing up, lived but between our house and the supermarket that my mum would do the shopping at on a Saturday morning, there happened to be a parachute center.

06:57.32

Peter

and always remember driving past that parachute centre on a Saturday morning and seeing these parachutes come down next to the motorway, these kind of umbrella jellyfish things.

07:03.43

drdani

Mm.

07:06.29

Peter

People will be familiar with their own parachutes if you've ever watched like old-school army film. And I thought, oh, well looks interesting. if, again, I wonder if I could do that. So, you know, loved flying, didn't like heights. Curious about whether I could actually use a parachute an emergency situation. Had seen people actually doing it, know, floating nicely down toward the ground. All of that went through my mind in a very short period of time, maybe a split second. It was like a fast forward movie.

07:39.10

Peter

And that happened, that fast forward movie happened when I was about to leave the university sports club fresher sphere. So I'd gone to university and I was about to start studying aerospace engineering, like designing airplanes. We come back to that part of the story. And before I'd even, what was called in those days in Britain, matriculationd it matriculation, before I'd matriculated, before I'd officially become a student, I went looking for something to do the weekends. I was actually looking for the men's field hockey team. I wandered around the inside of this building, happened to be an old

08:18.22

Peter

church so I'm kind of walking around this old church there's tables and people signing freshers up to join their sports club and there's rugby and there's soccer football and there's dungeons and dragons and chess and all sorts of things that you know some people's minds are pushing the limits of and what a sport is and what there wasn't was a men's field hockey team so nothing really caught my attention apart from that I was a I kind of made a mind up I would need to find something else to do that weekend. can I was about to leave this old church building. And if you imagine, it's autumn in Scotland. Despite that, it was a sunshiny day outside. And I'm looking out of this old Victorian sandstone building.

09:02.37

Peter

Lots of hubbub behind me and I can kind of see the quiet street out in front of me through this arched church door and I heard a voice behind me. I happened to be a female voice, but I heard the voice saying to me, excuse me, would you like to do a parachute jump? And the fast forward movie started playing in my mind. as was like, well, the honest answer to that would be, I have thought about it.

09:27.38

Peter

I start turning around turning around and then I stopped turning around and I saw in front of me was a table with a couple of parachutes on a video on a really small TV playing of somebody falling through the sky with a parachute on their back and two people women i sitting manning this table. And and said, well, actually the last thing went through my mind before I responded to them. The last thing that went through my mind was, mum's going to kill me.

09:57.77

Peter

Because then I said, yes, I would like to do a parachute jump, actually.

10:04.46

Peter

nothing better to do we can't and it turned out you could do a you could even better than than being able to do a parachute jump you could actually do for us essentially free that um the way that the university parachute club worked was that uh they would um raise money for charity and um they had a deal with the the parachute club but um you raise enough money for charity you could do your first jump um for nothing so that's what i ended up doing So fast forward, I think it was, ah ah well, it was only a few weeks before I went to the Barrage at the Club and did my training, but um was another few weeks before the weather happened to be good enough that I was sitting

10:43.59

Peter

in a doorless, small, single-engined airplane, Cessna 206 for anyone who's into airplanes. 2,200 feet above the Perthshire countryside, looking down on all the autumn colours. And you can ask me some questions, I'll continue the story if you like. I'll pause here though, so that is how I ended up doing one parachute jump

11:11.09

drdani

So I need to recap a little bit.

11:12.37

Peter

Okay.

11:12.98

drdani

So when you were a child, you discovered you were afraid of heights. And then for some reason, then you decided you're going to join the air cadets.

11:25.48

Peter

That's right.

11:26.37

drdani

And then you got to university, you were wanting to get on the field hockey team, but ended up at a table that was about parachute jumping and then found yourself on a plane with no doors looking down.

11:32.53

Peter

Mm hmm.

11:39.07

Peter

That's right.

11:43.22

Peter

That's right. That's right.

11:46.42

Peter

That's right.

11:49.72

drdani

what was going through that first jump?

11:48.75

Peter

Yeah.

11:52.20

Peter

Yeah.

11:52.43

drdani

Because you haven't experienced the jump at this point, right?

11:54.79

Peter

Yeah.

11:55.76

drdani

So what was that?

11:56.72

drdani

Do you remember what that?

11:59.56

Peter

And i i one of the things I do remember is there was a couple of weeks between the training that I did and the jump.

12:07.44

drdani

the

12:08.25

Peter

the training was for a whole day. And one of the key things about training, skydiving, parachute training of any kind is repetition. So especially doing a first jump, anyone has watched any old movies where there is some military power as you're jumping going on and people are getting kind of barter and they're shouting things back and doing things over and over again. It's really similar. You basically being trained to do something and the the training is really based on getting stuff into your brain so that you will do it almost automatically.

12:40.02

Peter

So one of the things you're trained to do the ground is to jump out of something called a mock-up which is basically a wooden model of an airplane and it's you know just a little bit higher than say a desk and you push yourself off the ground and then you go into your kind of stable position that you should be in when you jump out of the airplane so you kind of go into this big star position and push your pelvis forward and you shout 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000 and then you look around and because by the time you've counted to 5000 then that automatic parachute opening has happened and you should be able to look up and see your parachute slowing you down.

13:22.27

Peter

And if it's not, then then you also train some emergency drills. Everything is along the same veins. So there I was, 2,000 feet above the Perthshire countryside. And I was there with some other university parachute club friends. There was four or five of us doing our first jump and the instructor and the pilot.

