A life skill coach personal development idea:

Apollo 13 and the Definition of Failure

BY JAMIE WALTERS

Reprinted with permission. See below.

What lessons can you learn from Apollo 13, NASA's most successful failure?

The Apollo 13 mission came to be known as "NASA's most successful failure." By the mere mention of those two words in the same sentence — successful failure — Apollo 13 and her crew provide a rich challenge to the notion that failure exists at all, outside of the "make-believe" reality created by our own minds.

For those unfamiliar with this particular real-life space drama, featured in the Apollo 13 movie starring Tom Hanks, the Apollo 13 spacecraft was launched into orbit on April 11, 1970 with three crew members. After almost three days of smooth operations, an oxygen tank onboard the craft blew up, sending the crews onboard and at NASA's Houston-based command center into overdrive to get the spacecraft back to Earth with its inhabitants alive. The explosion triggered a series of vexing dilemmas, one following another, that lasted several more days. Because the problems occurred while the craft and crew were 200,000 miles from Earth, the situation was life-threatening and the margin-for-error was nil. And you thought your current dilemma was stressful?

The great thing is that we needn't be floating around in space in a damaged spacecraft to learn valuable "here on Planet Earth" lessons from the Apollo 13 crew's handling of the crisis. What can we learn? Here are a few of the lessons I find most valuable from their story:

Not everything goes smoothly. These days, it seems that almost everyone has the rather silly expectation that everything should be easy and that discomfort or sacrifice of any kind suggests failure. As Doc Holliday says in one of my favorite portrayals — the movie Tombstone, starring Val Kilmer as the infamous Holliday — "There's no such thing as a normal life, Wyatt. There's just life." Likewise, there's no such thing as a perfect (or perfectly smooth) situation; there's just the situation (and our masochistic expectation that it should be something other than it is). Read Marcus Aurelius or the more contemporary Victor Beaseley to learn how to "let the situation be your guru" as exemplified by the Apollo 13 crew.

Present-moment awareness is crucial. Like many challenging situations, the unraveling of the Apollo 13 mission-as compared to the smooth flight revealed in the mission plan-required both mindfulness and skillfulness on the parts of all involved in the project. Worry too far ahead into the future or belabor the mistakes of the past, and it's likely that you're not attending to something important, like the present-moment, which requires your attention and offers any number of options for your perusal and action.

You have to trust your instincts, your experience — and your team. The folks careening through space in Apollo 13 didn't have the luxury (or if they did, it was fleeting) of sitting around dilly-dallying and wondering, "Gosh, my gut tells me that something's wrong here, but the computer is broken and the other folks who know are down there in Houston, so, gee, I'm just not sure whether we should take some action here before getting the go-ahead from the executive team." Neither did they bicker with one another about what was whose job, nor did they bloat with ego and tell Houston, "We're really good up here, so we'll just handle this ourselves, fellas." That would have been ridiculous under any circumstances, and because they were in crisis they knew it. As a result, they:

trusted their training,

used their analytical skills for essential problem-solving rather than unessential analyzing,

knew that false humility and sagging confidence would waste valuable time and energy, and

respected their colleagues onboard and in Houston by relying on them to apply their expertise and work their part of the problem.
As a result, they made it through the Earth's atmosphere and into a safe ocean-landing on April 17, 1970, and were alive to tell the story that's now a part of history.

There's no such thing as failure. Just because it's a cliche doesn't mean it's not true. Failure is just a word we've made up to describe when things don't work out like we might have expected, or work out in a way that's different from the mass hallucination about what's "normal." Apollo 13 — the successful failure — demonstrates that real success is gained from working at the peak of your potential, and doing the very best you can with what you have to navigate the circumstances before you at any given time. That's not so much success or failure as it is just life.

Had they not lived the lessons outlined above, chances are good that the crew would have run out of oxygen or not found the means to power the craft back home. Why wait for a life-threatening crisis to use lessons and skills you have at your disposal right now?

© Jamie S. Walters, Ivy Sea, Inc. San Francisco, CA (www.ivysea.com). Reprinted with permission. No additional reprint, distribution, or reproduction in any form without express permission or VIP membership from Ivy Sea, Inc.

HELLO FEAR. YOU DON'T EXIST. NOW GO AWAY.

When I was in the eighth grade, my science teacher told us there was no such thing as cold. He went on to say that what we perceived as cold was just an absence of heat. It's funny what we remember from all those years sitting in a classroom.

The same principle can be applied to what we tend to perceive as fear. Look no further than our major religions, wisdom teachings, mindset management practices, or the advice given by professional trainers and coaches. I'm sure you'll find them all extolling this same basic axiom. Rather than heat, where fear's concerned, what's missing can be described as confidence, knowledge, security, intuition, faith, love, or just a belief that all is as it should be.

Yet in these times of economic and political uncertainty, when the airwaves are full of messages of gloom and doom (hey, it sells ad space better than hope), and when our leaders are fanning fear's flame to keep our attention focused on their agenda, how can we get back in touch with what's real?

Five things you can do right now to transform unproductive fears:

1. Get away for a while, literally or emotionally.

Take a long weekend away from TVs, radios, phones, e-mail and news. If you can't literally get away, stay home and don't turn the TV on, don't read the headlines and don't talk with anyone who wants to bring these topics up. The longer you've been 'in the soup' the longer the detox period needs to be.

2.Slow down and get quiet.

This is Western society's paradox. We just can't grasp that we can be exceedingly productive without going non-stop. To quote the Runes: "Do without doing and everything gets done." Until we quiet the clutter, this exercise is futile. Period.

3. Anchor with past positive feelings, productivity and outcomes.

Too often when our individual lives get hijacked by the collective hysteria, we can't remember that we were ever happy at all. Now that can't be good! So after you've disconnected long enough, recall those times when you were in flow. How did you feel? What allowed you to accomplish so much? Why were you happy? What did you get done? What obstacles did you effortlessly overcome? Again, how did you feel?

4. Look the illusion of fear in the face.

Have the courage to sit across from what scares you to the point where your lifestyle and happiness are negatively affected. Until you name it, you can't displace it. But once you do, the more you'll notice that these fearful feelings have no basis in reality, and begin to dissolve.

5. Do the opposite and call on your greatest allies for support.

This time, sit next to your confidence, intuition, belief and love. These powerful forces have been with you all along. Unfortunately, over time we either ignore or push them away until we can no longer connect with them. Remember that this is what's real. Resist the pull to minimize the power of these guides. And don't let others tell you what's true for you. This last point is especially true during times of great uncertainty.

Bonus tip: Help someone else for no reason. Sweep the sidewalk in front of their house. Shovel snow from a neighbor's driveway. Help a kid with her homework. I have a friend who finds it easiest to get out of a funk by helping others in the moment. I've done it and it works for me. When we're focusing all our energy helping someone out, we're not dwelling in self-pity and fear. And once we're out of that funky space, we begin to see clearly once again.

Of course, fear is natural and can do us the favor of giving us a heads-up regarding potential danger, or fears can be overwhelming and require the assistance of a trained therapist. For the day-to-day variety, though, mindset management or spiritual practices can put fears in their proper perspective, allowing us to see more clearly the things that are worth paying attention to.

© Jamie Walters