Last week we talked about a tool for your tool belt — how to actually learn as an air traffic controller, and what learning even means in this profession. 

This week's tool is one you might not expect.

Listening.

I know what some of you are thinking. Tom, I think you flipped your lid. 

Hear me out. 

Listening is one of the most important — and most underrated — tools in your entire ATC tool belt.

I want to open with a quote from Stephen Covey, from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: "Seek first to understand, then to be understood."

Most people read that as a lesson about relationships. 

I think it's also one of the best lessons — especially early in your ATC career — for becoming an air traffic controller. Because before you can communicate effectively, you have to become an exceptional listener. 

At the Academy especially, this matters enormously, and it doesn't matter which option you're in.

This tool builds on last week's. 

They all will — each tool we cover adds to the one before it.

Here's what I want you to understand right out of the gate: listening is not a passive exercise. 

It's not something you sit back and let happen. 

That's how most people "listen" — and it's exactly why most people are bad at it.

Listening is something you decide to do. 

Something you actively do. 

And especially early in your career, when everything is new and you're learning all of it at once, that's when listening matters most.

And I don't just mean listening in the classroom to your instructors — though that matters too. 

I mean actually listening to the frequency. 

Listening to what the person on the other end is telling you, so that you can then tell them what they need to hear back.

As air traffic controllers, we should be spending far more of our time listening than we spend transmitting instructions.

Listening is how we understand what this part of the picture is going to be — how we understand this one pixel of the overall picture we're building. 

It's how we detect problems. 

At the Academy, it can be as simple as the pseudo-pilot saying something wrong. If you don't catch it, the error is on you. Just like in the real world — the pilot can say something wrong, and if you as the controller don't catch it, the fault is yours.

You have to verify instructions. 

You give an instruction, the pilot reads it back — that read back is your opportunity to listen and make sure they actually heard what you said. I can't tell you how many times I've told a pilot "turn left" and gotten "right" read back. Or said "right" and gotten "left." 

It happens. It will happen to you.

Listening also lets you anticipate conflicts. 

Say you just climbed someone to fifteen thousand, and right after that, someone else checks on at fifteen thousand. It's rarely that simple in real life, but that's a clue — if you're listening. Oh, I've got two guys at fifteen thousand. Are they anywhere near each other? If they are, you might just have a chance to solve the conflict before it becomes an error.

And listening keeps you ahead of the operation. 

One thing that will slow you down faster than almost anything — and I use "slow" and "faster" on purpose — is not hearing when aircraft check on. Because if you don't respond, guess what happens? They check on again. And if you're already busy, that's the last thing you need.

As you get better as a controller, you'll start anticipating who's going to call you next. That can happen even at the Academy. But even when you've anticipated the call, you still have to listen to what the pilot actually says. 

Don't assume you already know. Listen.

I'll tell you from experience, both as an instructor in Oklahoma City and in the real world: a controller who doesn't listen well is almost always behind the traffic they're working. Doesn't matter if it's a tower, a TRACON, or a center. 

If you're not listening, you're not dialed in. 

If you're not dialed in, you're behind. 

It's that simple.

Level One — pre-Academy. 

Start deciding right now how you can listen better. A lot of students tell me they listen to live ATC to get a feel for the job, and that's fine — just understand the phraseology you hear from CPCs on live ATC isn't necessarily what you'll need to pass the Academy or your CTI program. 

These are working controllers, and working controllers don't always use 100% by-the-book phraseology. I know we're supposed to. We don't always. Sometimes plain English gets the point across faster.

But it still helps. 

And something else that helps just as much: become a better listener with the people around you, in whatever job you're working right now. 

Build that muscle in regular life before you ever get to the Academy. 

It will pay off immensely, both there and after.

Level Two — the Academy. 

Keep listening to live ATC, but change how you do it. 

Listen while you're doing something else — reading an SOP, working through a letter of agreement — and let the listening happen in the background. Not entirely in the background, though. 

You want to develop the ability to focus on one thing while part of your brain is still monitoring the frequency.

I'm a firm believer that true multitasking doesn't exist — not for us, not even for the fastest supercomputers. They just do one thing so quickly it looks like several things at once. 

Same with controllers. 

It looks like multitasking. 

It isn't, not really. 

It's just speed.

Here's where this shows up at the in-route Academy: you sit down at the sector, get your briefing, and start opening up your boxes and setting up your EDST display. While you're doing that, the R-side is talking to airplanes, gives one of them a crossing restriction — and the pilot reads it back wrong. It's scripted that way on purpose.

