I'm Dr. Paul Jenkins. I'm a clinical psychologist. Today, I'll be reacting to
the concept of attitude from a pilot's perspective.
First, I'll introduce my pilot. This is Adam.
He's actually my son and a licensed pilot.
And a Live On Purpose certified coach. So, I thought, Adam, you'd be the perfect
person to bring on for this conversation today. Thanks for joining me. -Thanks for
having me. This is kind of fun because as a
psychologist, I work with attitude all the time. It's a
word that comes up. We discuss it in sessions or in coaching, in
presentations or trainings. Attitude. You've heard about how
important attitude is. A few years ago, one of my friends pointed out to me that
attitude is actually an aviation term. And you know this
because you're a pilot. -Right. -Adam. What is
attitude from an aviation perspective? As a pilot, what's your take on that?
-Right. Yeah. So, attitude, if you're like me, you wouldn't have known that attitude
was an aviation term. Before I was in aviation.. Yeah, I'd... Maybe heard of. You know,
altitude or wings, airplane but pretty limited
understanding of aviation terms. But attitude is a very important in
aviation concept. And basically, what it represents is it's your
airplane's position relative to the horizon.
-Okay. The position of the plane. -Right. Yeah. So, it doesn't actually tell you
anything about the current like trajectory of your
airplane. But it's just the position and where
your airplane is going to be within the next you know 6 seconds,
minute, few minutes, whatever. -So, you brought a
model to show us. -I brought a model. I feel like it's... So,
you can kind of imagine my hand. Here is the horizon.
And the airplane, the attitude would be its
position relative to the horizon. So, there's a banking attitude.
A nose-high attitude. And a nose-low attitude.
-Yeah. That's hitting you into the hard stuff. -Right.
-Nose-down... -And I don't want to have a nose-down attitude.
-I want to react to this as a psychologist
because often attitude is assumed to be how you feel. Okay?
You'll say somebody has a bad attitude or I have a bad attitude or whatever.
Right? -Right. -Attitude isn't how you feel. It's your position.
And I love how this aviation concept can come into psychology and help us
understand it's not how we feel. It's our position
relative to what? You said that the plane,
it's it's relative to the horizon, right? -Right.
-And so a nose-down attitude is heading into the hard stuff.
A nose-up attitude is going to give you altitude.
-Correct. -Is that fair? -Yeah, that's fair. -In psychology, I think we can look at that
in a very similar way. Our position toward whatever it is, okay?
So, instead of the horizon. It's our position toward our
circumstances or what it is in our life. We take a
position about that. So, if I ask you for example "How's your
day?" Your position about that represents your
attitude or your position toward your day.
-Right. -You can say, "Well, I'm having a great day." Or "I'm having a really
terrible day." It's just a day until you take a
position about it. Anyway that's what my psychologist mind
is doing with what you've shared with us about the aviation term. Adam, you gave me
an experience a couple of weeks ago. In fact, let's pull up a picture of that.
-You can see here on the screen. This is me
and Adam in a little two-seat sport cruiser. Did I get that right? -That's
right. -Which Adam was piloting. And first of all,
this is kind of surreal as a father to be
up in the sky in an airplane and he's at the
controls. It was really cool experience. But we went flying.
Down on my knees was this control panel. You see this on the screen right now.
And this is different I think from the old school planes where they didn't have
the digital technology and whatnot. But there are a lot of
things to track there. And it kind of blew my mind because
I'm not trained in that. I'm not a licensed pilot.
But you are and you were looking at all of those instruments.
Tell us a little bit about that control panel and just how important that is to
a pilot. -Yeah. Well, definitely the control panel
is extremely important when you're flying.
One of the reasons being in the sky other than just blue sky, there are
clouds. And planes fly through clouds. Which
means you often can't see where you're going. So, you're very reliant on your
panel to see where you're going. And one of the most
important indications that you need to see
is that attitude indicator that we were talking about earlier.
Where you can see if your airplane is headed in a certain direction or
whether the trend is going to be. -You said that the
attitude indicator is the most important instrument there. I saw a lot of
instruments on that control panel. And quite frankly, I didn't even
know what some of them were. But the attitude indicator was very prominent.
