The Flipside: How to Invert Your Perspective and Turn Fear into Your Superpower

by Michelle "MACE" Curran

The next time my ROTC instructor asked, “Who here wants to be a pilot?” I raised my hand. After years of keeping my head down, I seemed to catch him off guard. “Oh, what do you want to fly?” In front of my entire class, I replied, “Fighters.” I think I sounded confident, even if I didn’t feel it. “You know how you can tell there’s a fighter pilot in the room?” he asked. “How?” “They’ll tell you.”

Have the courage to start something when you’re not ready and believe in yourself enough to know that you will figure it out along the way. That is literally what every successful person you admire is doing.

I mean “wingman” as in the Air Force’s definition: a pilot who flies alongside the leader of a formation to provide mutual support and backup for a mission.5 And yes, your wingman can be a woman, and you can have more than one. In the air, a wingman flies across from the lead jet in formation, watching their “six”—as in “six o’clock,” or directly behind them—a tough place to see when you’re laden down with gear. When you’re leading a flight, you don’t have time to be twisting around and checking behind you for threats. This leaves you vulnerable to a bad guy sneaking up on your blind spot. Your wingman has your six, and therefore your back. Remember, fighter pilots never fly a mission on their own, and their wingmen offer backup and firepower. Your wingman recognizes when you need support and helps you prioritize obstacles that you need to overcome. They know what your strengths are and how they can fill in to help you achieve the mission.

we can all adopt the principles of a successful wingman relationship: Understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Clearly communicate expectations, feedback, and roles. Watch for threats and speak up when you see one. Think about the people in your life who see your strengths even when you don’t. Who can you always rely on? Who will give you honest feedback, even if it’s not always what you want to hear? Find the people who will be direct with you and exhibit the courage to have tough conversations. These are the ones who know your quirks and downfalls but can redirect you in a way that optimizes your strengths. These are also the people who can give you perspective on your inner critic when it starts to make you question your worthiness. These are your wingmen. They know your blind spots and they know how you can overcome them.

After you’ve created your battle plan, it’s time to say, “Fight’s on!” It’s the fighter pilot’s version of “Let’s go,” and it comes after much preparation and training. While it’s true that planning, reflection, and intention are important, action is what changes your life, and that’s what “Fight’s on” is all about. But how do you do it?

couldn’t help but create an acronym for a list of steps, this time for keeping your critic at bay if you’re B.O.L.D.: Bring light to your critic. Own your thoughts. Lean on your wingmen. Discover your power.

When these training fights start, the goal is to get your air speed up and fly to the “enemy” jet’s turn circle, the arc they make in the sky as they try to avoid your fire. When you’re on defense, you want to make a tight turn to lose the jet behind you. On offense, you want to get as close to directly behind your target as possible so they can’t lose you. So, you roll sideways—one wing up and one down—and pull back on the stick until you can point at the other jet’s six, straight behind him, and “shoot” at him.

I was later told that they didn’t have that many stories about me, but that flight where I nearly G-LOCed stuck out. So, they named me MACE, an acronym for Mach at Circle Entry. In other words, I had flown my jet so fast during a maneuver that I went supersonic, the speed of sound. I was flying much faster than I should have been, and the jet had so much energy that when I rolled and pulled, I hit nine Gs and then held it for a full 360-degree turn.

Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning reported that corrective feedback, including an analysis of the mistake, helps students learn better, but that’s not how our educational system is set up.1 The researchers said that “error avoidance” is the rule in most American classrooms.2 How can you learn from your mistakes in life if you’re taught to avoid them in school? But the U.S. military understands the value hidden in mistakes. That’s why we debrief, reviewing our flights immediately afterward compared against the briefs we’d done preflight. You can’t effectively debrief if you don’t brief first. The goal I’d set for BFM that day was to pull behind my instructor pilot’s airplane and fire my (unarmed) gun at him, and not only hadn’t I achieved that, I’d flown so fast and put my body under so many Gs, I couldn’t even see him—or anything. Fighter squadrons take it to an extreme level, and it’s generally accepted that much more learning takes place in the debrief than during the actual flight, as I’d soon find out. Here’s how debriefing works: Everyone who flew in the mission goes into a room and shuts the door. No phones, no interruptions, no distractions. We then list the failures from a flight on a whiteboard, and dig into all the details, such as location, time, and issue. We review the contributing factors, starting with the plan and the preparation, before going into the details of any errors. We continue to peel back the layers of why something went wron...