13:43.17

Peter

you know I was quite enjoying this ride in this little airplane, seeing the scenery, um um and then it kind of climbed up to the right height, and then it leveled off and just started flying in a straight line, turning around, and then what's called running in to drop us in the right place um the parachute center. And bearing in mind, the repetition training is all about 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, so the first person

14:10.11

Peter

I'm kind of facing the back of the plane actually with my legs kind of near the open door i i and the first person ah ah to go gets kind of shuffled into the door by the instructor um and they're kind of sitting on the edge of the door and they're ready to go and the instructor goes, says to them, go! And what a hear 1000! And that was it.

14:32.20

Peter

Because unlike on the ground, when you can hear people shouting, and they're just standing there shouting from 1,000 to 5,000, in the air, they drop away. So all you can hear is 1,000. And it was a state. I was in such a, I guess, a hiked up state. I brushed out laughing. I thought it was hilarious. I was like, wow, this is so funny. They've just disappeared. And then you can you kind of see their parachute opening.

14:56.95

Peter

I think I was a third or fourth person. So that amusement, that hilarious moment about people disappearing and only hearing 1,000 started to disappear. That was my turn to they brought into the door and I was saying, so you've got like one bum cheek on, imagine having one bum cheek on the edge of your kitchen table or desk, but instead of a nice wood floor or carpet um underneath your feet, there's nothing for 2,000 feet and there's lots of noise and lots of wind, but your training takes over and you do what you're told or even trained to do.

15:33.70

Peter

and um can feel like lots of adrenaline. sorry remember being told, you know, go and then pushing out of the airplane and again, you know, saying 1000, 2000. And ah then for about you know, maybe two or three weeks. I didn't remember anything between then and being under the parachute. But then I did remember like floating down under the parachute, doing a parachute landing fall the ground, picking up my stuff and hmm, I'd like to do that again.

16:07.41

Peter

The bit about not remembering, there's such a sensory overload that I think your brain just kind of shuts down. And yeah, just over the course of the next couple of weeks, almost at random moments, the little bits would pop back into my mind and until till my brain. And you this is common to everyone, I think, ah ah having shared this story.

16:24.41

Peter

the brain starts to put the movie back together until you've got almost all of the frames. Some of it is still missing, so like our basically a white space between doing it and remembering it. There was just this kind of white out in my mind. But I remember distinctly landing and going, that was fun. I'm going to do it again. Now your question I think was, was it a scary thing? It wasn't really. It wasn't, it certainly wasn't the scariest thing I'd ever done in my life. Do you want to know what the scariest thing I've ever done in my life was and still is?

16:52.81

drdani

Was it telling your mom that you want skydiving?

16:56.20

Peter

you Maybe that's the third thing. That's a whole separate episode and story. And I have to tell my mum about this

17:00.38

drdani

Okay, well what is...

17:02.36

Peter

She might be listening. Well, maybe get her on as a guest and she can tell the story. The second scariest thing was the second parachute jump.

17:12.63

Peter

Because I knew it.

17:12.70

drdani

Because the first time you were, you didn't know what you didn't know.

17:16.39

Peter

I didn't know. I didn't know. And then my mind and body certainly knew what was coming for the second time. And yeah, that Here's the first lesson downing, I think. him And I didn't really, i only recently came across a great way to kind of sum this up. And it's, you've got to see it to be it. And I've mentioned it in a previous episode.

17:40.25

Peter

the time of even my first parachute jump, because I'd fully committed to the idea of doing a parachute jump and therefore got fully involved in the parachute club and it's both weekend and parachute activities and weekday ah weekday ah social activities, shall we say. I had seen not just what it might be like to do one parachute jump and raise money for charity and just kind of tick that box.

18:08.18

Peter

But I'd also seen that, well, that was the static line jump. So if I wanted to fulfill that and answer that question of was I capable of free falling out of a plane and saving my own life, then I would need to do more than one. I would need to do about 10 because I needed to to to complete the static line progression so that I could pull a handle while apparently it was opening automatically.

18:30.14

Peter

and then progressed to actually doing that for real. So I'd started to see what I needed to do. And the same time, I'd also seen what was beyond that.

18:38.19

drdani

Thank

18:41.05

Peter

I remember the first night I turned up to the parachute club social evening during the week.

18:42.99

drdani

you.

18:44.41

Peter

There was three or four of the university parachute club had just come back from California. California. um and they were more experienced than I was. They were a few years ahead of me and they'd gone off and had a two-week skydiving holiday in California and they showed us some videos of them.

19:02.53

Peter

falling through the sky and they look like they're having lots of fun. They were jumping out of airplanes at 12,000 feet over the Californian countryside and um falling together and just having lots of fun. and remember and one person that became a really good friend, my friend Phil, basically sat down with me in the university union bar at the parachute club evening and he basically said, okay, so look at my watch and as it ticked over to the 12th, the second hand, he said, we we've just jumped out together, we're over this amazing countryside, we're in this nice warm air, there's three of us and we kind of jump out of the plane separately, then we fly to each other and hold our hands.

19:43.26

Peter

still falling he kept telling me the story of what it was like to fly and and they'd been falling for for 60 seconds and it seemed like a lifetime. I can believe that you can actually jump out of an airplane and fly your body and open a parachute, you know, between getting out and opening a parachute it was a home and it just blew my mind. So that inspired me and when I say got to see it to be it that was the first thing that really grabbed my attention that that was something that maybe I could do.

