Forging Resilience
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Whether you're seeking to overcome personal challenges, enhance your leadership skills, or simply navigate life's twists and turns, "Forging Resilience" offers a unique and inspiring perspective for you to apply in your own life.
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Forging Resilience
S3 Ep 84 Helen Lunnon - Wood: The Masks We Wear
Helen Lunnon-Wood knows what it means to say “good to go” and put the mask on. In this episode of Forging Resilience, we walk through the three thirds of her professional life: psychology student turned fast jet pilot, then senior military leader working across NATO and the US services, and now aviation psychologist, coach, and founder of High Flight. She talks about the cost and the gift of that journey, migraines that ended her flying career, becoming a parent, and the slow shift from the cockpit to supporting others from the ground.
We dig into Helen’s take on resilience, far beyond the buzzword. She shares her LEMONS framework, lifestyle and loving what you do, exercise, “meditations” as emptying your head, optimism, nutrition, and sleep and how migraines became her early warning system when her resilience was low.
We talk about marbles in the jar, the tiny daily choices that really build resilience, and why sometimes that looks like a deliberate mental health day.
Helen also opens up about being one of the very few women in fast jet squadrons, the tension between belonging and fitting in, and the masks she wore from her callsign “Elle” to the masculine armour she had to adopt just to survive.
Helen explains how tools from aviation planning, briefing, debriefing, feedback transfer into business and leadership, and why “good to go” has become her shorthand for the warrior mask leaders put on.
Reach out to Helen on LinkedIn
Welcome to Fortune Resilience, real conversations for high performers facing transition. I'm Erin Hill. And join me as I talk with people about challenge change and the adversity they faced in life, so we can learn from their experiences, insights, and stories.
SPEAKER_01:Good to go.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, born ready, like a coiled spring. Sorry about that as well. Today I'm joined by Helen Lunnon Wood, a former RAF fast jet pilot, turned aviation psychologist and coach and the founder of High Flight Limited coaching company. She blends human factors with real-world command experience to help leaders and veterans build personal and cultural resilience. Helen, welcome to the show. It's uh great to have you here today.
SPEAKER_02:It's lovely to be here. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Do you know what I was going to say? What I do is I is I give the intro, and what I normally say is I stumble my way through it. It is my least favourite part of the show. Um that's what I didn't say to you before, so I could say it and get out of the way. But Helen, over to you. Give us a give us a bit of um a bit of your story and a bit of your background that's that's relevant or or even on your heart to share today.
SPEAKER_02:So um it's good to be here, by the way. We've had lots of conversations, and I've been really looking forward to this one. Like what you're saying. Um so if I broke my life in professional life into thirds, that would make most sense, I think. The first third, I started studying uh psychology at Edinburgh University, I did a master's there, loved it. I thought it was brilliant, and thought I was gonna be a psychologist, and that was my calling. And then uh I got involved in the University Air Squadron, and I realized that flying was the other half of my heart that I wanted to pursue, and so I did. Um, mainly because the RAF said you have to start flying by the time you're 24 in the military, and psychology felt like it had a longer game to it. So I finished the degree, but I joined the Air Force and joined it as a pilot. Um, and that was the first third of my life was frontline flying, instructional flying, fast jet flying, hair on fire, low level, around mountains, over deserts, across seas. It was brilliant. It was an absolutely amazing experience. Um, and I can diss on all day about it. And then the second third of my life happened, and three sort of fairly momentous things occurred. Uh, one was you get to a point when you're flying, and they say, You've done enough flying for now, we need to go and you could go and fly a desk for us. So, can you go and fly a desk for us for a while? So that was part of the professional path. Uh, and I did go and fly a desk. At the same time, I became uh a parent, and that for those of you who are thinking about becoming a parent or old parent, rearranges your priorities and rearranges your what's important to you. Um, and that definitely made me rethink what I wanted to do with the the next bit of my life. And then the third one was not my choice, but I got diagnosed with migraines. For those of you who know about fast jet flying, uh at the time that was a fairly uh solid end to my flying career. Um, that may have adapted very slightly now, but at the time it was that was we're done for fast jet flying. So I had to rethink what the the what turned into the middle field of my professional life would be. And I ended up going, well, I still have the Air Force, I still want to support the operations, but let's go and have some of the adventures. And luckily my husband brought in on that, which was a good thing. Um, and we ended up going out to the US. We did a tour each out there, working with the Air Force, the US Air Force, uh, and I also worked with the US Marine Corps, US Navy, USDAD, uh, in a super interesting role. Uh, I also