Here is the full transcript of Jannell MacAulay’s talk titled “How To Achieve High Performance Under Stress” at TEDxABQ conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Believing in Possibilities
Have you ever had someone believe in you so much, you felt there were no limits to what you could achieve? At the young age of seven, I can remember my dad telling anyone who would listen that I was going to grow up to be a fighter pilot or a submarine warfare commander. Now, this was the 1980s, and these jobs weren’t even open to women, but it didn’t matter because his ultimate goal was to inspire me to do or be anything I wanted. All I had to do was work hard, labor enough, and I could achieve my dreams.
When you remove societal barriers, it’s amazing what you can imagine for yourself. That was extremely powerful for a young girl. His guidance gave me the drive to seek out challenges and to actually think that I could be a combat pilot, a leader and military commander, a mother and wife, and also an academic. I didn’t have to choose.
The Struggle of Balance
However, my first attempt at integrating the person I wanted to be with the person I could be in reality was a complete failure. You see, a few years ago, I was leading a flying training unit while my husband was deployed to the Middle East for a year, and we had a two-year-old daughter at home. I felt the intense pressure to be the best pilot, the best leader, the best mother, the best military spouse that I could be. And that was while I was navigating a whole host of other stressors like managing a house and a dog and two high-maintenance parents.
Does anyone else have those? I love you, Mom and Dad. My drive took me to the point where I was giving to everything and everybody. I was embodying servant leadership, trying to be the perfect role model in every facet of my life, and that almost destroyed me.
Rediscovering Self-Compassion
I sure labored a whole heck of a lot, and I had plenty of judgment for how I wasn’t achieving perfection, but I had little to no compassion or love for myself. I actually forgot how to laugh, and I lost sight of all the love that surrounded me, and I forgot that there was actually learning and growth within my imperfection. I completely lost myself in the process, and it resulted in a total burnout. I was doing life wrong, and sure, I was successful, but drive alone does not equip you for sustained success.
And regardless of our primary role in life, we should be able to maintain or even accelerate our professional success without having to sacrifice ourselves, and in particular, our health and our relationships along the way. My burnout became the motivation for my doctoral work and my recent academic focus. I wanted to know how we could all perform better under stress. How could we do life better?
The Power of Mindfulness
Well, I’ll tell you, it starts with putting on your own oxygen mask. We can use the power of our breath to live more in the present moment, increasing our productivity and our efficiency and actually giving ourselves time back, time we can use to harmonize our hard work and our labor with the joys in life. It’s about being in the present moment instead of wasting our time, succumbing to the mind wandering and the distractions, and ultimately, the unrealistic expectations we put on ourselves with our own inner dialogue, and that’s extremely hard to do on our own, especially under stress.
But what if I told you there was a tool, a tool that can build the mental qualities of being in the present moment, a tool that can act as your own personal oxygen mask? Just as today’s technology allows us to be virtually present from almost anywhere in the world, the practice of mindfulness allows us the opportunity to be present, mentally present anytime, anywhere.
Once I found mindfulness, I was able to accelerate my professional success using something that’s free and always with me, my breath, to live more in the moment so I can harmonize my life and my work together. Life is stressful. Mindfulness reminds me to slow down, and it also helps me forgive myself when I don’t because I am imperfect.
Understanding Mindfulness
You may have heard a lot about mindfulness these days. It was a solution for me, and maybe it could be a solution for some of you. Mindfulness is, what is it exactly? Mindfulness is paying attention to the present moment intentionally, in a nonjudgmental way.
As my colleague and esteemed mindfulness researcher, Dr. Amishi Jha, likes to say, think of your mind like an iPod. Our minds are fantastic at mental time travel. In fact, we spend a lot of time in fast forward, catastrophizing and worrying about the future. We also spend a lot of time in rewind, ruminating and regretting over the past.
Living in the Present
We hardly ever sit and play. Mindfulness is sitting and play in the present moment. You can think of it as a type of mental exercise like doing push-ups or bicep curls for our brains, and the more you practice it, the more available it is to us under stress. Mindfulness can actually strengthen our muscle of attention, increase our working memory capacity, and help us make better decisions. It also decreases the amount of time we spend mind-wandering or judging ourselves and setting unrealistic expectations.
You know, science will tell us we mind-wander half of our waking moments. Now, I’ve been talking for about six minutes, and your minds have been wandering for at least three of those. It’s okay. I know you can’t help it. The interesting thing about mind-wandering is, when we do it, we think of unpleasant thoughts.