“It” turned out to be fighter pilot songs focused on the theme of demeaning women, constant sexual innuendos, and, occasionally, over-the-top remarks that even made many of the men noticeably uncomfortable. He never said, “We’re going to stop doing this now that you two are here.” Or, “We’re working to change this, so please be patient with us.” It was up to Smokin’ and me to adjust because many of our colleagues had resisted the fact that combat cockpits had (long) opened to women, and change was slow. Even the fighter pilot culture’s language was gendered. In classes, instructors would say, “Okay, gentlemen…” Sometimes, they’d catch themselves and add, “and Candy.” Frankly, that was worse because I didn’t love being singled out. They’d even do it for the good stuff, like when I was celebrated as extra impressive when I did well, a kind of pat on the back for doing a good job “for a girl” as though they had expected less from me. Even when I did well, I couldn’t win. I didn’t know how I should react. Part of me was proud of my successes and the other part worried about what my peers thought. Once, after I’d crushed it in a high-stakes flight simulator test, not only earning praise from my squadron but winning an award for bravery under (virtual) fire, I found myself checking the other brand-new wingmen’s reactions. I couldn’t just celebrate the moment. I had to worry that my win would make them feel less manly, ultimately affecting our relationship and my standing in the ...

After I’d become a more experienced fighter pilot, an instructor pilot, a flight commander, and the Lead Solo of the Thunderbirds, I figured out an important fact: No matter where you are in your career, you’re mostly worried about your own performance. People aren’t really thinking about you much at all—and if they are, it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with them.

high achiever + new challenges x self-doubt = imposter syndrome

If you feel that you have to be something else and act like someone else, that you have to pretend, you’ll likely spend your days in a hypervigilant state, second-guessing your every move and word. This desire to be perfect keeps you from trying new things, which prevents innovation. Meanwhile, vulnerability from the top down makes room for everyone to try and fail and try again because it is positively modeled for us. This happened to me with another boss, on the Thunderbirds, who appeared to have it all figured out until he finally shared something deeper. Most days, he would share minor, surface problems, like “‘I’m tired today,” but nothing of depth, so I rarely shared anything deep with him, either. Then one day, he overheard me say that it was hard to be an introvert and a Thunderbird, which required us to make public appearances and interact with the crowd. Sometimes, it drained my energy level. “Mace, this isn’t natural for me, either,” he admitted. “I am introverted, too.” He didn’t have a solution, but I didn’t need one because his vulnerability allowed me to identify and bond with him for the first time. It allowed me to see him out there interacting with the crowd day in and day out as the leader of the team and realize that he wasn’t perfect. This one remark shifted our dynamic for the better. Being vulnerable as a leader doesn’t mean crying to your team or airing your dirty laundry. The gestures can be small and simple.

I landed safely on the ground because I responded instead of reacting. When you react, you’re providing an immediate and instinctive action, but when you respond, you’ve taken a more deliberate and thoughtful approach.

Learn Something New: Dedicate time each week to learn a new skill or hobby. As you learn, your brain forms new connections, boosting your adaptability.

To me, a growth mindset is about a devotion to ever-evolving goals wrapped in a willingness to take chances, rather than taking the path of least resistance. This is where you have to take ownership and refuse to fall into the victim mentality where you blame other people or the situation for your failures. Even if the culture is working against your growth, your boss doesn’t manage well, your marriage is stagnant, or the situation isn’t ideal, you need to focus on the things you can control; this is the secret to enduring so you can grow. (See chapter six.) Even though the growing pains were, at times, excruciating for me, they were not as painful as “comfortable misery” became.

One morning, I was driving my little Daihatsu Opti classic, a tiny car like a Volkswagen Beetle, on a winding hilly road overlooking a cliff,

We’ve heard a lot about posttraumatic stress disorder, especially when it comes to the military, but what about posttraumatic growth, or PTG? Richard Tedeschi, PhD, among the founders of PTG research, defines it as “positive psychological changes experienced as a result of the struggle with trauma or highly challenging situations.”5 In other words, you go through something bad and then evolve because of it, not in spite of it.

The thing about PTG is that it kind of just… happens. But we can speed it up. Tedeschi wrote in Harvard Business Review that there are five elements of such growth: Education: Learn about the trauma that rocked your world. Emotional regulation: Manage negative emotions. Disclosure: Talk about it with someone you trust. Narrative development: Determine how the trauma made you stronger, a better person, more appreciative, etc. Service: Find a way to help other people going through the same thing.14 Turns out that plenty of people, veterans and civilians alike, are psychologically resilient. We bounce back eventually. But posttraumatic growth and resilience aren’t the same thing. I’ve come to think of resilience as a part of your personality, a personal characteristic independent of any specific event. I’m not the only one who thinks that way.

Resilience is a choice. You have to do hard things to become tough, and you don’t have to be in the military to need or to create mental toughness. There are plenty of situations in civilian life where it’s necessary and where it can be cultivated.

This matches up with the informal findings of Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse and author of The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, which has been translated into twenty-seven languages. Among those five regrets are: not staying in touch with friends, not expressing feelings, and not living a life that’s true to themselves. The other two are “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard,” and, “I wish I had let myself be happier,” which are really regrets for not doing things, too, as in not making family and fun a priority and not pursuing happiness.5

I love to fly upside down. In my role as Lead Solo, I spent more time inverted than anyone else in the formation, and it became what I was known for.

