Greg Voisen
Well, welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisen, I'm the host of inside personal growth. And joining us from Florida. Miami, did you say Christian?

Christian Boucousis
Miami it is.

Greg Voisen
Miami is Christian. And don't let me screw up your last name, say it for me once.

Christian Boucousis
Boucousis, which is why they call me Boo, Greg.

Greg Voisen
Boucousis and he goes by Boo, and this book is On Time on Target. And you can see that there's a fighter jet there. And it's How Teams and Targets Can Cut Through Complexity and Get Things Done . . . The Fighter Pilot Way. And if you haven't already, probably figured it out. Boo was a fighter pilot. So let me just tell you a bit about him. He goes by BU and he's a world class speaker. With hundreds of reviews. Testing to his life changing insights. He ranked a 4.9 out of five on one of the world's most impactful and results oriented speakers. He walks his talk inside of organizations such as McDonald's, Zorich, Pfizer, Microsoft, space savers, Woolworths, and a few of the other global leaders have experienced immediate and dramatic, ongoing performance leaves thanks to his secrets to creating deep performance mindset as he calls it. He is he reinvented himself numerous time but transforming the way of his thinking and working the acquired at that he acquired as a fighter pilot to build a humanitarian business turning over in excess of 200 mil million followed by developing a public record setting 42 million high rise hotel, transformed an iconic publishing business into digital publishing powerhouse. And now works with iconic brands and people to implement their methods and drive habitual success. His unique performance mindset is fueled by deep curiosity around what makes him tick as a human. The one thing we all have in common is irrespective of gender, race, age, race, color, and creed. Boo connects with this as human performance this and talks with us about our strengths and limitations, and how to navigate toward a better life. Well, boo, thanks for being on. Thanks for coming on. And talking about this is definitely a book that's focused on the personal growth mindset. Could you tell a story you tell a story in the preface of the book about your experience in a fighter jet and was running out of fuel, and you were in bad weather? And I remember the story distinctly Can you tell the story and the lessons you learned it in the lessons you learned you said was the fear of uncertainty is not a match for the Air Force's discipline process that you were taught. And I think that's what it really comes down to. You can be up there as a fighter pilot. But all of the training that you've had, as a fighter pilot, really prepare you so well, to take a plane like that landed? Yeah.

Christian Boucousis
Yeah, I think at face value, you think fighter pilot, you think Top Gun, and you think that it's just a bunch of men and women who fly airplanes. And that's probably what I thought it was, too, when I was flying them. I didn't think too much about it. But to be able to fly airplanes very well, what the Air Force did very cleverly, is created a cognitive model that allowed us to do that. And the cognitive model is specifically designed to process information at speed, to deconstruct decision making into lots of small decisions that can be changed rapidly. So you can adapt to the environment around you rather than react. And, importantly, to understand that, due to the complexity of the environment, and the fact that you're always at the edge of the envelope, as a human being mentally and physically, you're going to make mistakes. And the best way to survive and grow is to acknowledge that acknowledge that mistakes are just part of life. But to come together as a, as a peer group to try and learn as much as we possibly can from each and every one of those. And some mistakes are really big ones. Most are very small. And the more we focus on fixing the small ones, the less we have the big ones. So in that story specifically, it was kind of unique because that story is me. The day I achieved a 16 year life dream. So when I was five I wanted to be a fighter pilot. In fact, I wanted to be a fighter But I think what it was was I manifested the reality of becoming a fighter pilot one day. And the day that I went solo, and in a Hornet, which is the f 18 Hornet, the aircraft I flew when you're training, there's two seats, and there's a instructor pilot behind you. So the first time you go, Solo is also the first time you ever fly machine or by yourself, but there's only literally one seat, a genuine fighter. So it's pretty exciting to do this. And the day that I went solo. I was in Australia, or on the East Coast. And there's in in wintertime, there's a lot of cold fronts that come up from Antarctica, biting wind, lots of rain. So during these periods, flying can be a bit marginal. So there was a gap in the weather, me and a few of the other pilots went out to take off on the runway. And just as I took off, the weather changed, and they decided they're going to close the airfield. So there's me first solo, bad weather never flown, we're not cleared. Even though we flew in cloud and other airplanes, you've got to get a particular qualification to fly each airplane in the clouds. And I was not qualified to fly Hornet and cloud. So I've got airborne, dodged all the weather, and flew my sequence. And there was very specific things that we had to do. So the first thing that was amazing, was flying around storm clouds on a machine that you could put on its tail and it would fly straight up point straight at the sky. So that's unique. And we had to fly high level sequence, get down low and then fly low level sequence. And the great thing about flying a fighter jet at low level is you get a lot of there's a lot of thick air, thick air in the engines add fuel in the afterburner, you get this incredible acceleration, the closest thing would be watching pod races in Star Wars the movie. So I've gone up there, I've gone down to low level, having a lot of fun, the clouds very heavy, I'm underneath the cloud on the limits, throwing sound down over the poor people that are on the main highway driving up and down the Australian east coast. And then I come around the corner and, and in my head, I'm like, I've got to have this much fuel to land. But that was based on clear weather. And on the day, it was not great weather. So I'm like, oh gosh, now I'm actually shorter fuel because I meant to go home earlier. Because when you have bad weather, you have to have enough fuel to maybe hold for a little while until the clouds clear over the runway. So I turned back to the airfield, I knew what to do to save some gas. And I spoke to the ops or the operations manager who keeps a tab on me the only fighter pilot flying first of all, everyone's a bit nervous now because poor our booth out there by himself where he probably shouldn't be. And as I came back towards the runway, I knew that okay, I'm below what I should be with fuel. I know that the fuel already has a buffer. So I've got a little bit of gas. And most important thing right now is not to fly into rain not to fly into a mountain or not to get above the cloud again where I can't get down. So I knew where the area was on my map and I just slowly wound my way down until I found the approach enter the runway came in and lands and as I was landing, there was lightning left and right of the wings and rain coming down everywhere and I managed to taxi home it was all safe. So whilst my heart rate was up, whilst it wasn't an ideal environment, and I certainly had a higher level of stress than if it was a beautiful blue day. The fact that up until that day flying a hornet solo, I'd been trained to fly in bad weather I flew little proper airplanes little jets before I got on the big jet. And I was very lucky to have a support network on the ground on the radio, a familiarity with what we call airmanship, just being a generally competent pilot and applying that into a new environment, which is a brand new airplane that flies very fast in bad weather. So the building blocks are all there, I just had to bring the building blocks together differently on that particular day. So I had to, I had two options to react and panic or adapt and get the jet on the ground.