ended up uh NATO headquarters, working with the 32 allies there, uh, which was another really fascinating role. Uh, and a PhD in patients and negotiation and diplomacy, quite literally. Um and in the midst of all that, I ended, I also did a job as the career manager. We call them career managers in the RAF, um, deskes, posters, appointers, various other things. And I was looking after 270-ish uh RAF air crew. Um, and that was an insight into them, me, uh, the RAF at the time, and it really re-ignited. I wanted to get back into the psychology space and the aviation psychology space. So uh I got to the third bit of my career so far, which really only started in January when I left the Air Force, and uh I retrained as a professional coach, uh, and that's what I do now. I I do one-to-one coaching and workshops, really taking aviation-inspired themes and ideas and things that worked for us on the front line and when I was instructing and translating them into usable tools and ideas that might help anyone who wants it really to be a better version of themselves, to be how you know, get their team into a better place, their organizations into a better place. Um, and additionally, on top of that, I'm going back into that aviation psychology space and specialising in military flying and military aviation for that, and working towards starting my PhD, which anyone who start knows about PhDs is a bit of a gruff just to get there. And then you actually have to do the PhD. So that's me, that's where I'm at, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00:Awesome. There's there's there's so much there, Helen. So thanks, thanks for sharing that. But um, I'm so in in my ignorance then in terms of migraines, is is that more well not more or anything. Is that is that is there any psychological uh reasons that migraines potentially start might start happening or that start happening for you, or is that a a purely physiological it's really interesting.
SPEAKER_02:So years and years of research, and I don't think there's unanimous decisions or explanations of people's migraines. And from my experience of chatting to other people who have it, um it's quite an individual thing. Now I'm quite lucky, my migraines are relatively infrequent. Some people get, you know, 10, 12, more per month. I get maybe one every six months, but it's enough to be debilitating. And um, I've had you know one series of migraines that I was in bed for three days. I just I in a dark room I couldn't get up, I couldn't puncture, I couldn't do anything. Um, so um the the personal experience you have of this kind of chronic illness that's quite invisible um to people um is really is really tricky. In terms of my migraines, uh so taking ownership of mine, there's a relation to stress. I think it's when stress relieves rather than when stress is ongoing. There's a relation to a balance of what on how I'm eating and looking up for myself. If I'm worn down um uh and I my resilience is low, that definitely opens a gate for the potential for them. And when I think about resilience, when I talk about resilience, um I actually I have an acronym so I can actually remember it. Um but it's lemons and it's about lifestyle and loving what you do. It's about exercising appropriate to what you're used to exercising and and being healthy. It's about um I call it meditations. Meditations isn't necessarily sat with your legs crossed and you know, uh that kind of thing. It can be, um, but what I found it was it was emptying my head at the end of the day so that I could sleep well. Um, and pulling together the things I'd done wrong in the day or right in the day, and just giving myself a chance to journal and rethink them over at the end of the day. Um, the O in Lemons is about optimism. It's not about happiness, it's not about positivity or even one of the worst neighbor toxic positivity, it's about an it's about optimism. Uh the end is nutrition. Like if I've eaten chite, excuse my French, for you know, like I've lived off chocolate, I haven't eaten my good three meals today, I'm like I'm not eating the fruit or the nuts that I need, I'm drugged for. So nutrition is just super, it's super important for my opinions. Uh and the last one I've already kind of mentioned is sleep. Like, there's there's some great books out there, but the the one that really convinced me on sleep was Matt Walker's stuff on while asleep and his podcast and his book. And I like I can remember where I was. I was driving my mini and listening to him, and I was like, holy moly, why have I not realized this? I am 45 years old or whatever it was, and and it's only just made me realize. So the migraines is part of me knowing when my resilience is super low, and those six things that we've just gone through, that's me a way of me keeping a track on all of that. Um to make sure that I'm managing migraines, but also managing resilience generally, and and going back to that sort of core baseline. This is my bedrock. If this is fine, I'd probably make everything else work.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Um there's a there's a lot of banter with the RAF and and other services, and I know what you're in. And I'm going there. And and I'm sure to some extent, and and I understand the implications. Um, so is there's a serious element to that of of why pilots wouldn't have help and support with those with looking after the lemons, even if it wasn't um given as that acronym. But when you were serving and when you're in high stress environments, was there extra care or emphasis put on the human side to look after yourself, the performance side, so that you can recover and and go back out and do your your job again when when you were there?
