Show Notes

• What would you do if money were no object?
• The balance between preparation and leaps of faith
• When we do something that scares us
• Incorporating fun into our lives
• Demo jumps
• Risk aversion
• How to overcome fear or apprehension
• “I can land a parachute”

Connect With Melanie Curtis

Website – http://melaniecurtis.com/
Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/melaniecurtis11/
Instagram – http://www.instagram.com/melaniecurtis11/
YouTube –  http://youtube.com/c/melaniecurtiscom/
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanie-curtis-74ab3540/
Podcast – http://trustthejourney.today/

Summary

Melanie Curtis is a life coach, an intensely driven entrepreneur, the author of three books, and a comically authentic speaker. She has also jumped out of an airplane over 11,000 times! Melanie shares insights from her exhilarating adventures, both in the air and on the ground.

Full Transcript

Brian:

Welcome to another episode of Life Excellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers, and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field so you can learn their tools, techniques, and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success.

Melanie Curtis is a life coach and intensely driven entrepreneur and a comically authentic speaker. Oh, and she’s also jumped out of an airplane over 11,000 times. Melanie has competed at the highest level in the sport of skydiving, has set world records with her team, and has worked around the clock, is a headlining professional skydiver. She is the author of three books, including this one, How To Fly:  Life Lessons From A Professional Skydiver, the audio version of which was recently released on Audible. Melanie is also the co-host of a podcast, Trust The Journey, is the co-founder of Highlight Pro Skydiving Team and is the executive director of the Women’s Skydiving Network, a not-for-profit organization that connects, inspires, and champions, female skydivers and future female skydivers, in skydiving and beyond. Welcome Melanie, and thanks so much for joining me today.

Melanie:

Brian, thank you so much for having me. It’s humbling to hear all that. I’m like, oh god, here we go.

Brian:

Speaking of impressive, you graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont, which obviously is one of the top private liberal arts colleges in the country. And you started a successful investment banking career with Credit Suisse. You left that secure job though, to work full time in the skydiving business. How did you get into skydiving and what caused you to make such a significant career change?

Melanie:

Yeah, my family is an aviation family. So my dad is a pilot, and I grew up with a grass strip, literally behind my dad’s house. And so I was exposed to aviation at a young age. My dad’s best friend, basically, was a skydiver. And they said, hey, let’s open a drop zone at our house. And they did. And so I simply grew up around it, sat through the first jump course a million times…I have no idea how many times. When I was 16, I was able to go jump for the first time, but I was not ready. With a parent’s permission, it’s all good. He owned the place it’s legal and all of that, but I wasn’t ready, you know what I mean? But then when I was 18, I had, again, sat through the first jump course a number of times and I got sick of waiting. I was sick of being nervous about it, thinking I really want to do this, but not really being sure how to do it. And I made this decision. I said, all right, the next day—tomorrow—I’m doing it. And I sat through the first jump course again, with a mindset of, I’m actually going to do this, which was different than [the way] I had done it before. And so it’s…long story short, I did my first jump. I really genuinely was in the mindset of, there’s no way I can jump out of a perfectly good airplane—quote, unquote—and survive, basically. So when I landed as an 18 year old kid and was alive, my psyche was sort of really forever altered. And from that point I was wildly, passionately in love with skydiving—it was a one and done for me. It literally altered the trajectory of my life.

So to answer your question of how did I go from investment banking to professional skydiving? Well, I still was motivated down the traditional path based on how I grew up. I wanted to go to school. I wanted to get educated. I was still in that traditional mindset of that’s what you do. You go to school, you get a good job. You yada, yada, yada, all those things. And not that that’s a bad thing, it’s just that was the only idea that I had about what my life could be. So fast forward, I’m competitively successful in the realm of competitive skydiving. And I have reached a point in my career in investment banking and in that realm where I was genuinely unhappy. So it was this colliding of those two moments where I had achieved basically a gold medal in the amateur class with my team at that time back in 2004 and I had to ask myself which direction I wanted to go. There’s more to that story, but I’ll let you jump in.

Brian:

Well, I was going to ask you if it was more about your love for skydiving or becoming dissatisfied being in sort of the corporate world, if we can call it that. But it sounds like it was a little bit of both.