Greg Voisen
Well, you were able to get it down because you're still here. And you did a masterful job of it. And it's a great story to start it off with which leads me into this. You know, you mentioned in the book Flex is a label for a way of thinking and a framework for action. You know, as a fighter pilot, the framework is there. And then to take the action, you tell the listeners what Flex is and how it would help them. You know, take your lessons as a fighter pilot, because you use this graphic in the book and the parts of the wing and the tail and the fuselage actually kind of make up this kind of Flex System. I think if you'd give them an overview of why you used it and how much more efficient it can kind of make us at getting things done, because everybody out there today has a lot to do, they have less time to do it in. And they have to be a lot more efficient at doing it, especially in the business world. No,

Christian Boucousis
I agree. And I think what we're seeing now, with the announcement that Nike no longer does annual planning, they only plan on a three month horizon. Now, that's their whole system. Change is just an indicator of the speed of execution, right. So Flex is short for flawless execution. It's Flex, it's flexible, it's flex, it's like having big muscles. And what it really is designed just to give you 300%, more, so 300% more output for the same effort, or 300% more time off for the same result. So it's your choice, you pick it. And the reason it does that is because a fighter pilot is trained to be ahead of the airplane, if we're ahead of the airplane, we're flying it, we're putting it in the right direction, it's doing what it's told, the flip side of that is we're hanging on to the tail plane and the airplanes flying us. So if you take that airplane, and I'm very, very comfortable with the analogy of that being business, there's times I've run my business where I felt like, I'm hostage to it, it's doing it's driving me. And there's times where I'm ahead of the business, and it's doing what I tell it to do. And that's where we want to be now it's impossible to be there all the time, we were were either ahead, roughly on top of things or behind, we just keep moving up and down a bunch of there's a bunch of factors there, we could be tired, we could be sick, we could, we could be trying to do too much, which is our human inclination is to always do more than we can. Or we could be in a toxic environment, not around the right people. There's all sorts of things that are vying for our attention. So flawless execution is a way of thinking that allows you to get from behind the business to ahead of the business. But the first thing you need to do is realize where you are, am I behind or or ahead. And if you've never heard a flawless execution, or you've never heard of being ahead of your business before, this is the tool you use. So if the aeroplane is the analogy, in the middle of the airplane is you and this is based on single seat fighter pilot thinking. So there's just one pilot. And when there's one pilot, you basically have to do the job of two people, you have to do the job of flying the airplane and keeping tabs on yourself. So this is single seat pilot, operations and mindset. So in the middle of the airplane is you around the aeroplane is a bubble. And we call that bubble situational awareness. And really, that is fundamental to your success is being aware of what situation you're in right now. Am I? Is my my cash flows robust? Is my pipeline trending ahead of my sales trending ahead of my cash flow? Am I running an inversion curve, but it's to really understand exactly where I am relative to where I want to be. And if you think of situational awareness as a bubble, what we're saying is we want big bubbles of situational awareness. Inside the bubble of awareness is calm. outside the bubble is the rest of the world. And to make good decisions, and the decisions you make equal the impact you have on on your business and on life. You want to make time, we all know that the more time you have to make decisions, the better decisions you make. So if we create a big bubble, we create time to make considerate thoughtful decisions. No one has that in today's world, we have no bubble, the world is on top of us. We're making reactive decisions. And we're trying to consume insane amounts of information that no human was ever engineered to consume. We have very small bubbles of situational awareness. Most of us haven't even heard of that concept before. No, no. Have you even heard those words. We've heard of self awareness, EQ, IQ, effective leadership, relationship management, but we've never really thought of viewing the world with respect to the situation I'm in right now, not just generally. So to create the big bubble, we need to have a clear understanding of where we're going. And we call that at afterburner, our high definition destination. It's clear, it's unambiguous. And it's a reasonably inspiring destination. Would that