At that speed, the fifty feet of spacing we usually targeted for these passes always felt pretty darn close, allowing us to see details on the other aircraft as it passed.

A large force exercise is a lot like playing defense in a high-stakes soccer game, in three dimensions, at four hundred miles per hour and thousands of feet in the air. I was on the “good guys” side, and our job was to protect the base, “our goal.” We did this by “shooting” down the “bad guys” aircraft before they could get close enough to release their simulated bombs and strike our base. I understood my role, but my brain was having a hard time keeping up with the combination of complex tasks that, until then, I’d only read about and performed in a simulator. At any given moment, I had to monitor my own airspeed and altitude, keep track of my flight lead, listen and respond to radio calls, complete the pre–weapons release checklist, be aware of my range from the target, and more. To me, F-16 training felt like drinking from a fire hose—so much material to read and so many skills to master all at once.

Instead of twenty things to cross off, her list has six items every day, which she prioritizes. If she only gets to four of the six, she moves two to the next day. Anything that’s carried over for three days gets scrutinized. She asks herself, “Do I really need to do this? Is it that important?”

Position Yourself Better: Be where lucky breaks seem to happen. This is why aspiring actors move to Los Angeles and New York, and fledging country songwriters and musicians move to Nashville. They’re more likely to catch their big breaks where the decision-makers in their businesses are located. These days, you can get discovered on TikTok or YouTube, like how I unexpectedly got my first speaking gig thanks to posting about the Thunderbirds on Instagram, but if you don’t have content that you’re constantly feeding online, you won’t be positioned for smart luck to find you.

Taking a portfolio view can bring the payoff when luck comes knocking on your door. That should include a portfolio view of your friends and colleagues. Put yourself in the company of other people who are also willing to operate with courage and zest for life, leading to what I call pinch-me moments, risky but ultimately fulfilling adventures. For me, traveling to Argentina and paragliding over the foothills of the Andes with a fellow former Thunderbird, climbing a cliff face for more than one thousand feet on the towering red rocks outside of Las Vegas with a Navy SEAL, and wake surfing on the aqua blue waters of Lake Tahoe with my buddy Grant are all examples of pinch-me moments. You can also have these moments with business partners, classmates, your fellow Little League parents, the Polar Plunge crew—anyone who shares your quest for a goal.

You can imagine how frustrating it is for me when people tell me, “You’re a lucky girl!” First of all, do they say, “You’re a lucky boy” to my fellow fighter pilots and Thunderbirds? I doubt it. Let’s look at that luck they’re attributing to me. I’m lucky I didn’t come of age before women were finally given permission to fly fighter jets in the military in 1993. Yet even now, three decades later, if you walked into a room full of Air Force fighter pilots, just five out of one hundred would be women. Thirty years for 5 percent.

It wasn’t my first mountain No-go. It also happened to me on Mt. Baker and then on Mt. Rainier. Every single time we’d get pretty dang close to the summit, and every single time, we had to turn around, once for snow conditions, once for weather, and once for a climbing-mate who’d fallen ill.

My body was beat up, and flying fighter jets part-time wasn’t an option I wanted to pursue, because I only wanted to do it if I was 100 percent present, focused, and proficient. I considered the National Guard or the Air Force Reserve, and I ended up working part-time for Air Force Recruiting via the Reserves for a while.

Top Gun’s Maverick might have declared he had “a need for speed,” and that’s fun Hollywood dialogue, but my “why” in the fighter jet was the same why I have in my life: to live authentically while making a positive impact for others, and to have a blast doing it. That has been true from the day I set a goal to become a fighter pilot, and it remains true in my motivation for pivoting out of the military and for writing this book. How that positive impact for others is created has evolved over time, but it has always been part of my why. I’ve asked myself why I’d joined the military, why I wanted to fly, and what was most important to me. The answer: I had wanted to see the world, be part of an exceptional team, and serve my country. I wanted to do something that felt fulfilling and exciting. By the end of my flying career, I had done all of those things and more. I learned so much, so fast, as a fighter pilot, and a lot of what I learned applies to everyday life. You may not need to know how to engage in a dogfight up in the air, but you can use a lot of the mental skills and coping hacks that fighter pilots develop. My why centers around teaching others what I’ve learned, all the while being my true self and having fun.