Melanie:

It was both. It’s one of those things where I could sort of tell I was the person…I was becoming a person I didn’t like. I really dreaded going to the office. I would snap at my boss, who was a great guy. I could tell, even though I was a young person with very low self-awareness at the time, I could feel that something was off. And I said, oh, I need to keep growing. So without a full lack of full clarity about that at the time, I said, okay, well, what should I do? I guess I should learn more, whatever. So I bought the book, the job search book, What Color Is Your Parachute? which is silly because I literally only bought it because parachute is in the title. I was wildly obsessed with skydiving. And so inside that book, a question changed my life. And that question was, what would you do if money were no object, which we’ve heard before, but in my challenged, youthful state I was like, yeah, well duh, skydiving, of course. But I don’t want to live in a trailer on the drop zone, I don’t want to make no money, I don’t want to…I had a laundry list of why I couldn’t be a professional skydiver—about what I perceived it to be and why that lifestyle was not for me. So as soon as I had that experience with that question, the blinders on my eyes started to creak open. And I started to peer out a little bit more widely than I had before. And I saw people who were professional skydivers, who didn’t live in a trailer on the drop zone, who had homes and seemingly a lifestyle that I would be interested in having. From there, I realized basically it was possible for me. I talked to my local drop zone and effectively pitched myself for the job that then became the dream job in professional skydiving that I had for a number of years.

Brian:

Well, it’s amazing the power of questions. And that book is a great book. I’ve read it, I’ve used it. I bought it for my kids at different times in their lives. And that was obviously a huge leap of faith, pardon the pun, but obviously it’s turned out well for you. What advice do you have for others who have similar feelings that you had, who aren’t doing what they love, so to speak, and want to make a career or life change?

Melanie:

One of the things that I think is super critical that we all consistently forever remember is that we are so much more capable than we ever currently think. So me as a 23, 24 year old person, who’s becoming dissatisfied in investment banking and has this love of skydiving, I didn’t have the ability to see how much more capable I was at that point. So I’ve carried that forward through all of my career decisions. In terms of entrepreneurship, for example, god, I couldn’t have predicted where I’d be now, having written all the books and done all the things, and the non-profit, and all this stuff that you listed. There’s no way I could have predicted that. So as we go through the path, I think it’s really important to actively and intentionally try to creak open those blinders and allow yourself—it sounds so cliche, but—to think bigger than you would if you were just comfortable. It’s, again, it sounds very cliche, but so much of my career has evidence that you can do more than you think at the time. So that’s what I would suggest.

Brian:

Well, and too, at some point you just need to jump, right? So you talked about the story of maybe wanting to, or maybe there was a little subtle peer pressure—I mean, there’s a drop zone in your backyard. So it makes sense that when you’re able to do it, that you would do it, and yet it took you a couple of years, and I think you need to be in the right place for that. I mean, that’s a whole other discussion, but at some point you just need to jump, right? In the airplane, you can ride around at 14,000 feet in the airplane and you can ride around and ride around and ride around. But I mean, at some point you need to jump.

Melanie:

Yeah, there’s a balance between preparation and leaps of faith, as it were. That’s the thing. We see this in entrepreneurship and business, a lot as well, where people will prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare, and that will become an avoidance tactic. So it will become…the fear will overtake in an ulterior way—will keep you from actually effectively “entering the arena”. So skydiving is a really powerful metaphor in that regard, in that we don’t want to go up with no training, with no preparation and jump out of an airplane, and we don’t know how to fly a parachute or land safely. That would be stupid, right? That would be unwise. That would be reckless. Similarly in life we don’t necessarily…this happens a lot to people when they are in discomfort. And this is more speaking from the life coaching realm of that work that I do now, that people will make a reckless choice because they are sick of the emotional discomfort versus doing the preparation work around looking into their blind spots, around trying to illuminate what they can’t currently see, such that they are then more prepared or to do the active work of learning something, doing research, avoiding that type of stuff, because they don’t really know where to begin. They don’t look at research or education as preparatory phase. Instead they sit in discomfort. That’s why I highlight this because it’s both sides of the coin. We can be stuck and not do any preparation. And then we get emotionally to the point where we make a reckless choice where it might work out and it might not. So it’s that idea of how much preparation do we need, but you’re right, at some point, definitely, we need to get in the arena and learn from experience. So if we don’t know what to do, we can take a step into the arena. We can take a step by starting to do something that isn’t necessarily so risky that it’ll give us some education by learning by doing.