Greg Voisen
be would that be similar? Boo to some people refer to it as a three hag, your big, hairy, audacious goal. But people are saying, Hey, have a three year plan. Maybe not a five year plan you just mentioned Nike now do in three months. Right. But But my point is, is that we've had other authors on here that have referred to the B hag the three egg. And I'm saying that yours is very similar to that right in that respect. It's the focus of where you're going within a very short period of time.

Christian Boucousis
It is and if you look at Nike, you know, if you look at their vision or their high definition destination, it's to do everything possible to explore Ain't human potential, it's got nothing to do with sneakers, nothing to do with T shirts. They're invested in, in, in us growing to be what we're meant to be right? That is a high definition destination. And that's something everyone can get on board with. That's, yeah, I want to be part of that journey. That's you

Greg Voisen
believe, do you believe for a small business person, it's an excuse when they say, that's a pretty lofty goal that I've got to get through a lot of stuff, but because my company like Nike has millions and millions of dollars behind it, to actually do have those huge lofty goals? Or do you believe that no matter where you are in your life journey, that you should have that lofty goal to do that, because a lot of people will say, Hey, boo, I've got to struggle through all this other crap first, before I can have that. And I just would love to know, what, how do you get that high performance mindset right out of the bag?

Christian Boucousis
Well, for starters, I'm, I'm an advocate of, of not being high performance mindset, I prefer a concept called Deep performance. I think when we try and be high performance, there's a big, there's a big piece of high performance that no one considers Well, there's a few actually one high performance is expensive. To high performance, things break. And three in a high performance environment, there's normally only one winner. And that doesn't really work inside an organization on for high performance, have an offseason, they have a lot of time off. So as a business, we can't do that we operate particularly as a small business owner, I challenge anyone to have more than two weeks off a year, you're always on, right. So you're going to be you're going to be wading through crap anyway, all the time. That's a given that's life. It's just you choose it, choose to see it as crap or choose to see it as as challenge. But but when you're on your own business, you live by the sword die by the sword, that's your it's your choice. So to have to have something that has meaning as your north star as your high definition, destination, is what makes you put up with all of that. I mean, being a fighter pilots really hard, like it's, it's time consuming. It's hard on your body, you're never on top of it, you're always nervous. Like it's it's a very difficult job. But to be one is aspirational. And within all of that there are moments in time where you experience things that no other human being on the planet is ever going to experience. So it makes it worth it. So you can be as audacious as you like. And this is where we humans aren't very good at connecting today, tomorrow. We're not good at that. That's why we all just do it tomorrow means I'll just put it in the bucket of everything else I'm going to do tomorrow, and tomorrow will be tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, tomorrow never comes. So when we say something that's big and audacious we, and we don't get it. Today, we start to think it's too hard, we start to think it's too hard. So think about a high definition destination is to understand it takes time it took me 16 years to become a fighter pilot. Alright, so forget your three year strategy. Right. Right. To to expand. You know, I acquired afterburner earlier this year as a business. Because I fundamentally believe the way fighter pilots think and the way fighter pilots go about their day can change the world can unlock potential in people, am I going to achieve that in three years? I don't know. If I'm going to achieve it when I'm 60. I don't know, I'm certainly going to give it a red hot go though. So. So for me, I know that our vision at afterburner is, is one by one, change the way people think and do. And through that, we will remove stress from people's lives, we will create the space for productive thought. And we'll also help people understand that being distracted and scrolling on your phone and doing all the things that pull you away from fulfilling your life purpose. Creating damage and eroding the neural tissue in the neural pathways in your mind. So we have a lot of depth to our product. But you've got to start somewhere, which is Hey, follow these four steps, create a create a high definition destination and just follow this. And by default, you'll get there faster.