SPEAKER_02:So when I was there, which is the sort of in the past year era, is uh talking about it. Yeah, in the fast-year space. When I was there for sort of the first decade and a bit of this century, it wasn't really a thing. Um it was you could see it forming in the background, but we still had a lot of the old and bold in there who were like, oh yeah, you may not get all of that. Um there is a sense of fear in bringing the that side into a space where you are expected to be aggressive, you're expected to go and put yourself at risk and actually a way of protecting yourself that um was thought to be. Don't deal with that stuff, don't touch it, bury it over there, put it over there, we don't need to deal with it. Do not bring that into the space. And I I actually have heard people say, I do not want you to bring your stress into work. And that was like, you know, this bit, and and you can see when that was said to someone, that person that it was said to was like, right, so all trust is gone, you know. I I now feel completely alienated. I no longer belong, I fit in, which has huge implications for individual and team dynamics. Um, so no, it didn't exist. Not not in the same way, it's much more proactively pursued now, from my understanding of it, which is I think is really healthy. But there's a really fine line, right? At the end of the day, we're building people we need to send to war. Um, and there has to be mechanisms for them to be able to get up in the morning and go and train and fly over the UK, but they also have to be able to go and engage and put the game face on and uh go to war. Uh and it's really interesting when we started this podcast. I don't know whether you're whether it was recording or not, but you said something like, Are you ready? And I said, good to go. And that for me is the mask going on, like like my floor, like good to go. And we would be stood at the outbreak, and probably actually in the car on the way to work, good to go, was already, Sean's back. Yeah, good to go. I have engaged the warrior.
SPEAKER_00:Love it, I love it. I'm getting all excited. Um I I'm curious, did did you did you then well? Let me give a little reflection now. I often reflect on on my my military career, very different from yours, obviously, but sometimes it got exciting as well. Um that I was quite young and ignorant and unaware, and also these we weren't as encouraged or it wasn't as well practiced or thought of in terms of looking after yourself as in in a hostilic way that maybe it is today. There wasn't the awareness and it wasn't the culture of that, which is fine. But now, having so many years later, I can reflect back. But I'm curious, is there any practices that you did have for yourself that you still use to this day? I mean, you mentioned frameworks, but yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, 100%. Because for me, I had um as a female in that environment, so so to give you some stats, right? Uh about 1.5% of fast jet air crew are female. Uh that was about the stats. That might be more or less now, but that was about the stats at the time. That equated very roughly to one or less uh pilot, female pilots on the squadron. So you were almost invariably on your own on the squadron as female aircrew. That did begin to change towards the end, and I felt very blessed about that. And that actually comes back to one of the survival or coping mechanisms I heard. But that that's the kind of ratio you're talking about. And even if there were other females on the squadron, certainly in the early half of my flying, they were not air crew, they would be one of the engineers uh or one of the intelligence officers, one of the admin staff, that kind of stuff. So that was a very isolating um existence. And what it made me, and what it was actually, and I spent a lot of time thinking about this, is you suffered from this duality. You were hyper, hyper visible, hyper visible in any room. You're voiced out the way you worst it out. You tried not to let it stand out in certain spaces because you didn't want to be the thing that alienated or or challenged the the cohesion. There's a there's a reason it's called Band of Brothers, right? Um, so you're hyper-visible, and then at the same time, you're hyper-invisible because none of the kit was designed for me. I was wearing, you know, protection equipment, so retirement, fire retirement stuff designed for men, which doesn't fit females. I was wearing body armor designed for men, didn't fit females. Um, I was lucky, I'm quite tall, so I can kind of adjust into a version of a male's outfit, suit, flying suit, that kind of thing. But that wasn't the case for everyone. Um, so there's this hypervisibility and invisibility you have at the same time, uh, which makes it really interesting. Coping mechanisms, there's kind of three, there's always three, because my brain is small, and I need to remember three points. So the first one is the places where I coped best were the places I belonged. And I say belonged in that kind of Buddhist concept of near enemies because there's belonging, which is really the key positive, virtuous thing, and there's fitting in, which sounds kind of similar, but it's not. And belonging is where the group makes space for you. Fitting in is where you change your shape to fit in with the group, and where I fitted in, I was invariably in a worse mental place and struggled. I really struggled. There's one one particular series of about eight months where I was massively struggling because I was trying to fit in and I wasn't where I belonged, and I've got three distinct points in my flying career where I really felt like I belonged. I was a far better, I was far better at flying, far better at delivery, far better as an officer, far better as a person. And so that sense of it was really important to me. And that spoke to