Brian:

Sure. Yeah, that’s well said. So Melanie, you’ve jumped out of an airplane—a perfectly good airplane, I might add—over 11,000 times. Now I’ve jumped out of a plane twice.

Melanie:

I love that!

Brian:

That’s two more times than most people in the world have jumped, as you know, and most people I talk to think I’m crazy for doing it even once. I’m fascinated by your love of skydiving, but help us to understand what in the world has possessed you to jump out of an airplane 11,000 times, that’s an amazing, amazing number.

Melanie:

Well, I joke about this, but it’s very true that my relationship with skydiving has gone through lots of different phases. It is one of the longest term relationships in my life. And I say that with great love, in the sense that you start and you fall in love and it’s this passionate love that will make you do anything. And just, oh my god! Then you sort of go into a more mature phase. That love drives you to do lots of things, then you’re like, oh, you get tired. And you’re like huh, this is so…this is sort of the bell curve of professional skydiving, as it were, where you could go crazy—up, up, up, up, up, then you’re doing all this work. I’m traveling around the world. I would trade zero…I would trade nothing—I loved all of those times in my life. Then you get to a point, like I said, you’re getting tired because it’s exhausting, a traveling lifestyle. It’s a physical sport. You’re doing 8, 10, 12 jumps a day, you’re talking with hundreds of people every weekend. That is this beautiful, wonderful intensity and it can be really exhausting as well. So there’s a, I think, a limited time where people can do that at the highest levels. And then you get to—and this is what happened to me—you get to a point where you’re burning out because that’s so intense, it’s that burn bright thing. And so my relationship has got [inaudible] we kind of broke up for a time. I never really broke up with skydiving in the sense that I was always mentoring young jumpers. I do an online group that was born out of the two years of time where I wasn’t actively skydiving, but that was also from a big part of my personal life. I was going through a divorce and I was healing from this burnout and loss of friends. It was a big lull in my career where I needed to take a big, big break. But it was such an important, critical healing time for me as well, where I stepped away from everything that I knew.

I say this a lot, Melanie Curtis, professional skydiver. I very much know who that person is. That person is confident. That person knows what she’s doing. That person can show up in a room in a big, bright way. And only in stepping away from that piece of my identity was I able to come back to skydiving in a healthy and balanced and much more mature way. So now how I engage in skydiving is only how I want to, and in these elevated ways that we’re now doing; with Highlight Pro Skydiving Team and the Women’s Skydiving Network, talking about gender equality, using skydiving as a vehicle for social change, and hopefully inspiring more women and girls to be bold and brave in their own ways. So that is where my inspiration and motivation comes now, but I don’t do eight to 12 jumps a day anymore. That’s not where I’m at in skydiving, but it took a long road, 25 years, to get there.

Brian:

I’m smiling as you’re talking about your relationship with skydiving and thinking about people listening to, or watching this on YouTube, and thinking no way, not even once., But it’s exciting and it’s exhilarating. Anyone who’s ever jumped out of a plane, even once, understands exactly what that experience is like. And it’s very difficult to describe to people, to really help people understand who haven’t done that—the anxiety, the excitement, all the feels. Melanie, for those listening and watching who haven’t had that experience, can you share what it’s like to get in a plane and that ride up…and I can still hear that engine humming as the plane is climbing and climbing and climbing, and then to experience human flight and then land safely back on the ground.

Melanie:

Ah, god, it still shocks me 25 years in, 11,000 plus whatever jumps in, how incredibly fun skydiving is. And I say fun because, man, and it doesn’t even have to be jumping out of an airplane, which is so fascinating. When we do something that really scares us, and we do it and we come out the other side, we’re still there and we have done this thing that we really, truly think we couldn’t do, there is massive, massive power in that. I see this weirdly—and I’ll talk more about literal skydiving, but I think this metaphor is so importantly applicable to other things. I see the same anxiety and the same apprehension and fear in people when they start life coaching with me, they’re making a brave, brave move to be willing to go into a space where they are starting to look into the dark corners of their own minds and hearts. That is wildly courageous, just as much as it is letting go of an aircraft in flight. And that’s the thing that I think is so powerful, is that you can get on the airplane, you can have a commitment to do this, you can be sitting there with your instructor, you can be whatever, riding the airplane up, feeling the hum of the propellers and all of the things that you feel. You can feel the wind as it hits your face as the door opens, you can feel your body freak out when you see how high you are, when you actually get the first look—right, you’re smiling—outside the door, but the moment really isn’t there until you let go. You can’t get back in the aircraft. As a young person—and again, I bring this, a call to entrepreneurship and personal growth at all, is this notion of throwing your hat over the fence. Once you throw your hat over the fence, you have to go over the fence to get it back. So skydiving is a very, very powerful version of that. Where, when you actually leave the aircraft, that’s the moment—the exit moment is wildly exhilarating because there’s no turning back. And so I would invite people to look for those moments or look for opportunities or ways that they can metaphorically throw their hat over the fence so that it forces them into some action. And again, not in a reckless way, like we were talking about earlier, this metaphorical way, what can I do to let go? What is a surrender moment that I need to give into? Is it reaching out to someone for help? Is it posting a video on the internet because I want to start a video blog? Is it calling this person that I want to make amends with? Is it—I don’t know—watching something that you said you weren’t going to watch because it makes you nervous because it might trigger some old stuff. It could be so many things, big and small. It doesn’t have to be giant change-your-life moments. It can be small stuff that then builds into bigger changes. So anyway, I could go on and on about this, but yeah, that’s what I would say.

Brian:

I think you really talked about a couple things. One is the fun piece. So actually having fun, and I don’t think most people are incorporating fun into their lives. The world is a little strange today, for a lot of reasons, I think people are more serious. I think people are down. And we’ll talk a little more about that because I know you’re not like that, but part of it is incorporating fun into our lives. And the other part is the doing something that scares us, which is the stretch stuff. So things that we either want to do or know we need to do, but there’s something standing in the way of doing that. And I think both of those are important and it doesn’t have to be skydiving, obviously, for either one of those. You mentioned exhilaration, what’s the most exhilarating moment you’ve ever had during a jump?

Melanie:

That is a wildly impossible question, but I love it at the same time, because it makes me think of lots of different things. It really depends because there are so many different versions in which you can participate in skydiving. So it could be one of the best rounds of competition, where my team is—and this happened—that one of the best rounds of competition I ever experienced was we tied a team. My team was the silver medal team that year. And the gold medal team was wildly much more skilled because they had—it was the advent of wind tunnel flying—and they lived on a drop zone where they could train in the wind tunnel. So they were very, very, very skilled, which is super cool. It was a part of the change in the evolution of competitive skydiving back then. We had tied them in one of our rounds. It was the best, we were in full flow state. From the moment we exited the aircraft, we were in complete sync and we ended up tying that incredible team on that round, which is wildly cool. So to see that moment on the competitive scoreboard, when we got the same score, and we had no [inaudible] and the judge [said] it was fully clean…that was an incredible moment.

But another moment is seeing a young skydiver who has 30 jumps or 50 jumps, and really doesn’t know much about skydiving yet, but is in that passionate love phase, helping them learn and helping them connect with other people—I love that. Because there is so much power, positive power, that we can wield for good when people are in that phase and helping them feel welcomed and helping them see possibilities for themselves in the sport and in the community. I love that.

And I’ll say one more thing on top, the demo jumps that we do for Highlighter—totally incredible, getting to use our skydiving skills to, again, share skydiving with the public. One of the coolest jumps we ever did for that was in 2020. On August 26th was the hundred year anniversary of the 19th Amendment securing the right to vote for women in the United States. Now the complex history of the 19th Amendment, in the sense that it was supposed to secure the right to vote for all women, but really it secured it for white women. So using skydiving to carry that message, we jumped over New York City. We jumped into the Bronx into Woodlawn Cemetery next to Alva Belmont’s mausoleum, and got to do really big media and share about, not only skydiving of course, but to talk about women and equality and really share that. That’s crazy cool to me and a dream jump. I mean, gosh, my next dream jump is jumping into Central Park in New York. That’s my absolute dream jump.

Brian:

I’ll do it with you, that’d be great. Melanie, you’re obviously an incredibly positive person. Definitely, from what I can tell, a glass is half full, make-lemonade-out-of-lemons kind of person. And yet, as you know and I’m sure even in your life, we all face adversity in our careers and in our personal lives. In some sports that ultimate adversity might be the loss of a championship game. Those are heartbreaking losses, or an injury, especially if it’s a career threatening injury. In business, it might be the loss of a big customer or the loss of a job personally, or a business that fails. In skydiving though, the stakes are a lot higher. What’s it like to play a game where the stakes are so high? How do you continue to step out of a plane in spite of that risk?