Greg Voisen
I think for every small business, medium size, large business, it's about teams. And you mentioned just a few minutes ago, that if it hadn't been for the team on the ground to help you get the plane down. It might have been a lot more challenging because you had some help that day. Right? And I think in any good organization, no matter what size you're building team, no man is an island. You can't do this alone. And in the book you speak about three major challenges that make it hard to achieve a team's goals. Could you speak about the challenge? and how the Flex Framework could help teams achieve their goals?

Christian Boucousis
Well, the first one, and I think during COVID, and post COVID, this one's well documented is engagement. So having a group of people engaged in a common goal. That's the first thing. And I would, of the hundreds of organizations we work with every year. Engagement is the recurring theme. When it comes to, hey, we want you to come in here because we want to improve engagement. Now, one of the challenges with engagement is as leaders that we lead in business in three ways, we lead people, which is more like a management role, you're a boss, and this is your team and, and this is what they get paid, and their bonuses, etc, etc. So you lead you lead people, right? You manage them more accurately, then you lead outcomes. And when you start thinking about leading outcomes, that's when you have deliverables. And that's when we create cross functional teams. Because it's highly unlikely in today's world, for any organization to achieve an outcome that you're going to be working with one team, you're going to be working with a diverse group of people, right? So we lead people, we lead outcomes. And then the final one is we lead in the moment. And when we say lead in the moment, what we mean is, the leader with the most situational awareness, at any point during this process, takes over and says, hang on, where are we going here? We're disappearing on a tangent. This was this was our goal. This was the plan, where are we going? It might be ready to go.

Greg Voisen
Boo Isn't that the most important one, though, is the one where you're leading. Now, I know, this may sound kind of strange. But I've been on this planet, almost 70 years, and I've owned lots of companies and had lots of teams. And I look at my life a little different now from an expectation standpoint or an outcome. I didn't always achieve the outcome the way I envisioned it. Now, I had to be flexible, to be able to kind of move that direction. Because I could say, oh, well, I had a goal to reach, you know, $10 million in sales this year. But I fell short, maybe only had 7.5. Right? You know what you get where I'm going with this? Right? Yes. So so that we're not disappointed by the expectation or the outcome? What do you do to help people kind of manage that? Because look, quotas are set all the time people have expectations put on them? They're doing what they claim is the best they can do? How do you help manage that?

Christian Boucousis
You make a great point. And you know, there's numerous great quotes around this, which is unhappiness, depression, sadness, whatever you want. negative emotion is created in an expectation unmet. So one of the things fighter pilots do really, really well is we only fly missions, we know we're gonna win, we're great at setting expectation. There you go. And, and when we go through our methodology, and we'll come to it later, but we have this concept called the debrief, often what we do when we reflect on performance is, is compare the two do we say? Did we tried to do something a little bit too ambitious today. And maybe next time, we just need to bring the expectation down. That's not to say we have low expectations, not at all, we have extremely high expectations around the things we can control. But we have a realistic viewpoint of the things, the things that we can't. So that's, that's really, really important. If you if you look at Daniel Kahneman 's work, you know, the Nobel Prize winning psychologist, back back in the 70s, he came up with the concept of the planning fallacy, where no matter what you plan, it's doomed to fail. Because as a human being, you're unable to even grasp what's involved when you plan. And and when we plan, we assume it's done. So the effort spent in planning, our brain perceives that as the effort of execution. So when we come up towards the deadline, it's like, oh, how come everything's not done yet? You know, what's an build? What's going on here? Why haven't I didn't realize we had to do it. It's I think, it was in the plan, but I'm waiting for Simon to do his piece of it and all of a sudden, it falls apart. So

Greg Voisen
you do believe based on what you just said, beginning of the show about Nike that corporations are now maybe looking at a different I mean, it's one thing to have a vision and a mission. Look, wars are fought based on missions and a vision to win a war, building a spacecraft that will go to the moon, or that will go to Mars. I watched that Netflix documentary on all the people at NASA that spent 20 some odd years getting spacecraft to Mars, you think it all the complexity that has to go into building the teams, the elements and the things to launch that device that got up into space and went to Mars? That's a very long term kind of concept. They made a lot of mistakes. But I think in business today, are we maybe pushing that envelope for that a little bit too far? Or? Or do you believe that's got to stay there, and we continue to reach?

