 Actually, our next speaker needs no introduction. She's been emceeing here for us, but a 25-year career as an Air Force pilot. And just so you know, she's pretty quiet, really reserved, pretty shy. In fact, those of you sitting in the back need to come way, but you're not going to be able to hear her. So come on up here and get closer. No further ado, Moe Barrett. It's the summer after my freshman year at the Air Force Academy. And as part of the first summer curriculum, you either jump out of perfectly good airplanes or you learn to fly airplanes. And being of sound mind, I choose the stay in the airplane option. So on the agenda for today is a confidence maneuver of stalling the aircraft, which means we are going to starve the aircraft of airspeed by disrupting the airflow underneath the wing that normally keeps the plane aloft. And the reason for this asinine maneuver is so that I will learn to recognize or prevent a stall from happening, or recover from a stall if I fail to recognize or prevent a stall from happening. So we go out to the plane, we're in the motor glider, and seated right next to me is an actual Air Force officer. And he's a qualified instructor pilot, and he's stuck flying with a college kid who thinks she's all that because she made it through one year at the Air Force Academy. So he points the nose of the plane to the sky, he pulls back on the throttle, and we wait. Soon the aircraft loses its upward momentum, and the stick between my instructor's legs becomes ineffective. That doesn't sound good, does it? No. The mechanism used to control the plane becomes ineffective. The plane starts to shake, so we're at that wonderful moment between flying and falling, or that wonderful moment between being a bird and a rock. And now the aircraft will start looking for its flight. And now the way my instructor described it to me during the pre-brief was the plane would go from nose high to nose low. So I'm expecting the plane to go from nose high to nose low. And today the plane goes from nose high to right wing low. I look to my left and all I see is sky, to my right all I see is a fast approaching ground. My instructor sits right next to me like he's bored, and he calmly executes the stall recovery procedures, which means he pushes the nose of the aircraft over, and so what was once sky-earth is now all-earth. He is unconcerned that we are plummeting toward our death. He's got one hand on the throttle, one hand on the stick. That once ineffective thing between his legs is now becoming useful. And soon we are flying straight and level, and my heart rate slows down toward the triple digits. My instructor looks over at me. You okay? Yeah? Because remember, I've made it through one year at the Air Force Academy. You sure? Yeah? Okay. At some point during the stall or the stall recovery, call it instinct, call it reaction, call it foreplay. I look over and see that I am grabbing my instructor's leg. And unaware that I have grabbed my instructor's leg, I am equally unaware that I am still grabbing my instructor's leg. So I bring my hands to my side of the cockpit. Fast forward a couple years, now it's the summer after my junior year at the Air Force Academy, and I'm learning to fly the Cessna 172. Again on the agenda is the confidence maneuver of let's let the plane fall out of the sky. Same setup as before, I have a qualified Air Force Officer next to me, instructor pilot, and he's now stuck flying with a college kid who now knows she's all that because she's made it through three years at the Air Force Academy. Nose of the sky, throttle back, lose upward momentum, ineffective stick between legs, shaking plane, bird, rock, and I'm ready for anything. I know the plane can go nose low, right wing low, I've even seen the plane go left wing low. And this time the plane goes nose low, instructor executes the recovery, and I keep my hands to myself. Big day for a mo. But today my instructor is teaching a new confidence maneuver of secondary stalls, and secondary stalls are what happen when you recover too aggressively from that first stall. So we go nose high, nose low, through straight and level, I keep my hands to myself, then the plane goes back up to no momentum, ineffective stick between legs, shaking plane, bird, rock, and right wing low. Now, this time, call it automated response, call it airmanship, or keep calling it foreplay, I once again grab my instructor's leg. This is how rumors start. This is how reputations are built. This is not the reputation I want built, so once again I retract my hands to my side of the cockpit. Fast forward two more years, now I'm in pilot training, I'm heading out to stall the T-37. You know the drill. Qualified instructor pilot next to me, flying with this kid who thinks she's all that because she's about to become a pilot, nose up, throttle pack, lose momentum, penis in your window, shaking plane, bird, rock, and looking for flight. Now, I know the plane can go nose low, right wing low, left wing low, I know about secondary stalls, but today my instructor is teaching me yet another new confidence maneuver called unloaded recoveries. In an unloaded recoveries, the aircraft will find its flying attitude where it damn well pleases, and today is behind us, so we start a lazy and unexpected float backwards. Because it's unexpected, what do you think I did? What is, even backstage a saying I grabbed is like, really? Did we not establish this report? I thought we knew each other better? No, you think I, no, because you're right, I did. I grabbed his leg. It may be surprising, or maybe it isn't surprising, I don't know, that I ended up in a crew aircraft because I think flying a single seat plane might have been a more appropriate choice given my airborne touching history. My leg grabbing career spanned five years, three different airfames, and three separate instructors. But in order to become a pilot, I had