Michelle Curran earned her call sign “Mace” from a mistake she made during training.
The former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot accidentally went supersonic during dogfighting training, a close-range aerial battle between fighter aircraft.
“Because of that, there was so much energy on the jet that I flew a full 360 (degrees) at nine Gs and almost went unconscious,” she said.
The call sign stands for “mach at circle entry,” which describes the danger of initiating a turn in a jet while flying too fast.
This mistake scared Curran and fueled her fear that maybe she wasn’t cut out for the job. But that voice in her head was wrong, and she eventually became just the second female lead solo pilot in Thunderbirds history. The lead solo pilot executes the majority of the high-speed, inverted and complex maneuvers during the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds air shows.
Curran defied the odds to get a pilot slot and a fighter jet out of training, was deployed to Afghanistan and served her final three years in the Air Force, 2019 to 2021, as a Thunderbird. She left the military after rising to the rank of major.
Now, she has traded G-forces for motivational speaking, writing the USA Today bestselling book “The Flipside: How to Invert Your Perspective and Turn Fear Into Your Superpower” and doing keynote speeches all over the world on how to turn fear into action just like she did.
“I think being in an environment that was high pressure, being in an environment where fear was probably valid in a lot of cases, really empowered me to have perspective on risk as an entrepreneur,” Curran said.
Q How did being a Thunderbird pilot help you become an educator and motivational speaker to business leaders and individuals around the world?
A I think there’s a misconception that you should wait until you feel confident to go after things. In my experience, confidence is not something you wait for, it’s something that you build.
For a good portion of my career, even when I was experienced, I questioned if I was the right person for the job, like somehow I had snuck in under the radar. Even when I was flying as the lead solo pilot for the Thunderbirds, I had those moments. I realized just how common that experience is.
What I found is that every time you level up in your career, you go from being the best at your job to now leading people, or maybe you move to the corner office. Those moments always come with self-doubt, not because you do not belong there, but because you are a beginner and you are learning new things.
When we lose that perspective, we talk ourselves out of grabbing opportunities we actually want because we feel that doubt and fear. What I try to do is normalize that and reframe it so people do not see it as a stop sign. That reframing helps people find the courage to manage fear and take action.
Sometimes the boardroom can be just as nerve-wracking as the cockpit of a plane. What are some ways you help people manage fear and take action?
There is something I call “the space between.” That is the moment between feeling fear and deciding what you are going to do with it.
There is a fear response when we think about giving a speech, asking for a raise or pitching for investment. In those moments, instead of responding with our experience or training, we often respond with instinct, because our brains are trying to protect us.
We need to recognize that brief moment and learn to work with it. Visualizing and practicing in advance, knowing how we want to respond in that space, is powerful. It lets us choose our response instead of defaulting to fear.
Was there a moment when you felt you were going to crumble under pressure? How did you manage it? Any tools?
I have a story about learning to air refuel. For people who are not familiar, there is a large tanker aircraft, and my small F-16. I have to fly behind it until our aircrafts connect so it can give me gas. It is a gas station in the sky.
It is a very precise maneuver, and when you are learning it, it is very stressful. As a student, you tend to overgrip the stick and overcontrol the aircraft. That can actually make the jet more unstable.
One of the things my instructor told me was that when I started to feel my whole body tense up, I should pause for a second and wiggle my toes. It sounds so stupid when you are flying a $30 (million) or $50 million airplane, but I tried it, and it worked. It felt like a switch flipped.
It gets you out of that hypervigilant state where you are trying to make tiny corrections under stress and grounds you back in your body so you can respond calmly.
When I was writing the book, I interviewed a neuroscientist about it, because I wanted to understand why it works. She called it a physical grounding technique.
Our brain operates in different waves tied to different states of focus. We need those higher intensity states for complex tasks like surgery, writing something precise or flying a jet into a tanker. But you can get too far into that state, where performance actually starts to decrease.
So there are tools that bring you back to an optimal level. Wiggling your toes is one of them. It sounds simple, but it is a way to reset your nervous system and recenter so you can perform at your best.
How did you come back from the mistake that gave you your call sign?
It earned me a call sign, and it also fueled this idea that maybe I was not cut out for it. My inner critic came out strongly. It was a difficult point in my career. Over time, I reframed it. Now I wear it as a badge of honor, and it is one of the key stories I tell onstage, because there’s a lot to learn from how we handle failure.
I talk a lot about the inner critic, that voice that chimes in and tries to talk you out of things. It makes you question if you belong or if you deserve to be there.
What I have people do is write down what that voice sounds like, what it looks like, and then give it a name. My inner voice had this persona of an older, very experienced fighter pilot, tactical and demanding, someone I was always trying to measure up to but never quite did. I named it Stan.
Now, when Stan shows up, I do not treat it like truth. I just notice it. I say, “Oh, there he is again.” It is not my identity. It is just a representation of pressure and standards I have carried, not fact.