As one mom pulled her six-year-old daughter toward the fence, I recognized that the girl, eyes downcast and hesitant, was embarrassed and shy. When they finally reached me, the mom said, “Look, Anna, that lady flew the jets you just watched.” Anna slowly looked up at me, connecting the dots between what she had witnessed during the air show and a person that she could relate to. A light turned on in her eyes. Over the next few minutes, previously shy Anna bombarded me with excited questions about flying upside down and spinning my jet around in the air. By the time the autograph session ended, her mom had to drag her away. I had become a planter of seeds of possibility for others, and when that was no longer something I could do most effectively in the military, it was clear it was time for a pivot to speaking and writing. The moment the new position failed to align with these goals, I abandoned my plans. It was clear that it was a No-go because it no longer fit my why. How do you determine your why? Entire books and courses have been written to help people find their why, and Simon Sinek’s Start with Why is perhaps the most well-known. His TEDx, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” introduces the idea as it relates to business and leadership.3 He said that most people who work for companies know what they do and how, but not all understand why. If you ask the average person why they work, they’ll reply, “To pay my bills.” But that’s the what and how, not the why. And this ...

Individuals also live by core values, and when you know what your values are, you can align your actions with them to live more authentically. Some examples are: adventure, autonomy, community, kindness, and wonder. If you haven’t labeled your own, it can be helpful to see some examples, and a quick internet search of common core values will give you infinitely more choices until you find the ones that feel right. If you’re not sure which values to choose, think about someone who embodies all that you’d like to be. It can be someone famous or someone in your social circles or your family, someone living or dead, someone who has achieved what you’d like to achieve or who behaves the way you’d like to be. There’s a good chance it might be someone from your Dream Team because they likely align with some values you admire.

Let whatever that is inform your why so that you have a guide to come back to even when stress is high and you just want to get home.

Outside the cockpit, wingmen are the people you know you can call when the shit hits the fan, the top names on your “recent calls” list, and the first people you text when things go bad or well. But they can also be people you haven’t talked to or seen in a while, like the friends and colleagues you message through Facebook when your family is trying to escape Afghanistan, for example. Sometimes wingmen just show up, like the neighbor down the street who’s had the same diagnosis as the one you just got, or everyone in your new support group, or your fellow recruits and first-timers.

A fighter jet doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman, but the people on the ground at an air show do, and for five years, there were no female Thunderbirds for little girls to (literally and figuratively) look up to. Five years of girls not seeing themselves represented in that role is a long time, especially considering it had taken more than fifty years for the Thunderbirds to bring on their first female pilot. So when the final call for Thunderbird applications hit my computer’s inbox, the gap that needed to be filled to inspire the next generation of aviators was on my mind.

“Go tell her you’re gonna fly Vipers,” my friend Kristina, who was in the class behind me, said. But I was too intimidated, choosing instead to eye Mother (real name, Kristin Hubbard)

By the time I left the Air Force, my body was so beat up, a VA doctor asked me if I’d been in a car accident because the damage to my vertebrae was something she’d normally seen in someone over sixty years old or in a patient who’d suffered some sort of trauma.

To endure all this, I was given steroid shots, eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen, and lidocaine patches. I had been in the best shape of my life. I’d run two marathons and a 50K trail ultra race. I’d climbed multiple mountains and I pushed myself in the gym. But now, I was putting my body through the ringer, on land and up in the air, and my body was finally like, “Nope. Not doing it.”

When the Solo flies the Max Turn Half Cuban, we’re subjected to seven to nine Gs for a full 360-degree turn just 150 feet above the ground. Remarkably similar to the move that earned me my call sign, this maneuver impresses the audience, but it’s hard on the pilot’s body. For three years, that pilot was me, with two air shows and multiple practices per week during the show season, and practice shows up to ten times per week during the winter training season.

my third year on the Thunderbirds was the best year I had. Once I got myself from denial to acceptance, I began to thrive. I’d learned how to manage my pain by adjusting my workouts and mobility training. On Sundays, I’d turn down all sorts of cool invitations—things like five-star dinners and backstage concert tickets that were frequently offered up by our shows’ hosts—so that I could rest my body and prepare to fly the next day. I’d pack myself healthy, premade meals and send them in a cooler on the C-17 that transported the Thunderbirds’ gear and personnel so I wouldn’t grab just anything off a food cart at air shows. I got better at prioritizing my battery, and I found my footing in my public persona so that it didn’t drain me as much along the fence and on camera.

YOU’RE SAYING THERE’S A CHANCE This tongue-in-cheek saying has been so much a part of fighter squadron culture, I almost forgot it came from a movie. It’s more than living life with a glass-half-full viewpoint, because that only gets you so far. Too often, we look ahead to our dreams and goals and see only the obstacles stacked against us. We focus on our chances of failure and what failure might look like, letting all those negative feelings take charge. But if you train yourself to look at the flipside over and over, it becomes your norm and soon, you automatically see the positive amid all the negative. It becomes your default. That’s when “You’re saying there’s a chance” comes into play, allowing you to treat the odds that are in your favor and the slim chances with the same boldness and courage and go for it anyway. Boldness is the bridge between slim chances and big opportunities.