Melanie:

That is a great question. There are a lot of things I could say about this. Learning about the environment that you are in does matter. As in, I keep a bubble of safety around myself based on what I learned and what I know such that I can engage in the sport of skydiving in such a way that it does still feel fun, that it does still feel safe, that it does still feel like leadership by example. So I’m not a person…I’m very risk averse, which is kind of comical if you think about it. Ha, ha, ha, professional skydiver, right? [cross talk] Yeah. But in knowing and witnessing accidents, and in witnessing people who push the envelope in the way of safety, in the way of physicality, I’m actually not someone who does that. The most intense stuff that I do now are these demo jumps because you’re landing into unknown locations with weird obstacles. But with the experience that I have, I approach that still with the same intensity around safety. I’m not into the feeling of feeling scared, like I’m mortally in danger. When I jump out of an airplane, I do know that on any skydive, it could be me. Absolutely. It could be me. I could have some weird, totally strange situation happen. It’s rare that that happens, but I know it can happen. So I accept that risk. Similarly, I get in a car and I drive fast on a freeway—I actually drive the speed limit, I’m totally that girl. But I acknowledge and I accept that risk as well. So I think there’s a part of being super intensely respectful about what you know you’re doing. And then really thinking about what is your level of risk aversion. What are you actually comfortable doing? Because, and this is something that I think is important, it’s not that we are not going to feel any fear, because we are doing a thing that absolutely is a mortal danger. Our bodies are programmed to recognize height and to feel that. So I have a lot of experience with that feeling. I have 11,000 plus times, not counting all the other things that we do in our lives, where we face fear, but getting masterful and skilled at that feeling, you can determine with more agility, more accuracy, what are the times to go and what are the times to not go. Because it’s not about, oh, feel the fear do it anyway. That’s the more superficial understanding of the feeling of fear. So that’s, what I love about doing something at a high level. That you get into the nuance and the real depth of understanding. And in my case, it’s the depth of understanding of this particular feeling; which is why and how I now can help people with that, as someone who’s their teammate, whether it’s in a business and relationship, or whether it is in somebody looking to overcome fear, however they might be looking to overcome it. But, yeah, I mean, gosh, there’s a lot to say about that, but does that make sense?

Brian:

Sure, it does. And obviously that’s been built up over time. So skydiving for you is not about adrenaline and it’s not about feeling the fear and doing it anyway. I think anyone doing it for the first time, it is going to have both of those sort of extreme experiences or dynamics that no longer exist for you because you’ve done it 11,000 times. So after we’ve driven a car—I don’t know what the number is, probably isn’t even close to 11,000—but after we’ve driven a car 2,000 times, we’re probably not thinking about the inherent risk of getting into a car and other people driving near us and that sort of thing. But, that said, you have experience navigating through risk, navigating through uncomfortable situations, navigating through straight fear. And I’m guessing there’s some times, and we’ll get into this in a minute, about unexpected things that happen. But what advice do you have for our listeners and viewers around overcoming fear or apprehension about doing something?

Melanie:

The very first thing that I tell people is to—if we’re triggered physiologically and mentally, emotionally in a fear state—the very first thing I advise people to do is to reconnect with their body. So to use your physiology, to bring that trigger down. So reconnecting with your breath and actively intentionally using it to re-center, which again, can sound very cliché, but if we think about it from its impact on our physiology. This is something I do in skydiving all the time. I will feel the tension coming up in my body and I’ll feel my muscles tensing, I’ll feel my shoulders getting tight. I’ll feel—if I’m in a relational scenario, I’ll feel my throat closing, the hindering of my voice. At the feeling of that tension—and this is something people can practice going forward—is making the tension the cue to breathe and to practice. So you can train your body. When you feel the tension, your body will…you can automatically start to breathe it away. So when I take a big breath like that, I can feel the dissolving of the tension from my muscles. That is a very small, but powerful starting point because we can’t…it’s very difficult when we’re elevated, when we’re triggered, when we are flooded in whatever way, whether it’s emotionally or physiologically with this fight or flight response, it’s very difficult to think clearly in those moments. So we need to first try to bring that trigger down. And so this is partly why sometimes in relational settings, people take a break. Because we know that we can’t necessarily have a productive dialogue if our trigger is way up here. If we can bring it down and we become, again, masterful at this feeling, or we practice mindset work, or we do work with professionals, such that we know what is causing our trigger, then we can become more skilled at navigating that feeling and bringing it down more quickly, more automatically. But until we do learn that, it’s great to step back, to get it down to this level, such that we can then go and start to ask ourselves questions about what is it that I’m experiencing and why. Then start to bring more consciousness to it versus reacting in, again, sort of a reckless way without thought, without consciousness. That’s what tends to get us into trouble.