Two things can happen. 

If you're listening while you handle the relatively unimportant task of setting up your monitor, you catch it and tell the R-side, "Hey, that guy read back ten thousand instead of eleven thousand." Job done — go back to what you were doing.

Or, you were heads-down on your EDST setup and missed it entirely. The R-side will say something like "verify assigned altitude" or "say again." If you ever hear your R-side say anything like that, stop what you're doing immediately — there was a readback error, and it's your job to make sure the R-side knows it got missed.

If that error isn't caught and the aircraft descends to the wrong altitude, now you have to coordinate with approach control for a non-LOA altitude. Miss that, and it's a coordination error. If there's traffic, it could turn into a separation error — worth many, many more points than a late monitor setup.

Focus on what matters. 

This shows up at TRACON and tower too — missed readbacks, bad readbacks, some scripted, some not. 

Catching them is your job, and listening is the only way to do it. 

The task isn't complete until the pilot reads it back correctly. 

Only then do you move to the next one.

Level Three — your first facility. 

Exactly the same principle, just with real consequences. 

Your task isn't complete until it's read back — or, if you're coordinating with another controller, until they give their initials and you give yours. After that, it's on them if they heard it wrong. That's why, at the Academy, coordination readbacks get scripted wrong so often. The FAA wants you listening because you need to be listening. That's why this is such an early tool in the series.

At your first facility you're also learning to listen to live traffic for the first time — every pilot with a different voice, a different accent, some radios harder to pick up than others. 

Listening becomes huge.

Level Four — CPC, training others. 

Listening never goes away. Its importance never diminishes, not even a little. One nice side effect: if you become a genuinely great listener at work, you're going to become a better listener away from work too — and I guarantee that makes your whole life better.

One: Listen for understanding. 

Don't just hear something — understand it. If you don't understand what someone's asking you to do, ask. This comes up a lot at the en route Academy with identifiers and locations — the remote controller gives you a fix you don't recognize, and you can ask them what it is. But you only get that chance if you were listening in the first place.

Two: Listen for accuracy. 

This is what I've been describing. Did the pilot read back the correct altitude, heading, turn, runway? Did they give you the correct call sign? I've had pilots think they were cleared to one runway when I said another, and end up on the wrong one — sometimes that's disastrous. I've also had a control instruction meant for one pilot get read back by an entirely different one. It's your responsibility as the controller to make sure what you communicate gets communicated correctly, and gets understood by the right person. If your mind is already moving to the next task, you'll miss those readbacks. 

And that can be disastrous.

Three: Listen to the entire frequency. 

Don't fixate on one airplane. You can develop an instinct for who's about to call you — but sometimes you'll be expecting one aircraft and someone else calls up entirely. You have to stay open to whoever's actually calling. There are a lot of similar call signs out there, and if you're not listening well, you'll make assumptions about who's talking to you — and they'll be wrong.

Four: Listen ahead. 

As one transmission ends, you're already starting to think about the next one — that's fine, as long as you're not doing it before the transmission actually ends. As you get more proficient, you'll be three, four, five, six steps ahead in your plan, and that's exactly when it gets dangerous, because your instinct is to jump to your next move before the pilot even finishes the readback.

Let me tell you a story. 

I'd been out for two weeks — my daughter had surgery. First day back at Love Field, first fifteen minutes on position. I go upstairs, tell a Southwest aircraft to taxi into position and hold on one runway. A pilot on a different runway reads it back. 

Problem: that second guy had another 737 on short final to his runway.

Fortunately, I was listening. I caught the readback from the wrong pilot and told him, "Negative, that was for someone else, hold short." He stopped. That prevented a disaster.

That's how fast things happen. That's how quickly calm and normal can flip into the exact opposite. You have to listen.

Five: Listen before you speak. 

Don't rush. 

If you're taking notes, they should be in all caps with a lot of exclamation points — but don't rush the listening itself. This is the number one mistake I see students make at the Academy and trainees make at their first facility. Don't rush. 

Think. 

Your most important tools aren't your keyboard or your strips — they're your ears and your brain. 

Think, then transmit.

Sometimes the best transmission you make is the one you don't make at all.

Listening isn't separate from the six drivers we've talked about — it's woven into them. 

It's part of your plan, because working through a plan means actually processing what you hear. 

It builds your picture, because every call from a pilot is the beginning of a pixel in that bigger picture you're constructing of your sector.

Miss the listening, and you miss the details. 

And this profession is all about the details.

So work on developing different ways of listening. 