20:09.94

Peter

Then I went to the parachute club, did the training and in between doing the training and i i a doing my jump. I was up every weekend or so and learning how to do different things like pack the parachute. I also start to see what other people could do because there was video screens in the parachute centre and it showed people it'd come back from our other trips or even people had just done jumps at the centre I was at and they were doing like jumping with not just two or three people but 10 or 12 or in some cases 40 or 50 or 60. If there had been jumping abroad so I could see

20:42.73

Peter

what was possible and I was starting to build a picture of, well, I'm pretty sure I want to do one. I'm going to do one and I'm pretty sure I want to scratch the edge and answer that question of whether I could actually have jumped out of the plane and saved my life as an air cadet.

20:48.74

drdani

Yeah,

20:52.94

drdani

yeah.

20:57.31

Peter

But I'm pretty sure now I've heard about it and seen I really want to go and do this freefall thing and jump with other people and learn what it's like to do that. That seems like really cool.

21:07.60

Peter

So that was lesson, I guess, kind of get in retrospect, a bit like um we talked about your design school lessons, none of these things were really occurring to me at the time.

21:16.93

Peter

But in hindsight, the reason that I kept going was because I could see what was possible. I

21:23.61

drdani

just want to take a beat. So the first lesson is, is up by the way, just really fascinated because I'm, I'm obsessed with both flying airplanes and I've always wanted to go skydiving.

21:33.97

Peter

Yeah. Okay.

21:36.85

drdani

from that element, just really fascinating.

21:39.71

Peter

Yeah.

21:40.57

drdani

you said that the first lesson is you, you got to see it to be it. So how do you bring that into business?

21:45.47

Peter

Yeah.

21:47.81

Peter

Yeah, good question. and working in the field of design and design thinking, I think having and perhaps um in New Zealand, it's less likely that you will work for somebody who has kind there and done it.

22:09.73

drdani

at the level that you're working at, right?

22:11.29

Peter

Exactly. At our career stage, when we're, I guess, leading activities, leading design, it's more likely that we'll be in the position of working for people and working with our peers who haven't experienced what we've experienced before. So that thought occurred to me. and actually, it's one of the reasons that, I guess, I don't know about you, but I pay attention to what's happening in other countries from a design point of view. and you stay in touch with people in other organizations and listen to podcasts. I'm kind of, that's my version of, for me, seeing it to be, I'm like drawing on other people's experience and replicating them.

22:50.07

Peter

But then it also tells me that what we can do as a sort of mid-career or the stage we are at as we can be ah that other people see so that they can be it. And and I think seeing it to be it could be also I see that, I don't want to be that. So it could be that see something and you It's this crystallization.

23:11.58

Peter

It's this yeah literally sometimes seeing someone and deciding that that's your role model. Or the opposite, seeing somebody and going, well, that's my anti-role model.

23:23.06

Peter

I don't want to, whether for better or worse, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, or that's just something or somebody I don't want to be like, I want to be like that person instead.

23:29.94

drdani

oh

23:30.48

Peter

So yeah, that's um um kind of how I think about how it might apply. i i to work and also as especially if you're in a leadership position, always be thinking to yourself, who am I being for somebody

23:42.95

Peter

Who is seeing me that they might not even tell me that they're my or

23:49.34

drdani

this is something that we don't talk about a lot in leadership is that you are, whether you like it or not, you are a role model.

23:52.75

Peter

Yeah.

23:57.37

drdani

And somebody is watching you and either going, that is who I want to emulate.

24:02.56

Peter

Yeah.

24:02.74

drdani

Or somebody is, you know, watching you and going, that is not what I want to do.

24:05.53

Peter

Yeah.

24:07.94

Peter

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

24:09.48

drdani

the other way that this lesson applies in business, because when you first said it, what came to mind for me was we spent a lot of time talking about things in organizations,

24:19.93

drdani

And in design, sometimes it's actually about showing, like just show me it, because I think that gets results faster. So sometimes cutting down the dialogue and painting the picture is like prototypes and visuals are really effective.

24:35.38

Peter

yeah

24:35.95

drdani

you can create the picture of this is what they could be, and maybe people decide, well, that's really great, but that's not where we want to go. Or we're not ready to go there, but at least they can get from steps towards what could be.

24:51.65

drdani

Nice. Okay.

24:56.09

Peter

next one that comes to mind is this idea of finding your people part of a community and the power of that.

25:01.60

drdani

Good

25:03.70

Peter

I'm going to say the power of quite a few times, I think, because some of these are really new at the time, but this this one is like finding your people and being part of a community. What I really loved about turning up to and University parachute club and then going to the actual parachute club then continuing on in the sport of of skydiving was that it was literally and in every one of those groups that the diversity was incredible. and So I would turn up to the parachute club at the weekend and there would really be a cross-section of society there. There'd be people who were

25:39.43

Peter

lawyers, surgeons, by electricians, plumbers, there were students like me, and everyone in between, what everybody had, and all sorts of different backgrounds, all sorts of different, um know, views, just diversity, full stop. But what everybody had in common was this,

26:01.37

Peter

a slightly unusual desire to jump out of airplanes. And it was that kind of, that common thing that obviously, you know, maybe it's really obvious, but it's that common desire and need and activity that united everybody.

26:17.83

drdani

Hmm. Hmm.