We may have this fabulous vacation coming up, but instead of thinking about how our toes are going to feel in the sand, we mind-wander about all the things we have to do before we leave. A wandering mind is an unhappy one.
This is my son, Andrew. When Andrew was three years old, I was giving him a bath, and I was doing what we all do, trying to multitask, right, when all of a sudden, he looked up at me, and he put his little hands on my face, and he said, “Mommy, why are you so sad? I love you, Mommy.” And it was in that moment, I realized I was mind-wandering, and instead of being present with him, laughing and loving, I was distracted and unhappy.
Maybe you found yourself there with someone you love. Now, mindfulness helps me live more in the present, so I don’t miss special moments with the people I care about. In fact, mindfulness was so powerful in my life.
Leadership Through Mindfulness
When I took command of the 305th Operation Support Squadron, a 400-member joint team of airmen, sailors, soldiers, and civilians, the power of my example helped to inspire leaders at all levels to revitalize the organizational culture.
As a leader or as a parent, what greater gift could I give to those around me than my presence and my focus, being present in my conversations, being present in my decision-making? My leadership at home and at work is rooted in the power of connection, which builds trust. No matter which role is center stage, leader or parent, we need connection before we give direction.
Now, I’ve been asked many times how I was able to get a military unit to buy in to mindfulness. And we did some unconventional things. We practiced yoga. We did mindful minutes before our leadership meetings and our commander’s calls.
Well, Colin Powell gave a speech, and he talks about how if you have trust, people will follow you, if only out of curiosity. I started with trust by being a mindful leader myself and creating opportunities for connection. I used initiatives like No Email Friday to be more available to the people I led. I also wrote handwritten personal notes, and I called parents.
The Impact of Mindful Leadership
In fact, one story in particular really stands out. I had an airman who was selected for an early promotion, so I offered to call his dad. So, we put him on speaker phone, and I was able to brag on his son, give him a glimpse of what his child is like in adulthood. And as we finished the conversation, the dad said, “I’m so proud of you. I love you, son.”
And as I looked up at my airman, he had tears streaming down his face. And he said, “Ma’am, my dad has never said that to me before.” Now, that took just two to three minutes of my time as a leader, but it had a huge impact on all of us.
When you start by connecting, you can build trust. Maybe at first, the members of my unit followed me only out of curiosity. But over time, I know mindfulness helped many of them to put on their own oxygen masks, to do life better, to have drive for professional success and mission accomplishment, but to compare it with compassion for themselves and for others.
I want to be clear. This is not just about making people feel good. We’re a military unit, but it’s about performance. Many of the members of my unit won individual high accolades and awards, and the unit itself was awarded the 2016 Operation Support Squadron of the Year for all of Air Mobility Command and the 2016 Airfield Complex of the Year for the entire Air Force.
We didn’t earn these accolades because we practiced mindfulness. We earned them because it created a culture of trust, of care, of love, of connection, a culture of innovation and risk-taking where people weren’t afraid to fail. In fact, we just failed forward and then used self-compassion to get back up and try again. Mindfulness created an environment where everyone can succeed.
Today, I’m here in New Mexico, and I’m the Director of Human Performance and Leadership for the 58th Special Operations Wing at Kirtland Air Force Base. Here, we’re inserting human performance initiatives like mindfulness into our leadership construct to help our airmen optimize their performance. Our effort is nascent, as is the military’s interest in mindfulness, and why I’m excited to share my ideas here with you today, but I’m optimistic about what we will be able to achieve.
Mindfulness is not a buzzword. It’s about sustained performance and overall well-being, and it’s really as simple as taking a few minutes’ worth of deep breaths every day, silencing the detrimental chatter in our heads, the chatter that holds us back and prevents us from putting on our own oxygen mask. The end goal is changing our state of mind.
Now, I still lead a very stressful life, but now mindfulness helps me not get carried away by my circumstances so I can perform at my best. And now, today, I live grounded and present in the 4Ls, using the drive my dad instilled in me each day I labor. Mindfulness gives me more time back so I can also laugh and learn and love every day.
My dad taught me a lot, and now I’m trying to teach my kids, starting with the 4Ls. I want them to grow up thinking there are no limits to what they can achieve. I want to give them the drive to labor and work hard, but I also want them to understand how mindfulness can help them live in the present moment because that is where the laughing and the loving and the learning occurs.
I want you to ask yourself, are your days only filled with labor and a drive to succeed at all costs? If they are, I’m here to offer you an alternative. Slow down. Be courageous. Mindfulness is your oxygen mask. Try it on. You just might be surprised how successful you can become, both in your work space and in your life space.