Start pre-Academy. 

Try a technique, run it through the success cycle — test it, fail at it sometimes, learn from it, get better, try again.

Listen for understanding. 

Listen for accuracy. 

Listen to the whole frequency, not just one airplane. 

Listen ahead, but not too far ahead. 

Listen before you speak.

The better you listen, the faster and better your picture develops. 

The better your picture, the better your decisions. 

And the better your decisions, the safer and more efficient a controller you become. 

That's how important this is.

I'll leave you with this: "When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new."

It's hard to learn while you're talking. 

It's a lot easier while you're listening.

If you need help anywhere in your ATC journey, please get help. I'm as close as a text or a phone call — you can reach me at 817-233-8299, or set up a free consultation at sidebysideatc.com . 

I'll answer any question you've got and talk through wherever you are on your journey, because I just want to help you get where you want to go.

Remember, you don't have to navigate your ATC journey alone. Let's do it side by side.

We covered preparation in the last post, and now I want to move directly into the chapter that belongs right alongside it: embracing practice. 

These two ideas are partners. 

Preparation gets you positioned correctly. 

Practice is what actually builds the capability to perform when it counts.

And Maxwell opens this section with something simple but worth repeating: you play at the level you practice. 

That's it. 

Whatever level your practice operates at, that is the level you're going to show up at on eval day. 

No more, no less.

At the Academy, especially in non-radar, the person sitting across from you watching you run through a practice scenario has to function as your toughest instructor. 

I mean that sincerely — the most detail-oriented, the most exacting, the least willing to let things slide. Because that is the only way the practice is genuinely going to benefit you.

Consistently good practice leads to consistently good performance. And consistently good practice sharpens your talent in a way that nothing else does. 

The students who succeed at the Academy are the ones who understand that practice isn't just about putting in reps — it's about getting better. 

Those are not the same thing. 

You can run practice scenarios all day and not improve if you're not holding yourself and each other to the real standard.

Now — this does not mean practice can't be enjoyable. 

Please make it enjoyable. 

Having fun makes learning easier, and some of the best lab environments I was part of as an instructor were ones where students were genuinely engaged and even laughing sometimes. 

When I was coaching soccer, I worked hard to make practice worth showing up for while still making it impactful. 

I tried to do the same thing at the Academy. 

But the fun has to live inside the standard, not replace it. 

The details still have to be there, because the evaluators are going to be looking at the details. 

If you've been skipping them in practice, you're going to be surprised on eval day — and that's not a surprise you can afford.

Maxwell identifies three core things that practice accomplishes, and all three matter for where you're headed.

Done correctly, practice keeps making you better than you were yesterday. That's the standard — not better than your classmate, not better than some external benchmark. Better than yesterday you. Small gains compound. 

At the beginning, your improvements are going to be incremental and sometimes almost invisible. But they're building. And then at some point — and I've watched this happen more times than I can count, both in the lab and on the soccer field — something clicks. 

The light comes on. 

And when it does, it is one of the most beautiful things you will ever watch. 

The student's entire face changes. Their whole body changes. You can see the moment they realize what just happened. 

Keep persevering through the slow stretch, because you never know which practice session is the one where everything suddenly connects.

Practice leads to discovery. 

When you commit to genuine practice, you learn things about yourself and your performance that you simply cannot learn any other way. 

One of those things is that your performance can always be improved — even when you think you've done well. Even the golfer who shoots a 59 knows he left shots out there. 

The point isn't perfection. The point is that there's always another level, and practice is the only path to it. 

There's also real value in starting small and building from there. 

You cannot get to day 60 without going through day one, day two, day three. 

Every day matters. 

Every small thing you learn on day seven becomes part of what makes day 30 possible. 

Don't skip steps.

Practice demands discipline. 

Aristotle — and yes, I'm going way back — said "we are what we repeatedly do." He also said "excellence is not an act but a habit." 

I want you to think about that the next time you sit down for a practice session. 

You're not just running through a scenario. 

You're building a habit. 

You're building excellence, one rep at a time. 

When you reframe practice that way — not as a necessary chore but as the actual process of becoming excellent — it takes on a completely different character. Call your practice groups excellence groups if you want. 

Seriously. 

The name matters. 

Walk in with the mindset that you're building something, not just getting through something.

Maxwell identifies five pillars that separate effective practice from time spent going through the motions.

Get an excellent teacher or coach. 

