Fighter Pilot: What It Takes to Perform Under Pressure | Commander Kristen Findlay

Kristen Findlay (0:02)

This business requires a high level of performance over a long period of time. You never rise to an occasion, you fall back to your basic level of preparation. You have no choice but to land the most excruciating seconds of your life. Knock it off, shut up. You have 18 seconds, just do it.

Michael Gervais (0:24)

Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist.

So I want you to imagine what it takes to land an $80 million fighter jet on a moving target in the middle of the ocean at night. The extreme precision, the split second timing and the unwavering focus that is required for such a feat, it's beyond the grasp of ordinary experience. Our guest today, Commander Kristen Findlay, knows precisely what it takes to land an F-18 Super Hornet on an aircraft carrier in rough seas and in the dark, where every decision can have monumental consequences. Kristen is a distinguished naval aviator whose career spans two decades of sustained high performance in military service. She's accumulated over 2,700 hours of flight time, 66 combat sorties over Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. And just under 500 carrier landings. I mean, talk about performance over time.

She embodies it. And as a prior Top Gun instructor, yes, just like the movie, and current commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 122, the Flying Eagles, she leads and trains some of the Navy's most elite pilots. She is a leader of leaders. Kristen's career experience now extends to Hollywood, where she served as a technical consultant and a pilot for the hit film Top Gun Maverick. I mean, how fun is that?

Kristen offers a unique perspective on leadership teamwork and mental toughness. And this conversation offers valuable applied insights into high stakes decision-making and the lessons that we can all learn from a life lived at full throttle. So with that, let's dive right into this conversation with Commander Kristen Findlay. Kristen, I am so stoked that you're here at the Mastery Lab. Thank you for coming in.

Kristen Findlay (2:25)

Thank you for having me. This is so exciting.

Michael Gervais (2:28)

Awesome.

So let's just start kind of with the basics. How are you?

Kristen Findlay (2:31)

I am super stoked. It's a get to drive down here today, see new scenery for me and get to meet you and your staff. So it's been a super fun morning.

Michael Gervais (2:40)

Yeah, very cool. Okay, so let's just start.

I've been wanting to talk to you about a lot. Like there's three main things that I wanna talk about. I wanna talk about performance and specifically high performance preparation for it and then how you navigate high stakes environments. Okay, so we'll talk about that as one chunk. I also wanna talk about your consulting business, I guess, with Top Gun. And the third, I wanna get into burnout and fatigue and high stress over many years for you decades of working in high stress environments and how you manage that.

So let's first start with, it was the USS Truman that I got to spend some time on. And so why are they bringing out a sports psychologist? I got to work with the ex-OCO HUDs, which is the heads of department and the fighter pilots while they're somewhere in the mid Atlantic.

And as we were prepping for the week that I was gonna be on the ship with them, the CO asked me for a deck, like what I wanted, my talking points. So I sent it over and he sent it back like, this is not acceptable. And it was something about peak performance. This was early in my career.

And it fundamentally shaped me because I was like, wait, what do you mean not peak performance? And his note was, I'm interested in sustaining superior performance during combat. I said, oh man, my sport stuff seems really flimsy right now. And so it was awesome because I think both of us, Pilots, HUDs and ExoCO and myself, we were all trying to learn together best practices from both industries. And I want to learn from you. When I say peak performance, what happens for you in your mind? And then when I say sustaining superior performance, what happens for you?

Kristen Findlay (4:35)

It's funny you mentioned sports. I grew up playing soccer. So I think a lot of the way I look at my career now in aviation and just kind of how I look at life, I think it was very much shaped by soccer. Just that's what we did growing up. Everything was trying to get to the next team, taking feedback, you know, trying to make it to the next level. So I think as much as I always like to say, I hate comparing aviation to sports, there's just nothing else that ties easily to that.