26:20.53

Peter

even, you know, there's lots of different types of skydiving and as a sport or as an activity and within that kind of what large group of skydivers, lots of subgroups of the But, you know, during and before, during and after a day of skydiving, everyone always had that thing in common. So, yeah, find your people and maybe pay more attention to what you've got in common and less attention to to what's different.

26:47.20

drdani

Hmm.

26:49.15

Peter

And how does that apply to business? You're going to ask me that, are you? I think it applies to business, especially,

26:58.37

Peter

but, you you know, most of aspects of life. But business especially, and especially as designers or design thinkers, think it's important to try and like when you turn up to an organization or you're brought into an organization,

27:12.84

Peter

in my experience anyway, there's always people who are inverted commas. Your people go and find the skydivers. won't be walking around with parachutes on their back. but People who are, again, designers, they might be obvious from their role titles, maybe not. They're unlikely to be obvious as design thinkers, but you will find them in an organization.

27:37.74

Peter

You'll find the people who who a talk about not just going off and delivering a solution, but instead taking a step back and up and going, what's the problem? We're trying to solve in the first place.

27:49.53

Peter

people who come to you and draw you a picture or the people who turn up and go, well, should we try an experiment? Yeah.

27:57.97

Peter

Find your people.

27:59.30

drdani

Because that your people may not be wearing the labels that you expect them to be,

28:02.51

Peter

Yeah. Yeah.

28:04.78

drdani

is particularly, if you are working for a large organization with thousands and thousands of people, it's very easy to get lost in that.

28:14.25

Peter

Yeah.

28:15.20

drdani

To finding your little tribe within that

28:18.82

Peter

Yes. and And the reason to do that, I suppose, is because it's always better to be with other people who have the same kind of worldview and approach to life, or in this case, work, and discovering and solving problems, because it's it's energizing to do that.

28:37.61

Peter

you When I was skydiving, I used to look forward to the weekends because I'd you be with my people for a couple of days, and then I'd go back to the kind real world for five days and use some of that energy to do work and and be different and show other people it's OK to be different in the real world. And I think the same thing applies you an organization. Find your people and recharge and replenish. and go back out to people who aren't your people yet, but might be. And this lesson I'm about to tell you is one that just occurred to me. It was one that took me a while to get over. Don't do that to the extent that you're,

29:16.64

Peter

maybe dismissing or alienating others. So it's really easy to when you're part of a really strong group with an unusual kind of common thing that they like to do to see other people as, you know, it's like easy to to do to othering.

29:29.02

drdani

others.

29:32.72

Peter

And we definitely did that as a group of skydivers, they probably still do. I'm actually one of the people that I would have used to look at one and go, and would call them wiffles. So wiffle is like woofle you want to jump out of a plane.

29:47.14

Peter

So that was our nickname for people who didn't jump out of variable aim, we called them WUFOs. And I distinctly remember flying over on the way to altitude, you know, things like, we'd call it Mitre 10 or Bunnings here, but, you know, being cute in the UK and looking down and shaking my head and feeling sorry for the people who were spending their Saturdays in the DIY store i i and a nice spend.

30:06.86

drdani

And look at you now.

30:08.38

Peter

Look at me now spending Saturday afternoons in the DIY store, quite happily actually. So yes, guess that's the kind of cautionary opposite to finding your people is make sure that you don't dismiss alienate. You might find a better word for that, Dani

30:23.04

drdani

Well, way I think about it is, you you find your people, but there's what there's billions of people on the planet, right?

30:30.10

Peter

Yeah.

30:30.13

drdani

So your people, your tribe is always growing.

30:32.78

Peter

Yeah, yeah. Oh, nice.

30:33.83

drdani

So. make sure that your tribe has space and room to grow.

30:38.15

Peter

Yeah, yeah, and Invite others in.

30:41.02

drdani

Yeah.

30:42.21

Peter

And also I think find find the commonality with other tribes.

30:46.44

drdani

Yeah. it's always looking for the common, because humans, we have so much more in common we are told or shaped to believe.

30:50.93

Peter

yeah

30:57.58

drdani

you could focus on finding one thing that, one thing spirals into other things and then you end up finding your podcast co-host.

31:06.14

Peter

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

31:08.96

drdani

And sometimes, you know, you're like, this is, it's been great knowing you, but this is probably it.

31:12.63

Peter

Yeah.

31:15.01

drdani

I'm just not that into you.

31:17.23

Peter

It's not the final episode, is it?

31:22.59

Peter

So your people. The next lesson i i was very much a personal one. And yeah, ah and it was determined to do freefall, which was pulling the ripcord and opening a parachute myself.

31:37.75

Peter

But I was also petrified, of as it turned out, not just to fight some when I'm on top of the building, but petrified of falling out of an airplane, even though there was a parachute that would open automatically in my back. So it took me quite a long time to go from being a static line jumper to a freefall parachute jumper. And even ah in my early freefalls, I still had to overcome i i that fear of dying basically to put it it upon the hours scared of dying I used to i i like moth to a flame or I'm not sure what

32:12.55

Peter

probably some sort of addict. I used to find myself going up to the parachute club on a Saturday the morning when I was on a train or catching a lift with somebody. And I'd be kind of looking at the weather secretly hoping that it would be too windy or too cloudy to actually jump out of airplanes, so even even though I actually wanted to jump out of airplanes, very strange situation. And I used to also go home on Sunday evening ago. What have I got myself into?

