Turbulence

Welcome to Insights and Implications!

This month’s newsletter was written by Nick Gray of DOW AgroSciences who has been learning and sharing his understanding of Insight Principles for several years. We welcome hearing from all of our readers and we would love to include your insights and implications in the next newsletter. As Nick shows us, a turbulent flight doesn’t have to mean a turbulent mind.

We wish you many insights and new ideas as we close out April.

All the best,

All of us at Insight Principles

Turbulence

Recently I was traveling on an aircraft contemplating the training I was to deliver the next day, when we suddenly hit some violent turbulence. The plane lifted and dropped very suddenly, and the pilot said it would continue for the next 30 minutes until we landed. Instantly I felt myself panic as my thinking changed: I concluded that the plane was going to break apart and I was going to die! I could see see the wing of the plane flexing dramatically as the turbulence hit again.

Then I was struck by another thought.

Planes are actually designed to deal with turbulence. The engineers add huge amounts of redundancy to the design so they stay in the air. Well-maintained planes almost never fall from the sky. In fact, air transportation is one of the safest modes of travel. That thought put me into a different place, and I felt my thinking calm and my body relax.

I looked over and noticed the person next to me white knuckling the armrests. He was obviously having a lot of vivid thoughts and it occurred to me that I should try to start a conversation with him. It was a little awkward at first, but we quickly had an interesting conversation going and he began to relax. The turbulence lasted another 30 minutes until we landed safely, but our mutual experience of the final 30 minutes of the flight was very different from the first five minutes when the turbulence started….. all courtesy of our thinking!

Nick Gray
Strategic Projects Leader
Dow AgroSciences

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