Christian Boucousis
I gotta think so I think what's happened now is we've just become a little more homogenized. You know, back in the NASA days, there was, you know, 10s of aircraft manufacturers, there was lots of innovation going into different fields. And now we're all sort of all sort of consolidated. And we saw at NASA, consolidating it, how the risks started to become, outweigh the return, and they just stopped building spacecraft anymore, right, the best thing that's happened is these billionaires have entered the space race. And it's, it's fantastic. If Elon Musk is listening to this program, I could almost guarantee that we could accelerate his journey to Mars, if they approach business as a using the Force execution model, I'll almost guarantee it. But, but we are. We are born as humans to aspire to great things. I mean, throughout civilizations and Empire. If we don't have inspiration, if we don't have a sense of purpose around why we do things, we're not very good. Like we don't work well together, we get agitated, you know, idle hands, the devil's playground, all that stuff, right. So. So I think we need these hugely aspirational goals. You know, you look at the neuroscience and the fMRI research on this. It's just, it's just how we're coded as human beings. But unfortunately, we invest a lot of that aspiration into, into into pursuits such as having a better car, or buying more clothes, or getting my kids more toys, that feels aspirational. But what it's designed to do is, is designed for us to evolve our village, create better work environments, have better relationships, so we can sustain where you

Greg Voisen
are, as you mentioned, something about engagement, most of these companies are hiring him for engagement, I, I go back to some interviews that I did with Steven Kotler. And everybody out there probably knows him, the guy that did all the studies about being in flow in the flow Genome Project. And I think when you're a fighter pilot, you're in flow, you're in a different state of consciousness. What I want to say about that is there were five things that were found. And I want to resonate this because I'm going to ask you about overcoming complexity, keep us ahead of the speed of change, that will allow the team to engage, and this is where this is, CEOs frequently are very, very curious people, that curiosity turns into a purpose, then they're purpose driven. After they get that purpose. They then set a vision for something, then after they do that they set a goal. And then after they do the goals, they set proximal goals, smaller goals. Now, but that doesn't always mean that all the people that are on the team are in the same boat. And unless you can get those people engaged in the vision and the purpose and the mission and the goals, it's quite challenging. What is it that you do to help overcome the complexity associated with that in the speed of change, to engage a team and speak with us about the flex engine and the four steps?

Christian Boucousis
There for starters, when it comes to enterprise, we are not programmed to comprehend enterprise works as it were designed to work in a village level, right? That's right. We, we we want seven close friends and an environment of about 102 150 people. Yeah, that's, that's, that's what we can comprehend. Anything beyond that is we either have alliances or conflict. Right. So does this village next to me, does this team in the office next to me support me? Or are they going to make me look bad? And, and if you if you look at the likes of Accenture and you talk to a lot of the consultants here, it's such a big enterprise now. They're often competing against themselves undercutting each other, because they work at different levels of the company. So their villages are mixed with the village next door. So that is not great alignment, right. And that is not how to create a deep performing organization. You said something before about how we have vision mission goals, goals. proximal goals strategic priorities near term short term purpose. I look at all that. So for starters, this complexity right now, simplicity is this. There are objectives, what we want. And there are actions what we do. That's it. Some are big, some are small. And if we just had that plain language inside an organization, we would immediately stop having conversations around all of this as a priority, or is it a q4 objective? Or does it align with our 12 month strategy? It's like, everyone's confused, right? What you want to be able to say is, oh, that objective lines up with that three month objective, which lines up with our high definition destiny? It makes sense. I don't need to explain it. It's just very obvious to me. And we call that a cascading objective. And that creates engagement, if I know what I do today. And you don't need to have purpose, like sit on a mountaintop and Kumbaya and Oh, my God, what's my life purpose, I think the word that we're looking for in business is purposeful, that, that I need to know that my actions purposeful that it delivers something for someone else. And that's all we need. That's all we need, we just need to know that our work is appreciated. And, and it means something to someone doesn't need to land, a man or a woman on Mars. But that's again, how, you know with HR and, and strategic thinking at the universities and well, then

Greg Voisen
you're then your company, Afterburner which is afterburner.com. For all my listeners, in a real sense, you're a bit disruptive to many of the things that have come into these companies that maybe have been put in inculcated into the culture. And you talk about a six step, I would

Christian Boucousis
say, what are they doing? I would say what they're doing today is disruptive. And what we do is actually introduced simplicity, I think, Well, I

Greg Voisen
think it's great, however you want to put it, the reality is, you have to kind of get people to shift nomenclature, how they refer to things, all of that. And you have made it very simple. You just said what it was. But you also talked about in the book, the six step mission planning process. And I did mention the word mission. When you were in a fighter pilot, you obviously were sent on plenty of missions. Because that's the way the Air Force works. That's the way the military works. Can you answer the who, what, when and why? And why that mission, and then and then actually go on to the brief itself, because you speak a lot about the brief and the debrief. And those terms of themselves are in your book, and I'm gonna hold it up for everybody. They're actually terms that are usually used in the military.

