Fellows Book Online Version 2020

28 to be a failure, they are waking up to be successful. So, if they make mistakes it’s OK, you must have faith in them, and they have to have faith in you. For me, part of the faith is having faith in people I have never met. People who built the Russian rocket which launched our Soyuz space craft were all workers in towns and cities across Russia. I didn’t meet every one of them, but I had faith they would do a good job and build a successful rocket. So how do you find faith and trust in your team? Are you going to be the team that trusts each other and goes on to victory or are you going to be like Game of Thrones where every time you trust somebody you get killed and therefore no one wins? Another key point is to always keep moving forward. In space, mistakes happen, we always try to minimize our mistakes and sometimes faith happens, and you see that in professional sports to. Sometimes the ball goes off the post of the goal, sometimes you get a bad call, you can’t stop, you can’t rewind time and say “Oh it would have been better if it had happened that way.” It doesn’t, you must keep moving forward, focusing on the win, “OK, this is where I am, how do I move forward to get that win?” Maybe I got a bad call, maybe I missed a free shot, it’s ok, you have to say that’s behind you and move forward. We do this at NASA, on my very first spacewalk I went outside, there was something wrong with my suit, I felt horrible that we had to come back inside after just a few minutes. If it was something, I had known about I could have helped to fix it. There was a valve I had to close to go on a spacewalk, it was down, the valve was closed, the indicator light was out and yet it didn’t fully close to we had to come back in due to an oxygen leak. We said, OK, that’s behind us, we fixed the valve, fixed the problem and went on a successful spacewalk a few days later. They even made a cartoon about this in the United Sates, about how to handle adversity and to keep moving forward. Feedback, this is tough, I bet in professional sports there are people that we call prima donnas, they have such a big ego, they need that ego to perform maximally but sometimes the ego gets in the way of the process of mastering the craft. In our space shuttle cockpit, we needed to know the function of every button, and when flying the shuttle, especially in the simulators during the training, if the commander made a mistake we would have an open discussion, an open culture where we could accept the criticism of our mistake so that we did not make the same mistake again. At NASA we say it is OK to make one mistake, you have one free pass, but after that you can’t make the same mistake again. We learn from our mistakes and we have to put our egos aside to master our craft, because astronauts make mistakes as well, we need to be super professional so that we can win. Managing our emotions, we are all passionate human beings, but in space flight we are sitting on top of a rocket that is about to blast off. We can’t get excited, we are pulling 3G’s as we scream through the atmosphere, we need to be calm and analytical. Yet we also need to use our passion to get that extra boost for winning the game, for winning our mission and we need to know when to be passionate and when to be calm and analytical. This is the secret of success for all true professionals, it’s to manage your emotions, tap into your true passion and not forget you are living your dream. You can see me in all the space suits I get to wear that I am almost smiling, because I’m still that little kid who is living his dream. So,