Brian:

That’s great advice. It’s easier said than done sometimes. As you started out, even before you talked about taking a breath and breathing, that was the first thing I thought about. Just breathe. Because when we’re anxious or excited or fearful, we stop breathing. We’re not breathing normally. And it’s interesting to hear you describe the physiology, how taking a breath releases some of that energy and then helps us to move forward.

Melanie:

Can I jump in really quickly, Brian, because there’s something else that I think is useful to share about that, is I’ve heard people say, okay, just re-frame the fear as excitement. For example, me as a public speaker, there’s no question about it, any time before I step onto a stage, I feel the same feeling, the same sort of fear, the same sort of tightening. I know I’m not going to physically die going up there. I have bombed on stage before. I have told jokes to crickets in the room. I know it’s going to be okay, and still my body responds. So I want to bring up this idea of re-framing it from fear and upset, to excitement is one thing. But the thing that I wanted to highlight or touch on is that I think, unconsciously, a lot of us feel like we shouldn’t be feeling this feeling at all. So even feeling the feeling, or feeling the trigger, or feeling the fear, whatever you describe it as, is a failure in itself. If I were more skilled or if I had my stuff together—I’m not swearing on this podcast—if I had it together, I wouldn’t be feeling. There’s this immediate self-judgment that comes on. Like, clearly I’m not capable, or clearly I’m not good enough, or whatever we might start saying about having the feeling at all. So this trick of re-framing it from fear to excitement gives us the permission to have the elevated intensity in our body. It allows it and gives us space to be with it more than if it’s fear and we’re judging it.

Brian:

Do you have mantras or affirmations that are part of that? Is that a way to bring you to center if you move outside that feeling? How do you actually do that?

Melanie:

Yes. Great question. So for example, on the demo jumps, we’re landing in a stadium in front of however many thousand people. That’s a big performative moment and it’s also landing in a stadium that has walls on four sides. You have to drive. It’s highly technical. You have media, you have cameras on you. It’s a really intense moment, and in our case, carrying a message that you really care about and want to represent amazingly in the world. When I get nervous for those jumps, which I totally do, which is totally normal, I bring myself back to something that I know I have high, high confidence in. So what I say to myself before I demo jump is, I can land a parachute. I can land a parachute. That’s it. It sounds very simple. But when I bring my mind back to something I have high, high confidence in, [something] I know, it really brings my anxiety down. So the fact that I can land a parachute, that’s it, that’s it. I know I can land a parachute. That’s all I need to do. I’m not gonna…whatever other things might be trying to sneak in. So in the realm of public speaking, or other lanes of life, and other lanes of performance, we can look for those types of things. What’s the baseline simple thing that you have high confidence in? If you don’t have anything that’s high confidence, then you’re going to have an experience of trying to figure that out. You’re going to have an educational experience of doing something and still feeling quite elevated, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it will hopefully start to inform you as to what can you bring into a situation where you are triggered and elevated. What can you start to coach yourself around to help bring yourself down.

Brian:

I think having those familiar experiences and re-framing it, or maybe simplifying it is a better way to put it, at the end of the day, the stadium is no different than the drop zone in your backyard that you grew up in, right? It’s a place to land. It just so happens that there are, I don’t know, 50,000-70,000 people, and there are four walls. But if you reduce that area where you’re landing, it’s the same as the drop zone in your backyard. And one of the things that I’ve heard recently with public speaking is—and this is true, whether it’s 50 people or 500 people or 5,000 people—if you imagine that you’re speaking to one person, and there are strategies for that, obviously, finding that person in the front row or finding the smiling faces. But if you can reduce it at its essence to speaking to one person, we all have conversations every day with one person, and most of those are perfectly comfortable conversations. And so if we can re-frame that and understanding that there are 50 or 500 or 5,000 people around us, but it’s still speaking and it’s speaking to a person, it’s just that there are more of them.