to let go of my instructor's leg, legs, and put my hands on my own controls and prove that I could fly the plane, that I could do the recoveries on my own. And isn't that kind of like how things are for us in life? We lean on other people, or fear me, you grope, we lean on other mentors as we're learning a new skill. But from each experience and each new environment, we learn something that can be applied and layered on to the next time we go through a similar experience, and we learn something from that time that we comply to the next time. Every single one of us in this room is going through some new experience, and we're doing it in the midst of ever-changing environments. And it's important for us to lean on others if we need to, at first. But at some point we have to let go, put our hands on our own controls and fly our own airplanes. Because when we grip too hard, we stall our life. So how do we loosen our grip? How do we learn to recognize, prevent, and recover a lifestyle? I'm going to propose to you that we treat our decisions, our actions, and our foams stand by. Let me get closer to my computer here. Like an internal combustion engine. So this is when all the geeks kind of perk up and they're like, yeah, this is sweet, and everybody's got the right brains like, I'm going to change the uniform on my Bitmoji, okay? So stick with me. Now we're going to try to make this as simple as possible. At its most basic level, an internal combustion engine is a chemical process that converts a fuel-air mixture into action, yes? Not an expert. I'm just saying at its most basic level that's what's happening. So for all the engineers, I'm going to put a little math up here for you. Here's, maybe not. Yeah, you could. Here's some math for you. So here's some things that look like numbers and they look like a sentence, but there's numbers and there's letters where numbers should be and all this other stuff. But for everybody else, next slide please, stick with me. Okay? I am qualified to get you through this and we were going to do this together, okay? So stick with me. Next slide, please. Internal combustion engine has, in a four-stroke engine, has four cycles. Intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust. Next slide, thanks. During the intake, the inlet guides bring all the air flow in, and so regardless of what direction the air is coming in, it's able to take all that air in and streamline it as it goes into the next chamber. Next slide, please. Compression is exactly what it sounds like. We're going to mush all those oxygen molecules together because the more we mush those oxygen molecules together, the more powerful the combustion is going to be. So in the combustion, as that's where that fuel-air mixture is ignited and burned, and this is the only one of the four phases where energy is actually produced. And then exhaust. That combusted gas gets expelled into the atmosphere. And next slide, please. Because of Newton's third law of something about equal and opposite reaction, when the engine expels the gas, the plane goes forward. Next slide, please. So intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust. Simple, yes? I'll make it simpler. Next slide. If you are like me and have the attention span of a fruit fly, maybe a nat goldfish would be pushing it, or you have the maturity level of a 12-year-old I'm going to propose a different change for you. Suck, squeeze, bang, blow. Okay? All right. Next slide. How do we use this? Next slide. Thank you, Megan. So let's go through my stall scenario here. Next slide. When I had the gliders, never been in a glider before, never been in a plane before, I'm getting ready to go out to stall the plane. My instructor tells me the plane's going to go, next slide, nose high to nose low. And so that's my input. That's my expectation that's going to get compressed through the experience of when I go out in the plane. Next slide, please. So I go out in the plane, and I have this experience, I have this expectation. It gets compressed in the expectation that meets right wing low. And so when I have right wing low, then I have that experience, and now I'm going to have this reaction, and my decision is going to be to grope him. And then I'm going to be like, you know what? That really wasn't what I wanted to do. So my exhaust is, I'm not going to do that again. So I'm going to try to think of a right way to say this. That blow becomes part of the suck for the next squeeze bang. So I go to T-40 once. Cessna 172, I'm like, yeah, yeah, I've done this before. I've been in a glider. I've got the pre-break for the Cessna 172. I know the plane can go nose low, right wing low, left wing low. Oh, but now I go through this experience of a secondary stall, and I have an action. And it is, again, to grab my instructor's leg. And then I use that as a filter, and I say, okay, you know what? I'm not going to do that again. So that blow becomes part of the sucks for the next squeeze bang, which is going to be out in pilot training. Megan, you're good. I love it. So now I know I can go nose low, right wing low, left wing low. I know about the secondary stall, and then I had this unloaded recovery thing, and we all know how that story ends. But this time, yeah, I'm not doing that again. Seriously, this time I mean it, okay? So I will say that the T-37 was the last time I grabbed an instructor in the air during stalls. It's the last time I grabbed a new instructor. Poof, okay, next slide, please. So how else can we use this? Do you guys write papers at all in any of the programs that you're in? Nobody writes papers. Do you type papers? Sorry, do you text papers? What do you guys, Twitter papers? Has anybody ever written a paper before? Yes. Yes, thank you. Thanks, Mel, I'm so glad you're here. All right, so when you write a paper, you get ready to do that. You take in as many inputs as you can. We've heard from so