Staying Ahead… of your life
How to catch up with your life…
If you feel like you do not have enough time for anything or life goes on and you are looking behind it, do not be upset. I guess many people feel the same way.
One of my best excuse for almost anything is to say that “But I do not have time for that”. I do also feel that 24 hours a day is not enough or I got to catch up with everything. This takes us to the topic of this piece: Staying ahead of your life and I would like to share a tip/my opinion on one tool that can help you with staying ahead.
I believe learning a second profession — my pilot training — contributed a lot to my life. Not just professionally but also as a person. I learned a lot of skills which are not just useful in flying a plane but also in navigating your life. So this is one of the skills I have gained through flight training that can also be applied to your personal life in order to stay ahead and create more time for yourselves.
Staying ahead of the plane
One of the most important part of flying is actually the work you do while you’re on the ground, not in the air. Flight planning is a curicial part of any flight. Both for safety and also for your conveinence. So what you do before any flight is to get prepared, check weather, airports, your route and any other thing that can be relevant to that particular flight. Also you do a briefing! You share such information with the crew and say what you will actually do during the flight out loud. So you plan everything.
They say in aviation that if you know something %100 on the ground, you will know it %50 up in the air.
Thus, it is important to know what to do and when very well on the ground in order to be able to keep up in the air. Keeping up with what? Keeping up with the plane!
Because a plane is fast and you need to stay ahead of it!
This means that knowing every step relative to your flight and thinking about what to do next beforehand. And you can only do that with preparation.
Probably it was the first thing they told me during the training: “You need to stay ahead of your plane!” But with the thrill of the moment, I probably ignored this advice at first. However, when you sweat enough while you are some thousand feet above and trying figure out what to do next, you understand that you actually need to be prepared. Because, it makes things much more easier. It makes your flight much smoother and more importantly it makes you stress less, sweat less and more confident.
Now, think of your flight as your life. When you are prepared, more organized and plan in advance, you’ll navigate it much smoother as well. Small things like writing things down, scheduling your week in advance or thinking about things beforehand all can help. This way you can make more of your limited 24 hours a day. Plus you’ll also notice that you stress for things much less.
Of course, life is also what is unexpected and you can’t plan and be prepared for everything. But flying is similar as well. You can lose an engine anytime. But when you get used to being prepared and planned, you can be better at dealing with the unexpected as well.
Don’t forget, life is too short to trail behind…