You remember, I asked you during our flight,
"What's this thing?" You said, "That's the attitude indicator." And I'm like,
"That must be pretty important." -Right. -Help us to understand why that's so important
in the controls of the airplane as you're as you're piloting that aircraft.
-Yeah. Well, one of the reasons why the attitude indicator is so important is
that there are a lot of situations in flying where
your body sensations can kind of throw off your perception
of reality. We call it spatial disorientation in aviation.
But basically, you know, you may feel that you're going up
and that you're pointed upward but you're actually going to be level or
pointed down just by the feeling in your body and in
your seat... -So, your feelings can deceive you. -Very
true. Yeah. -Oh, I could play with that as a psychologist.
-Right. -How often do our feelings take us in a direction that we didn't intend to
go. Again, attitude is not how you feel. It's
your position. So, let's not let our feelings
interfere with piloting the craft. -Right. -Right? Is that a fair... -Yeah. So,
that's a perfect... Yeah, that's a perfect example because that's exactly what you
want to do when you're in the airplane. Say you're getting tossed around in
turbulence and after getting jumbled a little bit, you
forget which way is up and which way is down.
-You literally don't know. -Yeah, you literally... You can't feel it. And it's
happened to me. You cannot tell at all. So, first thing you want to
do is you look down at the attitude indicator and it'll tell you
where your airplane's headed. So, you want to set your attitude first thing when
trouble hits. And that'll get you set up for the best
solution. -I think you explained this to me when
we're on the flight too that if you get into trouble, the first thing
you check is your attitude. -Right. -Make sure that's where it needs to
be. And then you can pay attention to things like air speed and altitude. And
and that's going to determine where you're going. In fact, maybe we ought to
come back to that too in just a minute. But as a
psychologist, I'm thinking about how many parallels there are as we look
at how we feel. Now, you're never wrong about
how you feel. But like in in aviation, your feelings
may be deceptive in terms of what needs to
happen next. Your attitude is what's going to
determine where you're going. So, am I accurate in
saying that the attitude indicator doesn't really
tell you where you are but it has a whole lot to do with
where you're going. -Yes. That's perfect. -Is that fair? -Yeah. -And
that's going to be really important, right? If you want to get out
of trouble, if you're in some kind of a storm or if you've lost
orientation somehow in the plane. Wow. Adam, your experience as a pilot, I
think is really relevant from a psychological standpoint as I
think about this concept of of attitude is being positioned. It's not
how you feel. It's your position. And that's going to
determine how you feel or have some impact on what direction
you're going to go from here. I'm sure that you've seen some utility
to this in coaching as well as you provided
coaching for people. What have you noticed there? -Yeah.
Definitely. Well, just like in flying... So, I kind of like to
relate it if you think of your altitude maybe as how you feel. If you're
at a high altitude, you feel elevated. At low altitude, you feel kind of
depressed. And say you erroneously somehow lose some
altitude. You get down to a low altitude. Well, the first thing you want to do is
set that attitude. Set a nose-high attitude so your
airplane starts to climb and you start getting out of that.
That sounds to me like positivity. -Yeah. -Or
the way we talk about it Live On Purpose that
it's not just a tripe fluffy just-think-positive sort of thing.
It's set your attitude, your position on purpose
relative to whatever it is that's going on in your life. I think that's how
you're referring to it as well. -Yeah, exactly. Right. So, even if you're feeling
down, you're getting kind of bumped around.
The first thing you want to do is check your attitude. Where am I headed
from here? It doesn't really matter how you feel at that moment. That's just
a lot of times a product of your surroundings and what's happened. And we
can't always control that. But what you can control is where your
position is going forward. Where you're setting up for the future.
You kind of want to set whatever you know is going to be best to get you
where you want to go. -And do that on purpose. -Right. -This is
the power of that concept of attitude. I'm so glad that you shared your
experience with us as a pilot. Thanks for sharing
that today. -Thanks for having me today. It was a pleasure.
You know, Adam, before we even had this conversation,
I did another video about the disadvantages of a negative
attitude. You might want to queue that one up next. Go take a look at that one
as well. If this has caught your attention and
you'd like to talk with Adam or one of our other certified
coaches, come on over to Live On Purpose Central where we can
get you hooked up with an attitude adjustment.