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Whose flying this Plane Anyway?
By admin | May 21, 2009
Whose flying this thing anyway? As some of you know I’m studying to become a pilot and as with all new adventures learning is just so much fun! (Insert sarcastic tone) So my instructor pilot says to me on more than one occasion “You have to decide who is in control before you leave the ground, you or the Plane?” To my surprise planes are engineered to fly. Yes, that did come as a surprise to me, I never understood the concept of glide ratio until I started learning to fly and really never put much thought into the fact that the basic design of a plane will keep it in the air, it is engineered to fly. (Sorry Wright brothers I was asleep during that part of class) You can picture it this way, if the pilot were to get knocked unconscious or be getting a lap dance or something and suddenly forget to fly, then the plane would nose dive for a second and then correct itself just like a paper airplane and you’d have a few minutes to wake the pilot up or get the stripper off his lap before you really needed to start praying. The glide ratio from plane to plane varies but if all the pieces are still there you’ve got a couple minutes. So the next time you experience a lot of turbulence, remember that, it should make you feel a little better. They aren’t just rocks waiting to fall out of the sky. That being said, if I as the pilot am not paying attention it will start self correcting. If I bank the plane, into a turn, and the turn is too steep then it’s my job to “be the boss” and correct the plane by decreasing the bank angle. Nobody is going to come do it for me and if I don’t fix it soon enough it will become an out of control situation. You have to decide who is flying the plane or the plane will fly you and it’s not going to be pretty. It struck me that our lives are the same way.
How often are we going through life thinking that somebody else is in control? Acting as if, it’s not you? Going wherever the wind blows us. Obviously I must do this quite often if I have to be reminded of this while I’m flying than I’m sure I do this in every area of life. How often are you on auto pilot? You can feel the difference when you take back control over a situation and don’t “try” but “do”. When things feel out of control catch it early on and ask your self whose flying this thing anyway? The answer is you.
When tragedy strikes you’ll notice that it’s usually several bad choices that got you to that point, very rarely is it just one bad thing that hits you from out of nowhere it’s a culmination of bad decisions. You didn’t just get in a car accident “oh poor me, wrong place, wrong time”, you were headed somewhere you didn’t really want to be going, in a hurry, on the phone, and Whammo, you get involved in an accident. Were you really flying the plane? Were you one hundred percent present? If the answer is yes then think of the ramifications of that… you must have really gotten a lot out of that accident because you decided to be involved in it. That’s fantastic it must have given you the opportunity for a huge learning experience.
Looking back at the accidents I have been involved in I was not one hundred percent present, in fact I made several stupid decisions that compounded into one big one. I let things happen to me and didn’t take control of the situation.
You can try to make up for a mean thing you did, by smiling and trying to make nice or you can walk up to them point blank tell them that you were a jerk and apologize. Which scenario is a “try” and which one is a “did”? We’ve all heard the saying there’s no such word as try. You can feel how true that is catch yourself and feel the difference.
Take your health for example, illness does not pop out of nowhere like the boogie man and come get you, just like obesity and diabetes, it’s a series of decisions that slowly creep up on you. Until one day it affects you in such a way that you get shaken out of you unconscious style of living and realize you’ve become a prisoner to your own body. Nothing happened to you, you quit flying the plane. You let TV commercials and visual stimuli do the thinking for you. You allowed your subconscious to rule and make the decisions for you. Your subconscious has one job and that is keeping you alive. So it will always choose the easy way out, the path of least resistance or when it comes to food the easiest options fat and sugar.
At the beginning of the day take a moment to remember that you’re flying the plane. Take control and notice how often you’re “hoping” and “trying” for something as opposed to grabbing the controls and making it happen. When something feels out of control use your See it as Perfect techniques to command that the result be a certain way and then sit back and look at what you’ve accomplished. Take back control, it is rightly yours.
When things feel out of control realize that you are writing the script. If you don’t like the way the ending is looking re-write it!
When the See it as Perfect text comes in it’s there to remind you that you are the pilot and to take a moment to be one hundred percent present and write the story the way it will be, not the way you hope it will be!
Molli
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