Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to another episode of the Worst Advice I Ever Got. I'm your host Sean Taylor, along with my producer, jb and today our guest is Kyle Freiberger. Kyle started his career as a pilot where precision, discipline, and calm under pressure were everything. Over time, he took what he learned in the cockpit and built a new career, helping people develop emotional intelligence and leadership skills. He's now the founder of First Class Leaders, a company dedicated to training people on how to understand themselves and influence others more effectively. But the path from flying planes to coaching leaders wasn't a direct flight. It had at least one stop, if not more. It was shaped by a piece of advice that seemed practical at the time, but ended up holding him back in ways he didn't see until much later. Hey, Kyle, I really appreciate you joining us today.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm glad to be here. This is going to be a fun episode.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Yeah, well, speaking of fun, it's always fun to jump right into the painful part. So tell us, what's the worst advice you ever got?
[00:01:02] Speaker B: The worst advice I've ever gotten was that there's no room for emotions in the cockpit. Yeah. Okay. Up on the pilot episode.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: No, no. Pilot. Oh, wow.
[00:01:13] Speaker C: Season three pilot episode.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Three pilot episode. Pilot, pilot episode. That's funny.
No room for emotions in the cockpit.
Expand on that for our listeners. What do you mean?
[00:01:26] Speaker B: You know, when it comes to emotions in the cockpit, people, a lot of people misunderstand the high performing, high team, you know, high stress environment of the cockpit and that, you know, emotions we typically think are clouding our judgment or clouding our decision making. And, you know, for me, that came from my childhood.
I grew up in a mechanic shop and my dad was always just kind of emotionless for the most part. Although he had lots of emotions, they just weren't the good kind.
And it was always just figure it out, fix it.
And for me, it just became this kind of continual effort of trying to please my dad and make sure that he wasn't getting those negative emotions. And, you know, I thought that all these negative emotions that he had were clouding a lot of the fun and taking out a lot of the fun and the decision making.
He was a micromanager. He was, you know, abusive physically and verbally.
And, you know, it toughened me up to a point because I think that was his intention to make me tough. And this idea that if you don't have emotions, then you're going to be tougher because you're going to do the things. And when people say don't have emotions. Typically, I think they're thinking, don't have those.
Those sappy emotions like, oh, I can't do this or I'm sad or I'm weak or I'm this or I'm that.
Because then if you don't have those emotions, what you're going to do is the opposite, is you're going to do things right and you're going to have accountability and discipline and. And that's what you need to be a pilot. But to be even better than. Or get closer to perfect, we need to recognize and understand how emotions are showing up in the cockpit. And so that's why that advice was kind of backwards.
[00:03:15] Speaker A: So. So, Kyle, it's lot, lot of emotion there. A lot to un.
So it started with your dad, and it sounded like it was a very difficult relationship for you growing up. When he was telling you about suppressing these emotions, were you taking the advice and. And actually, was it working for you for a while?
[00:03:36] Speaker B: Yeah. So. So I didn't really have this realization about emotions till I was about 27. So I went. And it's a very specific moment when I had the realization. But leading up to that, yeah, up until 27, I actually really excelled at everything that I did because I tried to suppress my emotions.
Now, don't take that. Be careful on taking that advice. I'm not saying.
[00:03:57] Speaker C: So it worked for a little while.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Right? Right. It worked in the sense of the technical aspects of my career. You know, I was becoming a pilot. I wanted to get away from home. Right. I really wanted to get away from my. My father. Suppressing my emotions towards my father allowed me just to, like, dial in on being a pilot. And I dialed in and I graduated with all the accolades and all the awards.
The only reason I'm saying any of this, because I was 27 years old and I was in a relationship with a girl who was a doctor. And we weren't happy, and we're two good people. I knew that she was a good person, I was a good person. And eventually I just said to myself, so there's gotta be something missing. And it was really the emotional side of everything when I realized that emotions are really important to learn to understand and accept as opposed to try and suppress.
Um, you actually start to realize that everything, every decision, everything you actually desire stems around your emotions. When you're flying an airplane, what do you think we base our decisions on? Safety.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: Yeah. Safer.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Safety. Safety. Safety. Everybody told me my whole life, make decisions in the interest of safety.
