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

by Michelle "MACE" Curran

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...