32:34.36

Peter

i

32:35.63

drdani

So the lesson.

32:36.25

Peter

The lesson is the power of self-talk and in particular visualization because I finally overcame this fear.

32:47.11

Peter

It was actually just after reading Chuck Yeager's autobiography. You probably know who Chuck Yeager is, Dani Chuck Yeager, for those who don't, was the person that Well, on the record books for breaking the sound barrier for the first time in an aircraft, he was a very famous American test pilot and was only not one of the first astronauts into space because he didn't have an official college degree, but he was more than qualified to going to space.

33:16.86

drdani

Hmm.

33:17.84

Peter

Anyway, his autobiography was called The Right Stuff and and talks about his confrontation with fear almost on a daily basis and his cool cam collected approach to not necessarily overcoming that fear but managing that

33:33.79

Peter

It's like being scared and doing it anyway. So it sounds really simple, but it was a bit more complicated. But basically I started to realize that I could tell myself the same things. I realized that I could instead of talking to myself and talking about being scared and and imagining,

33:51.18

Peter

things going wrong when I fell out or jumped out of the airplane. I could imagine the opposite just as easily. I actually wrote a poster together and put it in the back of my door of my room so that that every time I came to open the door to go out I would see it and it said was the right stuff. That was it. Nothing to do with new kids on the block I think.

34:12.46

Peter

thank you and got my pop reference there, it was the right stuff. So i I basically told myself over and over again that I had the right stuff to do what I wanted to do, which was to freefall out of an airplane. And I, through the help of other skydivers who recognised that I was struggling, they would help me and they taught me how to visualise and yeah, there's more visualising later on in the story. Yeah, in really simple terms, I would close my eyes and imagine myself doing a really good jump um because I had the right stuff.

34:41.04

Peter

So yeah, power of self-talk.

34:41.63

drdani

I love that. I love that. But I also heard another lesson in there that I think you need to talk about, which is you just said, other skydivers saw me struggling.

34:47.10

Peter

Oh yeah, okay.

34:52.42

Peter

Yeah.

34:53.83

drdani

And there's two sides to that, is particularly important in leadership, is there's that element of we see people struggling, and what do we do?

35:02.27

Peter

Yeah, yeah.

35:02.32

drdani

But also as a leader, you struggle silently rather than going, who are the people that can help me?

35:12.26

drdani

in that moment, people saw you were struggling and they could offer to help you, but you had to be willing to take the help.

35:15.46

Peter

Yeah.

35:19.76

Peter

Yeah, yeah, that's true. I was was more than willing to accept that help and shout out to all those people that did tell me.

35:28.83

drdani

Yes.

35:29.15

Peter

My friends, who probably will listen to this,

35:32.92

drdani

Do you say who probably won't listen to this?

35:35.99

Peter

Well, don't think, well, actually maybe they're all, but everyone, ah there's too many people to list actually. Anyway, some people did recognise I was struggling and they helped me significantly. if

35:45.44

Peter

put it But yes, yeah next lesson.

35:46.49

drdani

Okay, so next

35:48.68

Peter

Where do we go next? right Well, I discovered early on that this was more than just jumping out of airplanes and saving your life or you pretending to be a paratrooper or anything like that, or just like It was it a sport and you could compete in it. It sounds really obvious, but you you applied yourself and and practiced it, you could get better and better at it. and beauty of skydiving as a sport, I think it's still, and I just see this as a positive, it's relatively small. There's not that as a proportion of the world. There's not that many people who want to

36:18.69

Peter

it And that means that the people who are at the very top of the sport, the world champions, to make a living, they they teach other people. they have to, and they want to actually, they want to coach others to and emulate and and one day kind of overtake them as the champions. So I used to describe this as it would be like learning golf from Tiger Woods, but that's a bad analogy.

36:40.43

drdani

That did not age well.

36:42.06

Peter

that there's no age well. Also, I think I realised that Tiger Woods probably isn't a great coach, whereas there's something about, and and I'm sure it applies to other sports, but there's something about skydiving, I think it's to do with ah the fact that it's not really a physical thing, it's a mental thing, you have to be a good communicator as well. That's another lesson and means that if you're a good communicator and you're good at learning and you can translate your learning into somebody else's then you can also teach people. So we got to learn from world champions and you know one of my early experiences of that was going over to Arizona and Eloy, a tiny little place in Arizona in America.

37:21.88

Peter

and learning from people who were at that point the world champions, a team called Arizona Airspeed who were mythical for how they'd evolved as a team. And we got to learn their kind of their way of doing things. And one of the things there was this learning cycle. they described it as some pedal, or P-E-D-L, or plan, execute, debrief, and learn. And think since I first came across that, then I've tried to use it as much as possible in the workplace. So I tried to turn everything into a learning cycle. I believe that P-E-D-L, actually the game for the American military, and they still use it. But the idea is that

37:59.93

Peter

you don't just plan something, you actually go and do it and you don't just do it, but actually, and this is the real key, as you pause it once you've done that and you debrief, in other words, get together as an individual or as a group and go, right, what did we plan to do? What did we actually end up doing? And what was the difference between those two things?

38:20.37

Peter

went well, what didn't go well. And then the fourth kind of key part is what did do we learn. So therefore what we're going to keep doing, what we're going to stop doing, what we're going to try and do better. So this whole learning cycle was a real kind of mind opener for me. And you can organize anything around that kind of learning cycle.