Melanie:

This sounds funny, but another thing, a couple other universal mantras that really help me. The funny one is, no one cares, in the good way. So meaning any part of me that thinks, and is worried, oh, I need to be XYZ or totally perfect at this speech or whatever, I remind myself that, at large, for the most part, in the good way, no one cares—as in no one’s going to be picking apart my thing. And if I said something weird or I paused funny, or this or that, no one really cares. And on the positive side, like you were saying, I know how to be real, being real, being myself, I’m a believer…again, all these things sound so cliche, but when intentionally put into action, we know when someone is being themselves. We know when someone is being real and that is moving and that’s inspiring. So again, it’s not that we don’t prepare. It’s not that we want to get on a stage in front of 10,000 people and have no preparation. That I would put into the reckless category. I would put that into the, maybe re-think that one category. But the last thing I’ll say about mantras is, and this one absolutely serves me deeply on a business level, personal level, skydiving level, spiritual level, is that I personally believe that the universe has my back. And so even if I do screw up on stage or I don’t do something as excellently as I would like, I believe very much that that’s for me. And so looking at those experiences and extracting what is the positive value from this experience that I had, and it can be, maybe, easier when we feel the positive feelings about something. But this debriefing, this sort of filter, can be really powerful when we look at the things that have challenged us.

Brian:

That’s really a great approach. That’s a great way to look at it, not only as you’re going through it, but also as you’re-evaluating it after the fact. And one thing you said earlier caused me to think about all the stories that we tell ourselves that aren’t true.

Melanie:

Oh my god, so many. We can’t believe everything we think.

Brian:

Exactly. Melanie, one of the great frustrations of life is that it doesn’t always go according to plan. And I know that’s true with skydiving too. What are some of the ways that you’ve had to adapt during a jump and how can our listeners and viewers apply those same strategies to life in general?

Melanie:

Oh gosh. That’s an interesting question. One of the jumps…

Brian:

[Cross talk] is perfectly all [inaudible]…

Melanie:

No, definitely not. Part of the fun in skydiving is that things don’t go according to plan. And this is something I wanted to touch on earlier, but it, I don’t know, our conversation evolved in a different direction. It’s this notion of type one fun versus type two fun. I learned the term type two fun, and it was  like, oh my god, my whole life makes sense. And type one fun is basically when something is easy and fun and you’re having a good time and you feel free. It’s all the things that we think of when we think of play and that type of stuff, which as we noted earlier is, oh my god, seriously lacking for so many of us in life. And I believe deeply in prioritizing play and fun, and that fun and excellence are in no way, mutually exclusive. In fact, I believe fun elevates our excellence and elevates our ability to perform. So that’s one thing.

But type two fun is where something is not fun until it’s over. [Laughter] So I think that’s hilarious because it’s this constant wonder of, why do I continuously torture myself [laughter] around personal development and even, again, writing the books, those projects can be really torturous, doing a world record—that training is rigorous and difficult, doing one of these big demo jumps. It is really hard to plan those things and talk to the FAA and get an aircraft, and where does the content helicopter…there’s so many details. You’d be wildly amazed, I think, at how much goes into some of this stuff behind the scenes. But I put those things into the category of type two fun where it’s that pressing us, that working towards something. And then that feeling that we only get when we’ve worked at something that’s really hard.