I don't think that's true. I think safety is the byproduct of the actual goal that we need to focus on. The actual goal we need to focus on is our own personal survival. Right. We want it, we focus on safety so that I don't die. But the emotion that is associated with that is fear of dying. And that's a much stronger motivated than just saying safety. So our decisions that we make at any given time is actually based upon our preservation and our own survival.
So as a pilot, if I have a fear of something, or if I have a stressor or if I have something that's deep seated, some sort of emotion, maybe a trauma from childhood, so then we start to make our own decisions based upon our own survival.
[00:05:50] Speaker C: So the emotional part in the cockpit, when you have that, like you're saying, you know, thinking about safety and thinking about things is, is the bad advice, that emotions don't belong in the cockpit because you can't do your job if you're emotional.
[00:06:02] Speaker B: Is that the idea that I. I guess that's the presumed idea. And I can, it's really easy to kind of spoil that idea real quickly and get everybody to close their eyes for two seconds. And as you close your eyes, just think about not having any emotions. Try not to have any emotions right now and you'll just, you'll feel a little tense, you'll feel your jaw client, you'll feel it. And that's stress. Like even when you try not to have emotions, you're having emotions. There's no such thing as not having emotions. They're chemical responses in our brain that literally are there to help us in several different ways, mostly with survival. So there's no such thing as ever not having an emotion in the cockpit.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: So the whole idea of suppressing emotions in general just is physically impossible or chemically impossible is what you're saying.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Learning about that in my life, my personal life and in my professional life, it's changed everything. It's helped me understand how I make decisions.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: How do emotions actually play a role? And what do you potentially do to embrace emotions for the good, not necessarily for the bad?
[00:07:06] Speaker B: Well, emotions are neutral. It's the meaning we give to the emotion that makes it good or bad. So when you seek to understand like anything else, everything's confusing until you learn to understand it. So emotions are really confusing until you learn to understand them. And knowledge is power. So the more you learn to understand emotions, the more you understand how to recognize them. And then that allows you to not lean into the emotional biases. As much and really focus on the actual facts that you have around you.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: And you're mentioning this from the standpoint of being a pilot or in the cockpit, but everything you've been talking about doesn't relate to me to being just singled out as a pilot problem. Right. This seems to be more universal, does it not?
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, I literally quit the airlines and start my own business to fill this gap.
You know, my company's first class leaders, we use behavioral assessment tools and we help people just deepen their understanding of, without using the word emotions. We help them understand and deepen their emotional intelligence. Again, as you realize that, you know, frustration is an emotion. Tired is emotion. Feeling hungry is. It is emotion. We say feeling hungry and a lot of people won't understand that hunger is an emotion. They'll think it's just a thing I need to eat sleepy. Like all of those things are emotions. So it's really about seeking to understand those. But it's a human problem. It's not a pilot problem.
I'm just in the aviation industry and it's really near and dear to me.
Nobody taught me or helped me with emotional intelligence or understanding emotions.
And as I worked through it myself, it was a difficult journey and I just want other people to have support that I didn't have.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: Let's dig into this emotional intelligence. How do I use understanding my emotions to better my life?
[00:08:59] Speaker B: Well, that's the, that's the key question. And it's not a simple answer. It's learning.
As you learn to understand your emotions, it's like anything starts to become more clear of what's happening.
So the, the simplest answer that I can give you without, you know, you know, most people have to work through this to truly develop this belief system that this is how it works. But the way that I found it works is I'll try to make this super simple. If I'm in a stressful situation in the cockpit, right, A light starts flashing as red and it's loud and starts dinging my emotional response. I can't, I can't control that. That emotional response is really important. It's called stress. And, and I'm not going to be able to control that. Everybody's going to respond. If you don't, we're in big trouble. Because that emotional response, it's. And most people think stress is bad, but when you learn about stress, it's just how you frame it. So stress could be framed as excitement. It's the same emotion that you feel.
So when a, when a When a bells and whistles go off, if I think stress is bad, well, that's not good because stress is actually going to increase my, my heart rate. It's going to make me way more focused. I'm going to be on the edge of my seat, which is going to make super alert. Those are all great things to be doing and having. So that emotional response is really important when, you know, things are, things are happening and it's a high, high pressure situation.