Christian Boucousis
They're very important terms and words, and, and if you there's four steps to our flawless execution methodology, right? Plan brief execute debrief, we consider those the four things you need to do. If you want to get something done, you have to do these four things. If you don't do that, take your 300% more likely to get what you want done if you do this, okay. And that's, that's the organization of operational effectiveness. In New York, it's the amalgamation of 40 studies that show that this fighter pilot facilitator debriefing is 300%. Better for improving performance? So planning set planning is the setup. Okay? So planning is the desire, it's the want. It's, it's the get excited about right. But it's also fictional, because it doesn't exist. It's later, right? So if we start with the mindset that it's fictional, but let's create as much clarity as we can. So what can I control the speed on my heart, I fly. And I can look at that dial or that screen until I see a threat. Now, do that i the dashboard, right? Yeah, that's the dashboard. I may see it. I may not, I don't know. But if I do see it, then that's going to then I'm going to change my plan. But I'm going to do I'm going to have a good idea. I'm either going to turn away and go home and say too hard. Or I'm going to sneak around and go in another way. So there's always there's always kind of like gates to our thinking. So planning is creating the what we say the perfect plan, and then testing it for reality. So when the Okay, how would we run this business if we were a monopoly, and there was no threat? No challenges. How could we do everything within our power as close to perfect as possible and flawless execution is accepting that perfection is not possible? What's the 98% solution? Now let's test it. What about competitors bring out a new sneaker. What about competitors come up with a new material that wicks sweat away in these new running shoes now that you can only wear once that everyone's starting to break these new records, there's always going to be something right. Right. But rather than rather than react to that, let's adapt to it, let's, let's assume in our planning that one day, that's actually going to happen, that something that is out of our control is going to happen, and what are we going to do. And when that moment comes, that's when we're going to go, and intensely focused on our resources to innovate. So fighter pilot mindset, think of it like this mission on is your day. So create moments in your time where you absolutely have to be on and moments in your day when you're not. And you can do that in the morning, you can just set three objectives for the day and say, these three things I'm going to focus on, and that gets into flow thinking and creating those neural pathways to have that hyper productive outcome because you're hyper focused. So the six steps of planning a very simple, set your objective, and that can be the objective for the day week, the next two weeks, month, quarter. Yeah, yeah. But same process, right? Doesn't matter. Just just have bigger objectives. Simple. Ask, I'll challenge them what's going to get in the way? All right and better to do do this with everyone else that you need everyone else that's involved in the process with you. That's how you drive engagement. Don't tell people what to do? Have them create the plan with you. Right, and we say that so identify the threats and opportunities from there. This is when reality hits, and we say well, what resources do we have available? And are there enough to achieve this objective and to achieve to mitigate all of these threats. So we do a bit of a reshuffle there. And normally, that's when you say, oops, maybe I'm being too ambitious today. Maybe going to the gym for two hours today is too ambitious based on the fact I've only got an hour, right. So I'm going to go for 45 minutes, reset my objective, reset my expectation, set an expectation that will be met. Step four is when we say what happened yesterday. What did I learn? And what did I say to myself, I'm going to do today to fix the problems from yesterday. And then finally, and this is more important with a bunch of people than yourself is everyone agrees on what their actions are for the day. And don't we don't need 100 actions, all we need is like two or three big actions. So we all agree, right? We understand where everyone's going. In the airforce, we call it same way, same day, it doesn't mean we're rigidly flying together like that. We're just all generally headed in the same direction. And that's good enough, right. And I know if I look over there, my number two is going to generally be there. And my number four is going to generally be there. And my number three is going to generally be there. Unlike business, which is like where the hell is everyone? And what are you doing there?

Greg Voisen
Well, I like the simplicity of the way you put it. And and I think there's one way one thing in particular that you talked about in the book that the military uses, but you know, my good friend, David Allen, who I've actually worked with on his book is called Getting Things Done, but that I literally was one of his first attendees is workshops, and then we did a audio cassette series together. And you know, you talk about checklists. Now, we all a lot of us make to do lists, checklists, whatever they are. And there's been books that have been written about how important checklists are to physicians that actually do surgeries, right? Hey, did we do this? What was step one? What was step two? What was step three, we didn't want to leave anything inside of boo, when we cut him open. So I want to make sure that we pulled out all the instruments, right? I'm joking a bit. But for I'm only joking from this standpoint, I have checklists. And I will tell you, that for me. What allows me to get completed, people have always said, How do you do so many podcasts? How do you prepare for something? How do you keep all track of it? If I didn't have checklists? I would never get any of this done. If you would speak to the importance and you have various types of checklists. And now we can use them to keep focused on our mission. Because I can say today without babbling on any further, if everybody had a checklist that they were working from, they would see inch by inch, mile by mile, they would actually reach their goal.