Now to answer your question more specifically, is there a time when things went wrong—tons of times, tons of times things have gone wrong. I can see this very much in my life, my life in general, but a jump I’m thinking of is kind of random. I was learning how to fly wingsuits and I didn’t really want to do it, to be honest. I don’t really like that, when things are connected to my body, I don’t like when my limbs are restricted. But a handful of my best friends were at Skydive Elsinore back in the day, doing the first ever wingsuit world record. And they really wanted me to be a part of it. So okay, I’m going to learn, I’m going to do this and I’m not going to be on the record, I’m clearly not good enough to do that. And it’s starting, but I’ll try it. I’ll try wingsuiting. And I did a number of jumps in the wingsuit, and over the course of a handful of days I did about, I want to say that I think it was 16 wingsuit jumps. Now when you’re flying a wingsuit, it’s different muscles that are engaged. Your body is holding a lot more pressure in spots on your muscles than you would if you were just free falling in a jumpsuit and your arms and legs were free. Long story short, on my very last jump that I did that particular week, I was on this bigger jump. I was on a 16 way and I was in a slot where I could screw it up. They put me in a slot where I could screw it up if I didn’t get there and that would still be safe. But on this jump, I turned to break off, which it means leave the group. And I reached back to get my handle to pull out my pilot chute and I go to pull out the pilot shoot, which deploys my main parachute and I couldn’t get it out. Part of that is because I had done so many jumps over such a short period, using muscle groups that I wasn’t used to and in that moment I couldn’t get it out. And I didn’t think of rolling my arms in and using my bicep. I didn’t think about it. I ended up going straight to my reserve on a wingsuit, and it really, really scared me. I was fine. I deployed my reserve, high. I was pulling high. So I wasn’t in danger. But when I landed, I was able to debrief that and go, why did that happen? There’s no reason I shouldn’t have been able to get my main out. So again, there’s lots of more details that go into why that happened and what I learned, but debriefing that and looking at it and going, oh, it was this thing, it was this thing, it was this thing, and then all those links in the chain lead to an incident. So that’s something that we talk about a lot in skydiving, is that when the links in this chain start to build up, that’s when you need to stop. You need to bring it back.

Brian:

What are two or three of the most impactful lessons that you’ve learned about life from skydiving?

Melanie:

Oh gosh, man, so many. I think one of the biggest, bar none, is what I said earlier—this notion that we can do so much more than we ever currently think. And that’s so clear because the world at large primarily says, jumping out of airplanes is crazy, or you could never jump out of a perfectly good airplane. That’s a pretty common theme. You said it yourself—I have two more jumps than most people and you’re right. I’m not saying skydiving is for everyone, but I think it is very important that we question what our fear tells us we can’t do. And I’m not going hashtag lifecoachsuper “you can do anything”. I have to at least question what fear is telling me I can’t do, because it might be a door to a life that you cannot predict in your current level of consciousness. And that, I think, is also really, really important as well.

You asked about my relationship with skydiving and how does one get 11,000 jumps and this and that. Another part of that for me is back in 2006 or 2007, gosh, I don’t even know, I started my life coaching training and I started along this much more intentional road around personal development, personal healing, professional growth as an entrepreneur, in parallel with my skydiving career. So I’m not only a professional athlete; and I’m not trying to diminish that because that’s totally incredible, though—the people that pursue their lives in that way. Why I bring that up is because skydiving, in my experience, in my personal experience and in my subsequent experience with other people, is it’s this beautiful stepping stone to opening our minds in a much bigger way and finding growth that is more unique to us. People will find skydiving and they will be, wow, this is the answer to life’s happiness—it is amazing. And it is amazing. Then inevitably people will get to a point in their skydiving where it’s not making them as happy anymore. It’s still good. It’s still fun, but it’s not really bringing out their light and lightness. And that’s when people really struggle. That’s when people usually end up working with me as a life coach, because as hard as that is—that phase of being, oh my god, I thought skydiving was the answer to me being happy—then they realize it’s not, that can be really scary and really painful. But what’s wonderful about that moment in that pain, is then it drives us to look more deeply. That’s what I think is really, really powerful. And that’s a big reason why I’ve stayed in this sport as long as I have as well.

Brian:

I appreciate you sharing that. A couple of things I know for sure. One, that we’re capable of doing far more things than we give ourselves credit for. And then the second part of that, maybe the corollary to that, is that growth occurs outside of our comfort zone. So you’re right. It doesn’t have to be skydiving or scuba diving or driving cars over the speed limit. There are lots of ways that we can push ourselves to do a little more. Most of us know what those things are that we’re avoiding, but it does take moving outside of our comfort zone to be able to do that. There’s a little bit of risk attached to that, but if it’s approached in the same way that you approach skydiving, then it’s uncomfortable, but it’s not frightening and it’s not adrenaline based. It’s more planned, concerted action in the direction of our goals. Melanie, you are probably the most courageous person I’ve ever met. Some might say the craziest, I mean, I’m not going to lie, but you are amazing! In any case, it’s been great having you on the show. Thanks so much for taking time to join us on Life Excellence today.

Melanie:

Thank you so much, Brian.

Brian:

And to our listeners and viewers, thanks for tuning into Life Excellence. Please support the show by subscribing, telling others about it, posting on social media about today’s show with professional skydiver, Melanie Curtis, and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me at BrianBartes.com. Until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.