[00:10:24] Speaker C: Did you quit because this was like frowned upon, this thought.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean there's, there's some other reasons as well, but I was threatened with lawyers a couple of times because of me. Talking about mental health and it's, it's unfortunate.
[00:10:41] Speaker C: When you, when you say talking about mental health, what do you mean? Just everything you've been saying?
[00:10:45] Speaker B: Well, I mean, you know, it's got such a bad rap to it. I'm very physically active and I've been always physically, always taking myself care of myself physically. And when I started learning about this emotional intelligence side, you know, 27, I'm 37 now, I realized what it is, is the practice of the brain. It's the, the, the physical fitness of your brain.
So that's all mental health is in a nutshell. And we just take it as a very negative thing.
So I, I proactively started going to therapy like three years ago. I love it. I've. My question was to myself was, how do I figure out the things that I don't know? Because as you learn things and you're taught this as a pilot, you're taught this as a human. As you learn things, you grow. And it's like, well, you have to figure out what you need to learn in order to grow. So I started going to therapy because I'm like, well, maybe they'll help me figure out what I don't know. That's exactly what's happened. So if anything, I'm a way better pilot now.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: What's the link between psychological safety and I guess, flight safety?
[00:11:47] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. Psychological safety is a term that I'm starting to hear more of, which is great. Psychological safety is the feeling that you can say anything without feeling like you're going to feel shame or embarrassment. The number one human emotion that we try to avoid is shame. And if you can learn about shame and understand that we all, we do a lot of things in our life to try and avoid that and, and they really, really, it really disables us.
If you can lean into that and understand shame. You start to realize that there's a lot of times you don't speak up. So then you don't learn something because you didn't say something. It's like you don't want to go to a therapist, right? Probably shame or embarrassment.
But I can promise you you'll learn a ton.
It will make your life way better.
So it's that shame and embarrassment that can hold us back.
And in aviation, obviously that's not good. Right? If I don't speak up and ask a question, then how am I going to learn and grow? So psychological safety is everything. And then the byproduct is that physical.
[00:12:45] Speaker C: Safety, this just seems so obvious like when you're saying it out loud, like why is this not something that is just taught everywhere? In.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: For pilots, it's so hard to measure where, you know, I'm, I'm really trying to push.
I've had dozens and dozens of airlines agree with me. I've had hundreds, thousands of pilots agree with me.
We're working to get this into training curriculums in airlines and we just hit like we had a pretty big breakthrough a few weeks ago after a year and a half.
But every company wants it. They just don't know like how to measure it. And when you can't measure something, it's very difficult to justify it. And I've been doing some work to figure out how to help them measure it and stuff, but just not measurable. I can't, I can't even put it up on a slide and say here's all the concepts I can, I can verbalize. And we can, we can talk about this stuff. But to practice this stuff, it needs to be experienced, needs to be facilitated and that's how we run our training. I actually don't talk about any of this like I don't talk like this on my training. It's, it's very question oriented.
It's very thought provocative. We use the behavioral assessment tool to bring more clarity and understanding to your own uniqueness of your attributes and your, your emot.
So it's really difficult and I understand why it's not being trained, but you know, I'm trying to drive, drive the new narrative and educate is a big one as well. People just don't know it exists.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: I want to go back to something here, Kyle. A word that jumped out to me when you were talking earlier was the word control. What do you mean by that? And is there some sort of distinction we should be making with emotions versus control by emotions?
[00:14:28] Speaker B: So for me, the understanding of emotional control, it's not a thing. I think of it as emotional influence. And it's, it's easy to prove. So you can't control your emotions, but you can influence them.
So you know these, the simplest way is go touch a hot stove and then don't have a stress response. It's not going to happen.
Right? So you can't, you can't control your emotions, but you can influence them. And what I mean by influence them, you can meditate, mindfulness, breathing exercises, but, but also reframing your belief systems around them. And so as you dig into this idea of learning about your emotions, you'll start to realize like most emotions are, it's the label and the meaning we're giving to them. So like I said, I could say that I'm anxious or I can say that I'm excited. You know, there's two sides to every emotion, but it's the same response in our body.