38:39.58

Peter

the important things are the planning and and learning are kind of attached to that or associated with that. that. ah That particular lesson is this idea of kind of rituals.

38:52.15

Peter

So we would begin and end a day of skydiving as a team.

38:52.15

drdani

Hmm.

38:56.74

Peter

as a team, we would get together at the beginning of the day and we'd have a quick plan of what we're going to do. And at the end of the day, our ritual, we would close out the day as a team and say, we've done this, we've done that, we've learned this, we've learned that, this is what we're going to keep doing tomorrow, this is what we're going to not do, this is how we're going to get better. It's like a cycle of continuous improvement kind anchored in the ritual of getting together at the beginning of the day and getting together at the end of the day.

39:24.15

Peter

The way that applies to business, and I still do this with teams that I lead and help, is we don't necessarily do it at the beginning and end of each day because a day at work isn't the same as a day on a skydiving camp.

39:37.21

Peter

we definitely do at the beginning and end of each week by saying right we're going to do together this week on a Monday morning and then at the end of Friday afternoon.

39:46.28

Peter

What do we do? Did we do what we wanted to do? If we did, why? If we didn't, why? What are we going to carry on to next week? So there's that learning cycle and the rituals combined.

39:54.62

drdani

Hmm. Hmm.

39:57.22

Peter

which I think are that both those things are scalable from the kind of nano, you know, as a person, an individual, but also to a whole organization.

40:06.51

drdani

Absolutely. And in organizations, planning is an interesting one because I feel like there's either a failure to plan or perpetual planning where you're just planning, planning, refining the plan, refining the plan, but then not actually doing anything.

40:16.12

Peter

Yeah.

40:22.16

drdani

And then there is the bucket of execute, execute, execute, deliver, deliver, deliver, deliver, but never really going hang on. What did we say we were going to do? that That debriefing, that taking time to debrief, reflect, and think about, are we doing the right things?

40:36.63

drdani

Are we doing them in the right way? Do we have the right

40:38.75

Peter

Yeah.

40:39.50

drdani

Those things tend to lack.

40:41.21

Peter

Yeah. And kind of one of the ways we... especially in those early training camps. And as I became more ambitious in my skydiving, I moved on from the fear of falling or fear of dying to the fear of failing.

40:56.96

drdani

Hmm.

40:57.58

Peter

It became much more about a mental game of I want to perform the best I possibly can, especially when you start jumping with other people. And especially as you build formations with other people, either whether it's just for fun or for the challenge or laterally, you laterally, you know um I got into competitive skydiving.

41:14.28

Peter

actually met my partner, Susan, at the University of Parachute Club, and the two of us started to form teams with other people to do competitive skydiving. And a lot of that was around getting coaches from, I guess, the top of the sport to help us. So one of the rituals, the debriefing and the learning and actually planning, executing tended to happen with a coach. So you after a training competition skydive where four of us had jumped out of an airplane with a fifth person,

41:41.72

Peter

who was part of the team filming us, we'd come down from that jump and we'd land and they'd plug the video camera into the TV and we'd gather around and with the coach sitting by us we would watch the skydive that we'd just done and the coach would help us pick out some good things and pick out some things that we wanted to work on and then we'd go back and usually repeat exactly the same jump looking to improve it there and then and then we'd move on to another

41:55.56

drdani

Right.

42:08.18

Peter

I'll jump so I guess another lesson here is having a coach can and often be invaluable. and I know in organisations a lot of rituals and learning cycles and coaches are part of newer ways of working.

42:26.63

Peter

know

42:25.91

drdani

Hmm.

42:26.89

Peter

a well-implemented agile work system incorporates all of those. so a lesson I have and a frustration I have is when

42:35.70

Peter

budgets start to get cut and we get rid of people who seem to be just doing fringe jobs like coaches, for example, or agile team facilitators or scrum masters. That frustrates me because actually, even though they might not be doing the doing, doing the work, they're as equally valuable, they're invaluable to the work that's getting done. And the people who seem to use job titles seem to be providing more value or actually doing the doing.

43:00.95

drdani

yeah

43:01.54

Peter

Because you our coach wasn't and of our team. They weren't jumping in the air with us. They couldn't talk to us anyway. were helping us perform the best we could by helping us go through those cycles and using those rituals to best effect.

43:12.99

drdani

As someone who's had, well actually in fitness coaching and then also someone that's had a leadership and coach, it is something that we all need to invest more in.

43:24.49

drdani

Cause it is, like you said, invaluable. everybody has blind spots that keep us from progressing and getting to the next level of whatever it is we're pursuing.

43:33.75

drdani

reminds me of something that I always come back to is that we don't succeed alone.

43:39.03

Peter

Yeah, definitely not.

43:39.13

drdani

Yeah. Right. Okay.

43:41.54

Peter

Definitely not. All right. I've got a couple more.

43:44.29

drdani

Okay.

43:45.15

Peter

One of them

43:48.47

Peter

two. two. ah Aim to be the best. Don't aim for a gold medal.

43:59.18

Peter

If you aim to be the best that you can be, either as an individual or as a team or broader, then you might not win a gold medal, but you'll be the best that you can be. Whereas if you aim for the gold medal, then you probably won't get the gold medal.

44:15.22

Peter

You'll focus too much on the prize.

44:17.30

drdani

the prize.

44:19.61

drdani

I you don't necessarily control getting the medal, but you get you have absolute control about training yourself to be the best.