Christian Boucousis
Oh, absolutely. So checklists were invented in World War Two when Boeing built the B 17. Yeah, and the reason they're invented is every time they took the thing off, they crashed it, someone put a switch in the wrong position, or they forgot what to do, right. And then they said, You know what? If we follow the switches, and we do it this way, this is the way you should do it. And they put it in a checklist, the pilots follow that and all of a sudden, everything was fine. I was like, hey, these checklists are a great idea. We're not We're not blowing up. Hundreds of 1000s of dollars, right? Have the machinery we're not killing people anymore. And that's got to be a good outcome. Right? 4949 Hammond died every day in training accidents during World War Two. Yeah. So that was the first thing. So that was the creation of the checklist. And it's a it's a, it's an aviation thing. Secondly, to fly Hornet, you need to learn about 418 to 423 checklist items, and you have to memorize them from one to 423. And you've got six weeks to do that, right? And you do. It's not, they're not random numbers, they follow a pattern we call, they're called left to right, you start on the left hand side, you go up down around to the right. But as an Australian fighter pilot, you're expected to know all of that, how to get the aeroplane started take off land, off off by memory. And and the philosophy there is, you shouldn't be wasting brainpower doing routine things, you need to be focused on fighting the aeroplane and surviving, and it's very tactical environment, it's very rapidly changing. So if we're there wondering, what does that button do, or which switch do I push now? Or what button do I push? Or which screen do I need to be on on my, on the digital screens in the crate? Right, that's one second, you've just given to the enemy that you can't afford to give them. Because one second, as a as a fighter pilot is the difference between their missile hitting you at Mach Five, you before yours hits them. So you have to and in business, people say, Well, I don't I don't work that fast. I've got all this extra time. So my philosophy is great, well, if you've got more time to waste go wasted. But what, why not, why not use the things that we use it at Mach one, and give yourself all this extra time to get ahead of your business. If your whole team's thinking this way, you can get the same amount of work done with half the members of the team, we've worked in organizations will move pull head headcount back by 40%. And delivered more. It's taken a few years to get there, but it works well.

Greg Voisen
And don't leave it to memory. What I'm saying is these checklists, if, today, the advancement in technology associated with surgeries, I'm gonna just use that again, there are guys that are wearing these goggles now that literally there's somebody else that can see. And they can talk to them through the headphones, right? And say, hey, you know, here's this to help them even better navigate the surgery, right? It's happening all over guys that are trying to repair airplanes, even, they've got these goggles where the guy can see on the other end, right, they're looking at what they're looking at with virtual reality and send it back to them. And I'm saying that's a checklist in a in a mechanism, because you've got another person who's actually on the back end, you know, helping you so that you don't forget things, right. I think that's also the benefit to a degree, I'll just say to AI, I'll put a plug in for it. Because I don't think it's a bad thing. You know, these debriefing. So I want you to cover two things here. The importance of the debrief, you talked a little bit about it. But I find as a business person, the most important thing I can do after every meeting, whether I'm using otter AI, or whatever I'm doing is provide the client with the debrief. Right. And I use that tool to give me the main salient points to say this is what we talked about, this is what we agreed on. And this is what we're going to do. And it's that simple. You got two great stories in this book. It's well referenced for the reader, by the way, and I'm going to hold the book up and there's two places people can go, they can go to afterburner.com To learn more about this book, or you can go to Boo's personal website which is callmeboo.com. Those are the two places leave the listeners if you would, with how they can apply some of the things that you've articulated in the book, and the importance of this debrief.