So it's really about reframing. And that's how you can kind of cake, like take control in a way, is you can, you can only control how we perceive things. There's a famous quote from Viktor Frankl. He wrote a book, Man's Search for Meaning. He was a psychiatrist that survived Auschwitz, the concentration camps. And he says the man can be robbed of everything but one thing, his ability to choose how he perceives any given situation.
And if you think about your emotions, if you have a negative emotion that is in your life that you are considering negative, find the opposite, right? Oh, I'm always stressed. Well, maybe I'm always excited, right? Find the opposite and lean into it and then find reasons to believe it.
[00:16:02] Speaker C: And back to the cockpit. That makes you a better pilot, right?
[00:16:05] Speaker B: Of course, hands down, we have a.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: Lot of leaders that listen to this podcast. Kyle, Aspiring leaders.
How do emotions play a part in leadership or effective leadership or degrading leadership?
[00:16:22] Speaker B: This is everything. Because the way we teach leadership is it's a way of being. It's not a title or a rank. I mean, the only person that can tell you if you're a leader is the person following you. The problem with I'll talk specifically about aviation, it's what I know best, is that we associate the captain with being the leader.
And the problem with that is that when you have somebody who has poor leadership skills being promoted to captain, because captain is a title that can be given to you, they can be really great captains, but poor leaders, and that's the problem that we have in aviation and the reason is, is because if you don't have emotional intelligence, if you don't have the leadership skills, it amplifies it. So you can, you can be a captain and just be a. It'll amplify that you're a bad leader. Or if you're a good leader and you become a captain, amplifies your good leadership skills.
The captain has the authority. We look at, we call them like the authority or the management, but the authority is for like the final decision making. But it's how do you make the decisions? Is the leadership. So authority and stuff like that, that's all the technical side. Leadership is the human side. Let me give you an analogy.
I often teach the lighthouse versus the tugboat, and this is another good one with control versus influence.
I really stress to everybody, just challenge the idea of control and influence. Try to shift it from control to influence, and your whole life will get quite a bit better. Start with control. Control is like the tugboat in the harbor, right? It's trying to push and pull one ship. It's going to get dented and bruised and it's going to have to have a lot of main. Its cost. And it's gonna be very stressful on the tugboat to try and get that ship to where it wants to go versus influence. Leadership is like a lighthouse. So a lighthouse just stands tall. It worries about itself. It shines a bright light and it says, hey, this is a. This is a safe way. If you want to follow my light, it's a safe passage into the harbor. And so now number one is it has no stress. If a ship doesn't want to follow its light, it doesn't bother the lighthouse. If it does want to follow its light, it doesn't bother the lighthouse. It's not got an. It's not got its happ us attached to whether the ships come into the harbor or not. But not only can it affect more than one ship, it can affect thousands and hundreds of thousands of ships. And the lighthouse might never even know how many ships it can affect. But all it needs to do is stand tall, weather the storms, and make sure it's taking care of itself. And that's that influential style of leadership. You hear the phrase all the time, practice what you preach. But I'm like, really curious if people think about that and how it shows up in their life. The more you practice what you preach, the more that it influences people around you, the more people obviously or will start to ask kind of that question, like, what are you doing? Why are you so happy. Why are you this? Why are you that? And then now you're influencing people.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: If. If you could train every pilot on one emotional skill, what would it be?
[00:19:13] Speaker B: Oh, well, I mean, emotional skill is emotional intelligence, but the emotional skill that I would. I would train everybody on is recognizing the emote, the actual emotion, the root emotion. So if we say I'm frustrated, oftentimes it's, I'm not feeling heard. To just learn the different emotions, our emotional vocabulary is horrible. So if I can say to you, If I can say the emotion to you, you will res. You'll resonate with that. Because we've all felt these different emotions before.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: If someone's listening out there, they're in a parenting role or they're in a leadership role. What's the first step they can take to becoming more emotionally intelligent?
[00:19:54] Speaker B: Understand that we all have them and that if we can, when. When people are emotional, typically we are very poor at expressing what the emotion is.
And so we'll do things like deflect and blame. Hey, you are mean. You know, you are being this. You need to do that.