me when I was being a leader as well about how do, where do people, do they feel like they fit in here or do they belong here? How do I help them belong? So that was a really important point. The second bit of survival was no one was going to tell me um that I needed to take a break or to step back because that's just not the culture of it at the time. So I had to, I had to figure out when it when I needed to. And I I not regularly by any stretch, probably I could count on one hand the number of times I did it over 15 years, 12 or 14 years, but I took mental health days because there were days I just couldn't face it. I just couldn't walk in and put the mask on and be that right because I was I was exhausted. Like I was exhausted. Um, just fighting it every day. So that was the the second thing. Um, and I would advocate those now. I I would advocate them probably one a year. Um, just in mental health, they take a step back to take a deep breath, you know, and figure yourself out a bit more, maybe more than one a year, but that was that would have worked for me. And then the final one is I ended up with really, really strong external female friendships and bonds initially. And that was going back to like school friends, they provided a massive support network for me. Uh, it was going back to people from university and other friends I reached out. And then later in my career, uh, when I was doing that career management job that I talked about, the desky job, I had the opportunity to reach out to every female on my desk and females in the rank above, and at the time, you know, that was a reasonably high rank, um, and form this unit. And it was the first time some of these females had had any other kind of female support. And there weren't weren't many of us. I think they were about 14 when we started, and we've grown a little bit since then. But that the idea that we were all in it together and we all had these shared experiences, but it we'd been so spread out as junior officers that we'd never met, never contacted, and then we got them all together on just on the WhatsApp chat to begin with, and then at my leaving do we had like 30, 30 or females, and it was female only, sorry. Um, but it was amazing, it was amazing, and I really survived on those three things belonging, um, the female, um, the female comradeship, and that idea of knowing when you need to take a mental health break.
SPEAKER_00:I can I can imagine I well, I I can't really imagine how lonely and isolating it must have been to be um one of one of the only females for such a long time on a on a squadron and the masks that you must have had to wear and the pretense was there a cost to you for for for the other occasions when you were were were fitting in rather than belonging.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, that's interesting. So the masks so for example, one of the masks I wore, like my name is Helen, but when I showed up at the RF, my my nickname is L E L L E. And that was definitely a mask. Like L is a version of me that I put on at some point on the drive to work, or maybe as I was pulling my flying sight on in the morning and that mask went on. And um for a long time I I to begin with, I almost didn't realise I was wearing a mask. And I don't think I took it off very often. And I don't think I think one of the costs of wearing well, one of the benefits of wearing masks is it does protect you. It's almost like armour. And it gives you confidence, it gives you courage, it gives you a load of different things. But the other side of it, that is if you don't realise you're wearing it, when do you take it off? When do you know whether you have to take it off? Where do you wear that mask in places which are inappropriate? Um, do other people who don't need to see you like that only start seeing you like that? So um that's a really interesting. So the cost is one to begin with. I hadn't realized what that I was even wearing the mask, and that did cost me. It cost me any uh I'm very conscious that I'm a better person now that I know I can take the mask off, or should take the mask off, and have taken the mask off. Um, but it's really interesting, you know, you have famous people who have stage names, like Beyoncé is Sasha Phillips, I think her name was. I don't know whether she uses that anymore, you know. But there's lots of people who have a stage version of themselves and then a background version or a backstage version of themselves, which is probably the more real one, you know. So it's a really interesting one about what does it cost you, what does it get you? Um, it's pros and cons, I think. There's a there's a great book I read um by Lewis House called The Mask of Masculinity, and it goes through kind of like I think it's nine masks that men put on. Um, and actually, when I was reading it, I was like, oh, I kind of put the masculine mask on when I was L and when I was going into that space. Um, I'd love him to write um masks of permanent in the came although he might not quite have the right take on it. But um, there's definitely this idea of mask. What does it gain? What does it cost?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I was at the theatre two weeks ago, and I was smiling a lot while you're speaking there because my insight from from going there was was um I'm fortunate enough to know the lead actor for the show. And um, I went there specifically to see him and and and I let him know I was there, and I met him briefly afterwards, and and he was exhausted. Um, and he's he's told me this before, but I only wanted to say hi, but he's very keen to get away. Um yeah, absolutely draining, pretending to be somebody else, um, even if it's just just for a while. And and it really I I it struck me as probably most of us are doing that at some level shape or have done. Um it's not that uncommon.