many speakers today who talk about get as many inputs as you can, right? We shouldn't be a single source of information. Take it in. We take it in from podcasts. We Google things. Nobody bings anything anymore, but we read articles and journals and we interview and all these things. Take in as many inputs. It's all raw data, and just like the internal combustion engine, we're gonna take that and we're gonna streamline it in and we're gonna pass it through this compression chamber of experience. Maybe outlines we've done. Maybe we're gonna do some peer review. Maybe we've written for this instructor before so we know the little trigger words that they'd like and so we can say, yeah, yeah, yeah, and I know what they like, so I'm gonna do that, right? These are all the experiences we've gone through before or maybe people are helping us with and we're gonna push it through that. But at some point, you gotta write the damn paper, okay? And I'm sure if you wait until the very last minute, no, that's okay. It's a nice piece of, no, there's just better. Yeah, those are your papers. Yeah, they're beautiful A-plus papers, perfect, but even the most perfect of papers, the most perfect of projects, they go every which way you, in every way you wanted it to go, there's still something that you can learn from that. There is still something that comes out of that bang that becomes the blow, because these are my papers. They're absolute works of shart. So that becomes, you can take something and you can learn some lesson from that, whether it's the timeline or the process or whatever you did. Again, use that blow to be part of the next suck. It becomes part of your input. Next slide, please. Something I want to propose to you though is I want you to think about where you are in other people's internal combustion engine of action or where others are in your internal combustion engine of action. So let's say no one's ever been out and stalled a plane before and you're getting ready to go get your private pilot's license tomorrow and you're gonna go and you're gonna do stalls and that's on the agenda. My experience that I shared with you about the glider, about the T41, about the T37, those experiences become part of your input. They become part of the suck that you take in as part of your experience before you experience it yourself. We all have a chance to provide cooperative input to each other, right? And it needs to be constructive input. Now when I talk about where you are in other people's life and where they are in yours, think about the constructive input you're taking in and think about the input that you're putting into other people. Make sure it's constructive. Let's lift people up. Think about all those inputs that are coming in. This is important and we can do it and it's free and it's easy. Next slide. The next thing we can do is we can help people filter through those experiences. This is what mentorship is. Mentorship isn't me making a decision for you. Mentorship is about us having a two-way conversation about what you're going through and I can share you maybe there's something similar I did or maybe there's something similar that you did and we share that experience so we don't have to make all the mistakes ourselves. I seem to be making more than my fair share of mistakes. But we help people frame experiences so we can do something with it. But at some point we need to act, right? We need to make a decision. At some point we need to get off the pot and do the thing. Write the paper. Make the decision. We're all leaders in here. We're all making decisions. The other thing I would caution you is make sure you're being gracious. Nobody comes into work and specifically says, I'm going to make Mel's life hell today. Yeah. I'm coming just to get under her skin. Or I'm going to come and I'm just going to try to get you fired. Nobody comes into work like that, right? Be gracious with people because everybody's going through this same iteration. Everybody's got different inputs. Everybody's got different experiences. Help people learn from that because we all know we're not perfect. We all know I'm not perfect. I don't always make the best decisions. I don't always make the decisions I'm most proud of and want to repeat again and again and again. But use that and that's what hot wash and feedback is for. Hot wash. After action reports. Feedback. Reviews. All those things that we do let those blows become a part of the suck. And because we're all leaders, remember that other people are watching what you do. They are watching what happens in your combustion chamber. They are watching what comes out of your exhaust. That doesn't sound good either. I might have to rework this speech. People are watching what you do and we need to be watching what other people are doing and that becomes part of our input. Yes? Next slide please. And again it's part of that input. One more Megan. I'm just going to leave you with this. I challenge you to take decisions, actions and experiences and run them through this internal combustion engine of action. If suck, squeeze, bang, blow works for you then I dare you to forget suck, squeeze, bang, blow. Take an inventory of all your experiences and look at how they have framed your decisions. Look at how you can use those to help others frame their decisions. Leverage other people's experiences so you can also learn from that and learn from their experiences. Think about the role you play in other people's engines and think about the roles of others in your engines. Some of the things that we take in might need to be just bypassed and they need to be used for other filters and other functions. When you do this you will be making deliberate action and you may be increasing your critical thinking. I just have to warn you about that. You also may accelerate your decision making and that will give you a leg up. Last slide. Thank you.