44:22.87

Peter

Yeah, exactly.

44:28.94

Peter

that's exactly it, Dani You could turn up to a competition at any level, whether it's local, national, international, world meet. And the other team that you're competing against, and skydiving anyway, might just do better than you, and you have absolutely no control of that whatsoever.

44:43.77

Peter

So focus on being the best that you can be, and don't focus on.

44:48.50

drdani

How do you bring that to business?

44:51.05

Peter

Well, as an organisation, don't set in relation to another organization. to um do set your goals around being best version of that particular organization. ah You can be as a small team, which is maybe where we're thinking more.

45:10.07

Peter

Yeah, I think, well, maybe in more modern terms, thinking about objectives and key results, I guess what what we're seeing here is really focus on the key results because they will lead you to the objective.

45:24.80

Peter

Start with key results, work on those, and the objective will take care of itself.

45:28.76

drdani

Hm.

45:29.35

Peter

Don't do it the other way around. If you focus on the objective, then you won't get there, if that makes sense.

45:36.39

drdani

Yep. OK, so final

45:40.07

Peter

The final lesson is,

45:43.28

Peter

go with well the power of visualization and I guess it's related to the self-talk thing of having the right stuff but as I got more and more into especially the world of competition skydiving and back in those days there was no such thing as vertical wind tunnels so again in those days if you wanted to be the best golfer or cyclist then you could just go out and golf balls at the driving range or you could get on your stationary bike or even go for a bike ride whenever you wanted. Whereas in a competition skydive, the time you have to score points is 35 seconds. In a training jump, you may have like a minute or a minute and 10 seconds if you get out of the plane a lot higher. And that was the training time. And there's a limit both in terms of time available during a day to do that over and over again. And also it's quite expensive, so you are limited by it.

46:37.54

Peter

how much you could afford to budget and timewise to do.

46:40.97

drdani

No.

46:42.29

Peter

and And yet it's a sport that you need to repeat over and over again to build muscle memory, to build communication with your team, just to get better and better.

46:51.44

Peter

So what we were taught to do, what we learned to do was use free and almost as effective training tool or visualising. So and you, I'm sure in the list, Visualizing something as in picture it closing your eyes and if you are able to imagining it happening and know if you're imagining doing ah ah something athletic or using your body, your brain pretty much believes you're doing it. and I think it's 80 or 85% as effective in terms of building muscle memory if you visualize doing something.

47:23.06

drdani

Yep.

47:23.10

Peter

So we would shut our eyes and spend hours instead of watching TV you would shut our eyes and imagine doing particular skydiving maneuvers. so And we would build up the ability to essentially watch a video in our minds from different points of view, whether it's from our own first-person point of view within the skydive or from a third-person point of view looking above it. And getting even more advanced, we'd learn to kind of go backwards and forwards through that tape. I guess when it comes to business, and the key skill, I guess, within the skill that we learned was

47:54.97

Peter

often our brains would visualize and imagine things going wrong. You would just, your naughty brain would go, oh, I don't want to be doing that. You just yourself following the bad edit rather than the good one. So what you do is train yourself to pause that video and do something to let go of that and reset and start again. Often the one I like the best actually is imagining having an unhelpful visualisation or thought and tying a piece of string to it at the other end of the string is a balloon filled with helium and you basically let that thought go. Or another one is, as we call it, a reset and we use this during the skydive sometimes as I imagine there's a big red button on top of your head and you want to reset your thinking while you imagine or literally press the top of your head you reset that you started again.

48:40.51

Peter

And the way that you can use all of this for in work for any businesses as an individual and as a team, if you learn it together, is you can imagine have choice in life as as humans. We can imagine the worst happening. We can imagine the best happening. We can mentally rehearse something where I started to apply it was in in work and mentally rehearsing like a meeting or a presentation or More latterly, and often have will mentally rehearse and visualise a workshop that I'm running and I'll rehearse some small segments of it. I'll rehearse all sorts of different things about it. I'm playing movies in my mind and that means that when I step into that scenario,

49:17.43

Peter

than I'm more likely to, not guaranteed, but more likely to perform in the way that I want to perform, whatever it is that I'm performing. So I think there's a huge untapped power for most of us in this idea of pausing, closing our eyes, getting ourselves into the right state to imagine something happening in the future, aka visualizing.

49:39.59

Peter

as an aside to that, I've actually learned and actually met a couple of people who, and I can't remember what the term for it's called, but their brains don't actually work in this way, so they can't close their eyes and literally can't imagine a picture in their minds.

49:52.78

Peter

i i Maybe you know more about it than I do. I think what you could do is almost talk it through in your head rather than imagine it through in your head.

50:01.01

drdani

it's whatever that works for you, right?

50:00.98

Peter

So, yeah.

50:02.61

drdani

Sometimes it is like literally talking to yourself.

50:05.89

Peter

Yeah.

50:05.96

drdani

Sometimes it is imagining it. But the whole point of this is is to frame your mind around something happening that you want to happen, right?

50:13.93

Peter

Yeah. Yes.

50:15.97

drdani

And a specific example of the power of visualization, there's a lot happening at the moment in organizations where, you we all talk about It seems like we're not having the difficult conversations we need to be having, whether it's performance, whether it's budgets, whatever it is. is a really useful exercise for that.

50:35.45

drdani

Because sometimes we build in our minds how terrible, I'm not going to talk about this because it's going to go, it's all just going to go, you terribly wrong.