SPEAKER_02:No, I think it's I think it's very common, and you you talk about um you can see it in the business world as well. Um, there's that thing called like executive presence where you've got someone who thinks in order to be a leader or in order to um show up in the right way, they have to dress a certain way, be a certain way. But actually, it's only part of who they are, it's a mask they've put on. Um, it's a mask they've put on to just be that person in that space. But how many of them, when do they take it off? Do they do they become I don't know, do they become something else or need something else? Do they take on that? Yeah, fascinating.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I if I reflect back to me then, or for me is there's a disconnection, especially if there's not our own awareness. And and so yeah, I've it goes back to that point of trying to fit in um and and doing doing things really. I yeah, going places or doing things or even dressing a certain way, just because everybody else does, uh a basic level, you know, or or or or versions of that, which goes again, which which leads into the cultural element of it, really. And but before before going there, I'm just curious to ask, um taking it right back to the beginning, and sometimes I open with this question, but I'll do it now three-quarters of the way through. Um what what does what does resilience mean to you now?
SPEAKER_02:So resilience, resilience is really interesting, and there's lots of different versions or um you know, you talk about grip, which is you know, Angela Duckworth, and that's like long-term goals and what you're going for in the long term. You talk about resilience, and a lot of people use it like uh bouncing back. I'm not a great fan of that phrase. Um, and like that, you know, I don't want to go back for a start, and and the idea of bouncing, I think that's not really really resilience that could end up in the denial or ignore space, which isn't necessarily healthy.
SPEAKER_00:And and I also think if you're you you told me I'm not a ball as well, I think, or I saw you written about bouncing on.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, don't bounce, you're not a ball. Um, no, I think resilience is is much more deliberate than a bounce. Uh real resilience is thoughtful and intentional and deliberate. Goes back to that lemons that I talked about. Like these are the six things I need to hook onto, and if I'm being deliberate about them, on my resilience, it goes up. And um I think sometimes people get very excited about the word of resilience, the the word resilience is kind of a buzzword at the moment, but actually the practical day-to-day living of it is is far more challenging. Um and there's big resilience, like I am being resilient. Then there's a diff, then there's an element, there's elements of resilience. If I I can explain that better, there's um uh a lovely, uh, an amazing lady called um, I'm gonna mispronounce her name, Pima Children, I think. She's a Buddhist teacher, she's Canadian, she does some great, she's got some great books. One of the bits in her book called Start Where You Are Um talks about her challenge of um living of mismanaged expectations, and she can't figure out whether she's supposed to be big or she's supposed to be small. And what her teacher says is you're supposed to be both. And the point of that when it comes to resilience is resilience is the big bit. It's the I'm gonna get back up there, I've used back, go grow forward, I'm gonna be deliberate and intentional about getting to where I want to be and and recovering from whatever the setback is, etc. etc. But it's resilience is also the minute everyday, every minute decisions you make in order to do that. And I think some people want the big resilience, but they don't realize the really hard work is that decision right now, that's a really bit, you know, it's it's one of the marbles in the jar. Like the jar of resilience is the big thing. You need to put the marbles in. And so, you know, I'm gonna have fruit, not uh like a chocolate bar. That's part of resilience. I'm gonna get up and speed walk the dog, poor dog, not meander. That's resilience. I'm gonna make sure I switch off my screen because I know I don't sleep well with my screen on just before I go to bed. That's another form of resilience. So the resilience is in the tiny, tiny details of every day, as well as the big, I want to be resilient to get back up to it. So if you can put the marbles in the jar and your jar is full, you're good. You're well, you're better. Good's probably an overstatement for any of us, right? But that's what resilience is, it's being big and being small at the same time.