Christian Boucousis
The debrief is everything. In fact, in February, the revised edition of that book gets published. It's more engineered towards the more engineer towards the post digital surge, post COVID. But we moved the debrief Chapter Two actually the preface, the whole book opens with debriefing. I'm sure you did. Because because it is the it is the hero. And there's two elements to debriefing, the way you do it, and what you do. And the way you debrief is what we call nameless and restless or what Ray Dalio calls radical transparency, where you have conversations that are purely focused on fact, and that's why the planning is so important, the more Garbage your plan is the less detailed that is, the less you can debrief because everything becomes an opinion. And some organizations are threatened by this because it does drive accountability. The problem with the problem with accountability without a debrief is everyone gets into the blame game. Accountability with a debrief. The debrief is where everyone decompresses. It's where we allow ourselves to talk about our mistakes. It's a psychologically safe environment where there's no hiding. And because we debrief regularly, we're debriefing, small things, we're not debriefing, well, let's debrief our entire financial year. I can't even remember, you know, the way the human brain works is we create false memories, you know, the whole police take a witness statement straightaway, but when we start making things up, so a debrief is how we capture every day in the moment, the the execution gap, the gap between what you want and what happened, and that's that unmet expectation. And rather than that, to go down a pathway towards misery, the expectation unmet life, we turn it around, and the most important part of the debrief and it's a four step process, what's the objective? What's the result? What's the cause? And what's the action? So what's the cause of the execution gap? But the thing is, what am I going to do, and when as a person when you've made a mistake, and you work closely with a peer group, and that supportive peer group helps you create what we call a bias to action, you feel much better. In fact, you release dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins, we're calling it the dose effect. And it's those four hormones, neuro chemicals that give you your energy back, that allow you to finish the day on a high that allow you to feel as though actually you know what, despite things not going great today, at least I've got one thing I can do before bed, or first thing in the morning to slowly move the oil tanker of my belief systems around this way. So fighter pilot mindset, if you think of mindset as our collective beliefs and learnings and our perception about where we should be the fighter pilot mindset basically means well, you've got control of that you can get ahead of the airplane, which is your life, and turn it in the direction that you want it to be. And there's very few people on earth that have been trained to think that way. And the debrief is really the anchor that allows you to adjust. I

Greg Voisen
think I'll add that if really, the truth is and that is be here now. If that is all we have, and you have checklists, and debriefs, no matter what happens tomorrow, or no matter what happened yesterday, you can't beat yourself up over something that didn't get accomplished from yesterday, because you'll just be playing the woe is me game, woulda, coulda shoulda. The reality is these checklists and what you just talked about the debriefs are way to keep you fully engaged in the present moment. Okay. And, and I know for a fact that that works, because your accomplishment, everybody says, Well, I'm looking for a win, well, you're gonna get a win. The win is going to be what you accomplish today. And you can feel good putting your head on your pillow at night, saying I accomplished what I what I wanted to accomplish today. And I felt good about what I accomplished. So leave the audience with three things that they can take away from the book.

Christian Boucousis
The first is, is the trick to winning big things is to win small every day. That's, that's, that's important. The second is to understand the difference between a dream and an aspiration and getting things done. You need both. But the fact you want something isn't enough, you might manifest the life that you want, you might have a great sense of purpose, but you got to the wheels have got to spin and get traction each day. And that's, that's that's what we have is the flawless execution engine. And the third thing is, and it's becoming a bit of a buzzword now, but I love it because it says so much is curiosity. debrief is formalized curiosity. It allows you to unpack things to be curious as to why do we do it this way? Why did this happen again. But the way that the brain creates memories, and the way that we genuinely learn and grow, is turning the ideas to action. And that last step in the debrief where we go from an analysis of a cause to delivering an action is is really the the glue that holds your execution to its purpose. And I've never been in an environment since leaving the air force that is anywhere near a fighter squadron. A Fighter Squadron is the epitome of the pinnacle of human performance, not high performance, because we don't have an offseason is genuine sustained performance with a group of people that individually and as a team consistently surpass expectations?

Greg Voisen
Well, I can tell people if they want to travel at Mach speed, and know where they're going, and how they're going to get there. And then after once they get there, measure the accomplishments of what it was that they had achieved to get there, that your afterburner programs, courses, whatever that you're offering, everybody out there is listening, definitely go to afterburner.com. And check it out. Boo, you have been a wealth of knowledge, I can see just by the short time we've spent today, kind of profiling some of the book, for my listeners, we'll have a link to Amazon Go out and get on time on target. And like he said, In February, the preference in the book is going to change and it's going to be on this debrief. There's only one thing you take away from this, I would say would be the check three things. I'm gonna say, the checklists, the brief, and the debrief. And if that's all you ever got out of this book, and you implemented those resources into your life, your life would be simpler. You would have more time for yourself. You'd feel more fulfilled, you'd be happier. He said, your endorphins would go up most definitely your oxytocin would go up. And you would be a better husband, a better father, a better employer. And when I say better, you'd be stellar. Hey, it's been a pleasure having you on Whoo, appreciate you taking the time to speak to my listeners. I hope and pray that everybody out there, heard these words, and takes it to heart and really makes a change. And not only what they do, but how they do it. You're quite welcome. You have a wonderful rest of your day and I hope to see you again on inside personal growth.

Christian Boucousis
Thanks very much. Likewise. Take care, Greg. Thank you.