The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:16:11 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:16:11] S0: And I mean, the the other one is your... The environment you grew up in. Like, people say the island when you were growing up was a tough place to grow up. How much of that is true? Like how much of that... And then how much of it is still instilled in you? Like I very much agree with your point. Like I have that view where if someone doubts me, it just lights a fire in my belly where I will go, great, I'm gonna prove you wrong. But I have realized that leg can also be my massive Achilles heel. Like my wife always says, she's like, dude, you need to calm down. If you do this, you will just blow up. But just reflect on the island you grew up in, like how much of that shaped your approach to life?
00:16:52 · Alan Joyce
[00:16:52] S1: Ireland was very different back then growing up in the mainly the eighties, seventies and eighties, but mainly the eighties. It was, we were very working class suburb. Ireland had a lot of economic problems. There was high unemployment. We were lucky, my father always had a job, and my mother had worked as a cleaner in a sports facility. So we were lucky. We always had an income coming in, there was high levels of unemployment, and it wasn't guaranteed that you were going to get a job. It was also very conservative. It was dominated by the Catholic church. You know, homosexuality was illegal until 1994, and you really couldn't come out. I had one of my neighbors who came out to his parents, and he was kicked out at 16 from his home. And I always thought that one of the things I talk about in the book is coming out to my parents and the relief when my father hugged me when I was in my late teens on that, because, you know, you were scared the same thing would happen, and you wouldn't see your brothers again. That would have been a sliding door moment for me because it would have changed my life completely. So you were living in this very poor, economically challenged country and very conservative at the same time. And then when you went to university, what was great about Ireland, which changed my life, is that the university fees for per families with low income were paid for by the government. So even though they were in economic trouble, that allowed me to get through university. I think if we had to pay the fees, we couldn't afford it, I couldn't have afford to do it. So I got through university. And then at the very end of university, I was one of the few people out of my degree that ended up getting a job in Ireland. Everybody else left. So there was part of, you know, if you needed to go, you went, and you... There was none of this located. One of the things is sometimes you get frustrated off in Australia is people love their cities, whether it's Sydney or Melbourne, and don't live. In Ireland, was part of the culture. You know, for career opportunities, you went, and you went to the other side of the world if you had to.
00:19:03 · Alan Joyce, Vidit Agarwal
So I think, you know, that that tough environment, that conservative environment changed my life in some ways, because it encouraged me to leave the country, to come to Australia because I was gay, and I didn't feel that Ireland was accepting at the time. Then in the next twenty years, God, did things change. Ireland became one of the most accepting countries in the world. [00:19:26] S0: I was going to ask, if you hadn't left Ireland, do you think your life would have been different today?
00:19:26 · Vidit Agarwal, Alan Joyce
[00:19:26] S0: I was going to ask, if you hadn't left Ireland, do you think your life would have been different today? [00:19:32] S1: I think it would have been. I think you look back in the book, I talk about the sliding door moments where the opportunities are there, and then sometimes you grab them. And sometimes the opportunities are not career, because the job, the job in Australia, working for Ansett, was probably a step backwards from where I was in Ireland. But it was for the the personal development, the opportunity to be who I am, to come down to Australia and have an open life. And that's when I met my partner and now my husband, Shane. So that was for that reason. And then I look at the career and say, any time there was an opportunity, I always grabbed it because I felt you take those risks and went with it. And maybe it would have been very different because the choice I had back in Ireland at the time was not to come to Australia, but to work for Ryanair, for Michael O'Leary, because I was offered a job working for him. Who knows where that would have went to. Ryanair turns out to be one of the most successful airlines in the world, has had huge growth opportunities, but it would have been very different from the career I got in Australia.
00:20:39 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:20:39] S0: Yeah, yeah, hindsight's a easy thing to do, right? One of the things that really fascinated me in my research Alan is people said you're very good at compartmentalising. Extremely good apparently. You can deal with a crisis and you would put your phone away and you would sleep well. I can tell you I'm decent at compartmentalizing but if something's in my mind, I will chew on it. I can't put it away. I've got to talk to someone about it or I've got to just find a way to vent. Where does that come from? Like how early in your life did you realize that you have this ability to compartmentalize? And two, what does that actually process look like? How do you compartmentalize?
00:21:18 · Alan Joyce
[00:21:18] S1: So, so when I was one of the great things, Aer Lingus was an amazing company to work for, the Irish National Airline, when I started working there. And one of the things that... They did a couple of things that were spectacular for your career, but one of the things they did was start doing mindfulness training before it was a very trendy thing. This would have been in the early nineteen nineties when I was a young manager. And that mindfulness training just helped me to relax, to focus on what's in front of you. And the process is very simple. It says that when something else comes in, and it's not part of what you need to be focused of the time, you just dismiss it like you would for meditation or for any month month from this training, and then focus back on it. And when you do it enough times, you get there. It can cause frustrations, you know, because with my partner, sometimes he would read headlines during the grounding, during the engine failure, and I come back home. And all I'd want to do is just switch everything off and relax and discount all of that. And he would say, can we chat about what I just saw on TV? And I'd say, no, I'm here to relax. I'm here to switch off. And I could do that very well. I still could do that today. It's one of the number one things I say to your manager is if you can practice it and get it down, it will save your mental health in future life. Because, you know, with everything, the ups and downs of my career over those those thirty odd years in aviation, I think it's the thing that kept me sane. It's the thing that made sure my mental health was actually really good, and I've never suffered from mental health problems because I'm able to detach from it and focus on what I believe is important at the time. And in a crisis, you need to do that because we go through in the book, I have a whole chapter on the QF 32 when the engine blew up. And, you know, that was... We had a lot happening at the time. We had a lot of things that we needed to do. But when you're managing a crisis, you really need to be focused on what's happening in the room and discount everything else that's going on. The other thing for your mental health, I think, you know, we worked out at one stage was that 10,000 Qantas passengers are in the air when you go to bed at night.