SPEAKER_00:Love it. And and and what I'm hearing in that then is it's not the it's not staying stuck. There's a connection to realize what what as an individual you need to do to keep that bucket topped up. And and also then slide that scale up and down. So if that looks like like taking a day off but for a mental health day, I don't think I've ever said that out loud or on a podcast, actually. Uh taking time for yourself, then then that can be it. But also it might it might be showing up, um, understanding that today it's the team that goes first, but it's a conscious decision and with intention. Um yeah, because you're connected to yourself and and that around you.
SPEAKER_01:Modeling. Interesting.
SPEAKER_00:So in terms of some of the things that you teach um and and the themes and the tools that you've taken from from aviation, I'm really curious to hear about some of those without giving all of your trade secrets away.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, so yeah, so um IP is an interesting one, isn't it? There's I I'm the IP in my in my job. Like I present this information in my way, I'm the IP. The information's out there for everyone to present. We've been doing this since you know the Romans or before then, you know, it's just packaged in a different way. So um we do what what I tend to do on workshops is pull in the things that we used in military aviation when we were, you know, planning our missions, when we were making decisions, when we were debriefing. That's always a really big one debriefing and feedback. Kind of second nature. In the bit of the military that I was in, and really probably across most of the military, but less so out in business and out in um for individuals as well. You know, they'll get to them today, they'll doom scroll for an hour and go to bed. Um, and actually having a debrief at the end of the day, even if it's just five minutes of journaling, what went right, what went wrong, what do I need to do tomorrow? You know, like we were talking about before we came on, you know, what does 2026 look like for me? What do I need to do in 2025 to make that work? You know, having a think about those things, it's deliberate. And and what I use when I'm doing my um coaching and my workshops are just bringing in the aviation-inspired versions of that. So I can talk, tell the story about, you know, this is when we had to plan to fly over Buckingham Palace or whatever it is, but link it to a tool, link it to a reason like they might want to pick it up and use it because it works for us. It's almost slightly different with businesses and the military. Businesses have a different ethos and a different bottom line at the end of the day, but the tools are useful. Um, and so that's that's how we use it and blend in. And I've got a load of associate coaches who have all got similar backgrounds than me, who um are all either psychology or coaching qualified, or both. Um, um, we go out there and help businesses and individuals figure out maybe how to do things uh that bit better or that bit more uh thought out and uh with with a better version of themselves in mind.
SPEAKER_00:So in in terms of businesses and teams then and helping them build some sort of or grow an awareness around their cultural resilience and and realize what they're creating, what what the some of the and and I know it'll be different for every single business, and but is there a general pattern that you see in in terms of how you start to get uh teams or businesses to look at the the culture and the cultural resilience that they've they've got or create?