50:42.96

Peter

Yeah.

50:43.01

drdani

But what if you could take the time to actually visualize or talk yourself through that hard conversation?

50:48.18

Peter

Yeah. Yeah.

50:50.26

drdani

And when you do that, you, frame it so that it goes well. And then you teach yourself, am I being curious? Am I being open? Am I being kind? But, you walk through that.

51:01.21

Peter

exactly. Love it.

51:04.27

drdani

This has been amazing.

51:04.40

Peter

Okay.

51:05.35

drdani

I feel like we could talk for 10 hours on on on the amazing lesson. But to wrap it up.

51:09.63

Peter

Oh, yes.

51:10.05

drdani

So you told us about how you started in skydiving.

51:13.31

Peter

Yes.

51:15.41

drdani

know that this is not an activity that you partake in anymore.

51:21.45

drdani

So how, what's it been like walking away from that?

51:25.93

Peter

Oh, really difficult to begin with, actually. This might be a whole other episode on identity and being comfortable with not doing something. um I'm always saying for the time being, not necessarily anymore. I made a conscious decision, though. For me, there's a whole other lesson in calculated risk taking, maybe episode two or three.

51:52.28

Peter

i But the um risk equation for me, when I balanced the rewards I was was ah getting from skydiving, where it started to become outweighed by the risk for me. There's a whole bunch of, like I say, there's a story behind both of those sides of the equation. So I decided to hang up my parachute temporarily i i and go and try and find other things to do that that satisfied me in the same way. I tried paragliding, that was

52:22.11

Peter

fun, but individual. I've not yet come across the same. I guess for me, now work is the environment in which I have the most opportunity to practice teamwork and some of these lessons that I've learned from getting in touch with nature and activity point of view, surfing or paddle boarding.

52:37.08

drdani

Mm hmm.

52:42.85

Peter

These days I get a similar kind of i' enjoyment from that. What was it like walking? It was tough to walk away, but because I made the decision, then I made it slightly easier.

52:54.27

Peter

Yeah, it was adjusting back into the real world was a bit of a journey.

52:58.32

drdani

I there's got to be another episode on this around redefining who you are.

53:03.61

Peter

definitely. And I think the lesson we can discuss in that episode is as

53:07.38

Peter

Designers and design thinkers within an organization, just like skydivers in society, we are quite different as we have discovered and we will discover. And it's being that different person in whatever way, in combination with seeing things differently and in combination with, and I think this is where the real lesson comes is none of us are our jobs. We might be design thinkers or we might think of ourselves as designers. It's really important to maybe kind continue to embody that, but also realize that that doesn't mean that if design or designers or design thinkers are unwanted or needed and are appreciated in our organization,

53:41.89

Peter

Um, that that means that you yourself are not appreciated, valued or wanted in an organization or anywhere else.

53:49.53

drdani

And I the great things about modern world is that we are living longer.

53:53.41

Peter

Yeah. Yeah.

53:54.14

Peter

Yeah.

54:01.28

drdani

The world around us is changing and we we make choices about our lives and the things we're going to do that require us to then redefine who we are as well.

54:12.72

drdani

I think that is a great way to end.

54:16.82

Peter

Sounds like it.

54:18.76

drdani

Any last bits that you want to share before we close out?

54:24.91

Peter

or two phrases. won't elaborate on them into lessons, but two phrases that I try and use all the time. One is rest as part of training.

54:31.47

drdani

Yes.

54:32.11

Peter

So I fully learned that and we couldn't skydive all day every day. actually, if you had a day off in the middle of a training camp, then you came back a lot stronger and sharper. And the last one is one of the most amazing people in the world.

54:44.15

Peter

Full stop at an amazing A very famous person in skydiving is a world champion multiple, multiple times. There's a guy called Dan Brodsky-Chenfield. He's got a TED Talk Anna book, actually, and it's called Above All Else. So I'd highly recommend if any of this has become as interested, anybody go and read and watch that. He tells his story, which is to mine. but also very different to mine, far more inspiring, go and watch that. But he coached me a few times, me and Susan and some others, and attitude to training and competition was basically what you do in competition is a direct reflection of what you do in training. So therefore, when you train and you're training for competition,

55:27.27

Peter

And don't change anything when you go to the competition. Don't try and do anything differently. Don't change anything. Just do it the way you've trained it. And his way of some summarizing that was don't even get a haircut. Change nothing. Don't even get a haircut. I don't know how this applies to work, so I'm not going to try. But I always remember him saying, don't even get a haircut. Just keep things the same.

55:48.61

drdani

Well, I think there's a lot you can take away from that, the way you practice it. that's about being deliberate about how you practice because that is how you're going to do it on the day.

55:57.70

Peter

That's right. That's right.

55:59.26

drdani

So nice.

56:01.83

Peter

We'll stop there because I could keep going on to the next six lessons, but we'll stop there.

56:02.15

drdani

Well,

56:05.71

Peter

Thank you for listening, Dani.

56:07.39

drdani

This has been really cool. i Thank you for sharing your story and thanks listeners for tuning into this, again, a different kind of episode. So we're always experimenting on the podcast and look forward to seeing what you all think.

56:16.08

Peter

Yeah.

56:22.91

Peter

Yeah.

56:24.07

drdani

Thanks, Peter.

56:25.47

Peter

Thanks, Dani.

56:26.60

drdani

Bye.

56:27.25

Peter

1000,