You need to say these things so that I feel better. You need to apologize that I feel okay. Again, those are all deflection. And the reason it happens is because we don't understand that people don't dictate our emotions. You can say anything to me. I choose my response. You can call me, just like I said with the bald and ugly. You can call me bald and ugly or bald and beautiful. It doesn't bother me either way because I've recognized my emotional response to that. So the number one thing we need to do is to help people understand that it's. It's okay that we have emotions, and we have to, number one, acknowledge that. We have to figure out what the emotions are, and we have to acknowledge that we have them. And then if I said to you, I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling frustrated, I'm feeling sad. You guys all know what those are. You guys have all felt them. So that's where we can connect and we can agree that, okay, well, it sucks to feel angry. It sucks to feel stressed. Sucks to feel those things. And if we focus on that, a lot of conflict will be resolved. Because what we don't focus instead of what we typically focus on is, you made me this way. You did this, and that's pissing me off.
But if we focus on the emotion, we acknowledge the emotion, then we can now say we can both feel heard, and now we can move to the next step of, you know, understanding our differences, it's okay to disagree. It's just not okay to not try and understand the other person.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: If you had known this at a younger age, like you said, you mentioned to me that you. To us earlier on this. That was about 27 before you figured out this wasn't working.
How would your life have been different if you kind of knew this in your teens? Like, what did you struggle through or go through that you could have avoided knowing these things?
[00:21:58] Speaker B: That's a great question.
First thing that comes to mind is I would have been able to help my dad quicker.
So my favorite is my favorite phrase. I. I swear by this phrase, the people that are the most difficult in our lives are the ones that need us to be the best leaders. So most of. Most of the time, we'll look at people who are difficult and be like, they need to change. That might be true, but what they really, really need in order to change is for you to really be a good leader. And so when I was young, I blamed my dad.
Knowing this, and this is what happened in my later life is I realized, okay, what if my dad's just misunderstood? What if my dad just didn't have emotional intelligence training? What if my dad. Nobody ever taught him any of this stuff? I guess reasonable to think since they didn't teach me any of it, they probably didn't know any of it either. And so I slipped the script and I started. Stopped blaming my dad, and I started opening up the space for my dad. And now him and I talk all the time, and he can vent to me, but I also know how to set boundaries, and I know how to kind of give him that space, but also not let it affect me. And, you know, there's. There's so many aspects to this. I just would have been able to do that sooner with more people.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it definitely started out as a pilot problem that led to this way of thinking, but it's definitely of universal relevance. And you are a guest of universal relevance to our listeners today, Kyle. So I'm really grateful for your time with us today. Thank you so much for joining us.
[00:23:20] Speaker B: I appreciate you guys. You ask excellent questions, and that's always prompts for good discussion. So I really appreciate that.
[00:23:28] Speaker A: Jb. What. What struck me about Kyle's story is just how impossible that advice really was. Who turns off their emotions? You can't do that.
They're there in every decision you make.
[00:23:40] Speaker C: Right. You know, and I love the way he kind of talked about it, you know, the hot stove example, you don't think about whether move your hand, you just do it because of the fear and the pain. And that's emotion driving action. Even though it feels like, oh, it's.
[00:23:52] Speaker B: Hot, I take it away.
[00:23:53] Speaker C: But that emotional part and understanding that and bringing that in other situations is so important.
[00:23:58] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And in the moment where he asked the audience to close their eyes and feel no emotion, you start laughing under your breath. You can't do it.
Even trying not to feel something is an emotional reaction itself. Right?
[00:24:12] Speaker C: Yeah. Which makes the advice to be emotionless not just bad, but also sort of dangerous. Like, if you spend your life suppressing everything, you're not actually getting stronger, you're just disconnecting. And then eventually, when it all bubbles up, it's going to catch up to you.
[00:24:24] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. That's the takeaway. Emotions aren't the enemy.
They're the operating system. You can't shut them off, but you can learn to understand them. And once you do that, you can make better choices in every area of your life.
[00:24:36] Speaker C: Yeah. You know, he showed us that being human is being emotional, and the work is learning how to use it.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: Yeah. Big thanks to Kyle for sharing his story, and big thanks to you for listening and tuning in.
And as always, we'll look forward to seeing you next Friday with another great guest and another great story on the worst advice I ever got.