SPEAKER_02:Um so that's an interesting one. Each team you go into is different, is it it has its own personality and it has its own culture. And culture is a really, really tricky one to get people to look at honestly, intelligently, in depth, and really self-analyse because um you tend to get one or two. Either, hey, we pretty much put the culture together because they're the CEO or the senior leadership team and they love it, or you get the other side of it is I didn't get a say in the culture, I came into the organization or whatever, and I I don't think the culture's working, but I can't get, I can't, I don't like it. I you what you try and do is get them get them to a space where they uh will at least truthfully examine what culture is, and a lot of people will go after strategy but not look at the culture, and there's a great phrase out there, isn't it? It's it culture each strategy for breakfast. Like if you can't look at your culture, if you try and draw a strategy up, but your culture won't accept it, your culture won't take on board, or it's it's really just a showpiece, then your strategy is probably a bit bit lost. Um, so culture is really, really important one. And um cultural resilience, like if you tie in those two together, is is fascinating, and it's it's a layer of you you talk about individual resilience, you talk about team resilience, you talk about cultural resilience, like how do you survive the dips and the highs and the lows as a culture, but you can also talk about um generational resilience, you can talk about um inherited resilience from your family, your family resilience. So cultural resilience is just one element of that. But if you add when you talk about cultural resilience, you're really bringing all those other things in there as well. And when you're talking about a team's culture or whether you're talking about a nation's culture, um, you can to really get into like examining like what where do you want to go with this? What do you actually want the culture to be? Um, and kind of explore that with them. That's that's always tricky though, it's really tricky. Um uh uh I'm gonna get the name wrong again, Lencioni, Paul Lencioni, five dysfunctions of a team. That's a great one. Um, and he starts with trust. And I would say that's exactly where you start. If you're looking at culture, you start with trust. Simon Sinick's another great one with his, he does his graph of uh trust versus ability, and the seals, he does it with the SEAL team, and he's looking at trust and the trust of an individual, the team has of an individual, uh against set against ability. And the SEALs will take high trust, medium, and medium ability over high ability, low trust individuals. So culture is about trust, it starts with trust anyway, and when you're going into it and you're trying to make yourself culturally cultural, oh too many hours, culturally resilient, you've got to start with trust. Got to.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And it's uh it's a it's a complex one, and I guess a lot of the time it starts with the leaders, and it starts with with themselves and trusting themselves as well. So I can I can imagine how nuanced that that word might be.
SPEAKER_02:It's it's it starts with leaders trusting themselves, leaders trusting the other, and the other trusting leaders. There's got to be this bedrock of trust. And trust is another one like the Marble Draft. You know, trust isn't, hey, everything has gone wrong. We need you to trust us. That is not the time to instigate trust. Trust is, again, it's the little actions every day. You know, hey, Joe, uh, I heard you've not been doing so well, your mom's not well. How is she doing now? You know, do you need some time? Uh, you know, hey, uh, great report. Nailed it, really proud of what you did. Um, you know, the those kind of little bits every day, that's what builds trust. And that's the culture of trust. And if you can get after that, that's that's a really important part of that bedrock.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. I love that. Um I'm gonna I'm gonna take you back towards the beginning of of the the conversation and and the the the third heart or the third the last third or get might too many too many words, not too many answers. The the last the last third of your of your career, which is the the transition. And and I'm curious, how how's your transition going from after being in such a yeah, a pointy-ended organization with so many people around you to running your own business? How's that transition going for you and the and the uh whole identity piece as well, Helen?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so transition is a really interesting time, as you remember. And what I have realized, and mainly with hindsight, is that there are multiple, multiple layers in the transition from the military into civilian life. Um, and the easiest one in many ways is the physical one. Like one day you're in the military, the next day you're not. Your ID card's revoked, you get your veteran ID eventually. Um, but your status within literally the gate getting onto a base, it completely changes. That's the physical one. Now, in many ways, that's I wouldn't say I don't mean easy as in accepted, but at least it's definitive, it's it's black and white. But there's so many layers of transition from spiritual and identity-driven layers to practical layers. Where do you live, your finances, what your definition of um feeling comfortable is, and I mean comfort in terms of the professional comfort, um all the way down to the psychological and the sort of mental space of how you go through the transition and um the challenges that happen. Now, I think the coaching actually, ironically, I was doing the coaching course as I was leaving, and I think actually that gave me a massive help. Uh but it was it was a huge crutch for me as I went through, an important one, because I actually took a lot of the stuff I was feeling into our sort of you know, one-to-one coaching position while we were practicing all our tools, and I found that really useful. But even now, a year on, I'm still you know, looking at how how has my identity changed? How do I define myself? Am I wearing a different mask? Yes, yes, yes.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_02:So um transition is fascinating. It's one of the ones I I in my coaching, I actually get quite a few people in that phase, or in the change phase of life, maybe is as well, to not just the transition from military to the civilian, but the change phase in other parts of their life. And one of the first things we look at is the layers that change really incorporates, because I think in the military we're very much a oh, you know, don't dun dun my directing hand, you know, this will happen, this will happen, this will happen, and then hey, I'm a civilian. Um, and um I don't well, A, I don't think I'm ever gonna be a civilian, really. Uh veteran probably only covers part of what I am. Um and there's a layer, there's there's a huge amount of other layers in there, but the transition is an absolutely fascinating time that needs layers of support as we as as an individual go through it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, definitely. I think that that's that that's the key thing that jumps at me there is that support and the network to to help you bridge that gap, whatever that might be, change your transition. Um and I can't help but think to it's really interesting because I don't consider myself a veteran. I it's not a label that I use, and we could do a whole other podcast on that, I'm sure. Um yeah, it really is. And and I guess, I guess for me then, what my my curiosity for myself is is what what did I make it mean? What do I make it mean? Um, and it's trying to understand that. And a bit like again in our chat that we could have recorded, but we didn't before we got on, was success and defining it. Well, let's actually define it, let's put that onto a list and and am I am I working towards that or am I hitting that or am I nowhere near?
