The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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.
00:23:33 · Alan Joyce, Vidit Agarwal
And when you wake up in the morning, you have to look at the phone. You can't detach from that, and some CEOs, I talked about some of my friends that were airline CEOs, that couldn't get over that, affected their sleep, worried them, it impacted on their mental health, and eventually they had to leave the role. If you can't get that out of your mind and the risks involved in that and manage it effectively, there's no way you could do the job because it would be overwhelming. And looking off, I was able to manage that, and I know a lot of CEOs that can manage it very effectively. [00:24:08] S0: It's so interesting because I like to think you and I are human and we have days where you just go, why would someone say that? Or you'd wake up and read a news article or you do an interview and someone like me would ask you a silly question and you'd go, why'd you ask me that? How do you deal with those moments? Again, is it meditation and mindfulness? Because I would like to think you have days where you are frustrated because someone said something you don't agree with.
00:24:08 · Vidit Agarwal, Alan Joyce
[00:24:08] S0: It's so interesting because I like to think you and I are human and we have days where you just go, why would someone say that? Or you'd wake up and read a news article or you do an interview and someone like me would ask you a silly question and you'd go, why'd you ask me that? How do you deal with those moments? Again, is it meditation and mindfulness? Because I would like to think you have days where you are frustrated because someone said something you don't agree with. [00:24:32] S1: You will always get those occasions when you do, but I think you have to also recognise that you need to keep focused on what you're doing. You need to make sure that you're aware of what your agenda is and what you're trying to achieve. And, you know, if you believed every headline that was written about me or you or anybody else, you would not be keep reading the truth, because there's lots of stuff that is incorrect. There's a lot of stuff that's correct. But you just have to discount that and have to say, yeah, that's just the nature of the world that we live in. I know a lot of people pay attention to what's said to them on social media. I think that's probably the worst thing you could do because that is an unfiltered, just view of people exposing anything that they want to. And I don't think that's healthy for people to look at that. So I've always been in that position. Yeah, you know, it's important to make sure you understand what's been said out there, but at the same time, you can't let it drive you and you can't make it live your life.
00:24:32 · Alan Joyce, Vidit Agarwal
[00:24:32] S1: You will always get those occasions when you do, but I think you have to also recognise that you need to keep focused on what you're doing. You need to make sure that you're aware of what your agenda is and what you're trying to achieve. And, you know, if you believed every headline that was written about me or you or anybody else, you would not be keep reading the truth, because there's lots of stuff that is incorrect. There's a lot of stuff that's correct. But you just have to discount that and have to say, yeah, that's just the nature of the world that we live in. I know a lot of people pay attention to what's said to them on social media. I think that's probably the worst thing you could do because that is an unfiltered, just view of people exposing anything that they want to. And I don't think that's healthy for people to look at that. So I've always been in that position. Yeah, you know, it's important to make sure you understand what's been said out there, but at the same time, you can't let it drive you and you can't make it live your life. [00:25:31] S0: It's incredible. Maybe that can be your next book because I can tell you like people always ask me what have I learned from doing the podcast for nearly seven years. I go the key thing I've learned irrespective of whether someone's a prime minister, CEO, athlete, investor, what have you, is we as humans want approval. We as humans want relevance and approval and connection. That is a basic human need. Do you agree with that?