Self-Awareness as a Pilot’s Superpower - Part 1

Self-awareness helps you make better decisions, regulate emotions, and build stronger connections, even with yourself. It keeps you confident without being overconfident, and open to growth instead of stuck in old habits. Without it, people repeat mistakes, struggle with communication, and let emotions control them. As a pilot it is perhaps even more important to be self-aware, as your decisions impact not only your own safety but also that of your crew and passengers. 

The good news? Self-awareness can be developed. Through reflection, mindfulness, and feedback, you can sharpen your understanding of yourself and improve every area of your life.

We have some ‘non-tech’ competencies - things like communication, leadership and teamwork, you know these already - which tie in with CRM. So our self-awareness in terms of how we operate has to be considered alongside how we work with others too. What things make us tick, and what things are going to tick off other people off.

I remember a Captain telling me once to stop talking. This was pretty early on in my career, when I was, let’s say, very “enthusiastic” about showing I knew my stuff. I had, rightly, spotted an issue and so pointed it out to the captain. And then I pointed it out again and again and again...

Fast-forward through the shock of him saying this to my reflecting on why he had said it and I discovered that yep, I have both a tendency to over commentate what I’m thinking, particularly when I’m a little nervous or unsure, and one for trying to prove I know my s**t. Both of which can prevent the other person from processing information.

So, a bit of self-awareness later and I am became much more capable in that respect (and hopefully a little less annoying too).

Self-awareness is a lot like situation awareness - the competency that focuses on the environment, having a mental model of the context you are operating in, and knowing how that is going to impact the operation. We need this for ourselves too.

It is really important because, well, we’re human, not robots. If we ignore the fact that we have strength and weaknesses, can become stressed, work differently under different levels of pressure, get fatigued, worried, nervous, anxious, startled, upset, surprised, all those other little humany** things… then we are going to mess up (something humans are particularly good at). We have to look after, and manage ourselves (inside and out) the same way we do our airplane, and this can be really hard to do because let’s face it, none of us like admitting we are anything less than an absolute superhero.

Although, my superhero power is the ability to sleep in any space and at any time, which is fairly lame in the grand scheme of things.

Self-aware pilots make better decisions because they understand their own cognitive biases—things like confirmation bias (only seeing what you expect to see) or complacency (assuming everything is fine without verifying). Recognizing these tendencies helps you take a step back and reassess situations objectively. (This is another very important topic, and we plan on telling you more about it in an upcoming article!)

Then I focus on any that come up and consider mitigations. I’m tired? OK, not fatigued, but my capacity is a little lower, so what can I do about it? Take some inflight rest, have a coffee, let my co-pilot know. I can’t stop thinking about that “whatever” I need to sort out? It is quite important, but not so important that I can’t delay it or ask someone to help? So, I’m good to fly? Wait, no, my foot actually fell off in the night… The HMEL (that’s Human MEL) needs my foot functional, I’d better call in sick…

You get the idea, and this might sound really silly, but doing a little “pre-flight check” on ourselves (physically and emotionally) is as important as the one we do on the aircraft, because we are just as integral to safety. By asking questions like these, we are ensuring we are aware of the things impacting ourselves, what this might mean for our performance and behaviour, and we can start to do something about it all 

Being self-aware means really understanding how you act and react to things, how your competency “tool kit” is looking, and how developed your knowledge and skills (and attitudes) are. It is also about understanding how external things affect all of these - your ability to apply your skills, the way your behaviour might change and how that will affect how you interact with others (that’s the CRM bit). These externalities can impact your performance, distract you, reduce your capacity, lower your resilience or adaptability etc (that’s human factors!)

It is also, and possibly most importantly, about making sure you are ok because at the end of the day, when we walk over that flight deck threshold, we are not leaving any of this on the outside.

Stick around for our next article in this series, when we’ll talk more about self-awareness, and a new topic: emotional intelligence!