SPEAKER_02:Um yeah, and and exactly that prioritization. What does success mean to you? And how does that affect how you prioritize what you do? Because once you transition that, you've now got a lot more time to think about what's important to you. And you might not, you might, you might go and do something that's very, very similar, just not in the military. Um, but I think there's a question that people have to answer about what are my priorities now? What are what is important to me that makes me get up, go sit at the desk, or show up, or or whatever it is. Um, and I did a lot of soul searching on um and in coaching, we call it the why. What's your why? And if you can identify the why, you know, I guess that's another Simon Cynic, isn't it? Start with why. If you can figure out why, you can then start figuring out how.
SPEAKER_00:Start, yeah. Start.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Helen, um is is there anything that that I've not asked you that you you feel compelled to share or talk about, or a question that I would ask that not asked you that that you've that you'd like to answer even I've not asked it as we start.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh um what I think what's really interesting when you're talking about resilience and certainly resilience within the transition phase of leaving the military is you go into that prioritization, but that fuels the resilience you have. Because if you go back to the why, you can go, that's that's why I'm doing what I'm doing, even if it's hard right now. And it goes back to that marble in the jar idea. Um, for me, one of the main things was as much as I continue to need to pay the mortgage, I also need to give back to a community that supported me. So, one of my most important decisions was about 25% of what I'm doing now, I'm gonna do pro boner in support of veterans. Interestingly say about veterans, because we've had that feedback too. Veterans tend to be associated with maybe World War II, that older era, whereas now a lot of people use ex-military, or um, you know, there might be other words, or they associate actually a little bit with um their regiment or their squadron, more than the in total of their service. So all interesting. But one of the things that drove me as I reset that third element of my um professional career is how do I give back? And so um I am a mentor and a coach and a trustee for a military charity called Icarus, who are for military or veterans or veterans' families, military families who are struggling and need some mental health support, up to and including therapy, um, to to get them through a few months, the next couple of months, whilst the the the more grinding gears of things like the NHS or the bigger charities step up. So doing that for me was a hugely important part of transitioning, giving back the why and all that. And I it all goes back for me to thinking about what do I want the third part of my chapter, the professional chapter, to be about. Um and being very, very deliberate about that. Um and I've had the privilege to do it and to think about it and answer the the why. And I feel like I'm getting there with it. And I would advocate for anyone who's in that transition space, even if they're just thinking about it and it's two years out, start really thinking about, you know, when you get to the age of eighty and you're sat on that porch with that gin, what do you want to look back and what do you want to have achieved? If you're lucky enough to get to 80, that's all that matters, really. What have you achieved? What have you what have you what has no achieved wrong words, sorry. What are you proud of? What are you most proud of? And what do you want to sit on that porch and feel at the age of 80?
SPEAKER_00:Making a quick few notes, and uh that's what I'll be doing learning on later. I'll let you know.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you get your gin, you go sit on the porch, right? Imagine yourself in four years' time.
SPEAKER_00:Well, we it'll probably it'll be probably a warm tea today because it's absolutely lumping it down here in Barcelona, which makes the which makes a change much needed. Um but um and then listen, thank you so much for for your time um and for this conversation. There's there's so many more questions that I've got. So that that would lead me very nicely to to ask you and back onto the show at some other stage. Um, but yeah, also thank you for the work that you do, um, giving back, serving others. Um, yeah, it's been it's been uh it's been a pleasure to to listen to you speak. And um, I've got a few things to take away to mull on myself, and I love the lemons acronym as well. So um, yeah, there's lots for everybody there. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_02:It's good to chat. Always good.