Look at the best performers in any field — athletics, business, performing arts, you name it — and you will find coaches and mentors. Tiger Woods has a coach. LeBron James has a coach. Rafael Nadal has a coach. These are people who have reached the absolute top of what they do, and they still have someone outside themselves who can watch what they're doing and identify small things that can be improved. 

Sometimes a coach is there to sharpen your technique. And sometimes a coach is just there to make sure you don't fall when things get hard. 

Everyone needs that. 

If you're at the Academy, lean on your instructors when you can. If you're preparing before you get there, find a mentor. 

Don't try to figure all of this out by yourself.

Give your best effort. 

You cannot sleepwalk through a practice session and expect to get better. You just can't. 

I've seen thousands of students come through the Academy over the five years I was there, and the ones who improve are consistently the ones who show up and give their best — even when they're tired, even when they're frustrated, even when nothing seems to be clicking. 

If you give your best effort, you will improve. 

I will guarantee that without hesitation.

Have a clear purpose going in. 

The overarching purpose of every practice session is improvement leading to excellence. 

Go in knowing that. 

Make excellence your target, not just completion. 

Walk into each session asking yourself: how am I going to be better coming out of this than I was going in? 

If you do that consistently, there's genuinely no ceiling on what you can accomplish.

Maxwell makes this point in a way that really stuck with me. 

Your standards for yourself should be higher than other people's standards for you. 

At the Academy, you know what the FAA standard is. You know what the evaluators are looking for. Don't settle for that. Hold yourself to a higher bar. Expect more from yourself than the minimum required to pass. 

When you do that — and I've watched this happen — the people around you notice. 

Your instructors notice. 

Your evaluators notice. 

Holding yourself to a higher standard is one of the things that makes a student genuinely stand out.

This one is practical but important. 

For non-radar en route practice, you need a strip board and a way to actually move strips around. 

For tower, build your own tabletop if you have to — you've got a dining room table in your apartment. 

Use it. 

You cannot practice effectively without the actual tools of the trade, and the FAA has given you the setup; it's on you to replicate it as closely as you can outside the lab.

Maxwell wraps up this chapter with what he calls the extra that makes people successful, and I want to give you these three things because they're worth carrying with you.

A little extra effort. 

Maxwell says the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary is the extra. 

Think about that word. 

Extra-ordinary. It literally has "extra" in it. 

Don't let anyone in your class — or any other class — outwork you. 

You beat a large portion of the field just by working hard. You beat another large portion by showing up with integrity and doing things the right way. The last piece is a competitive fight, and the ones who win it are the ones who give the little bit more when everyone else is satisfied with where they are.

A little extra time. 

Successful people practice harder and longer than unsuccessful people do. And this requires something beyond just persistence — it requires patience. 

You're going to have stretches where you're putting in the extra time and things are just not clicking. 

Keep going. 

You genuinely don't know which session is the one where everything suddenly makes sense. 

Keep persevering, because when that moment arrives — and I have watched it happen over and over — it is extraordinary to witness. 

Don't quit before your breakthrough.

A little extra help. 

Alex Haley, who wrote Roots, said something that has stuck with me: "If you see a turtle on top of a fence post, you know he had help getting there." 

Nobody gets there alone. 

As a class, help each other — you all have different strengths, you all have gaps. Learn from each other. And don't let the controller mentality of feeling like you should already know everything get in the way of asking for help. 

I still ask for help. I'm still learning after 37 years in this business. If you see something I'm doing with traffic and you don't understand it or you wonder if there's a better way — say something. 

Everyone with something to offer can still be helped by someone else.

I want to close with something William Johnson said that I think deserves to be posted somewhere you'll see it every day: "Quality is a race with no finish line."

You never arrive at your potential. 

You can only continue to strive toward it. 

When you finish your radar evals and look at your score — whatever it is — take a moment to celebrate it. 

Genuinely. 

You earned that. 

And then take another moment to recognize that you could have been better, and that the race continues.

Because here's the progression I've watched happen to people who stop striving: excellent becomes acceptable, acceptable becomes mediocre, and nobody is going to pay for mediocre. 

Not the FAA, not the flying public, not anyone.

Don't settle for average. 

Don't settle for acceptable. 

Keep practicing with excellence as the standard, keep giving the extra effort and the extra time, and keep asking for help when you need it. 

That is the path to becoming not just an air traffic controller, but one of the best ones who has ever sat down at a position.

That's available to every one of you. 

But it only comes through practice — real practice, intentional practice, practice that treats every session as another step toward excellent.

Start that today. 

I want to open with a quote from Aristotle that sets up everything we're going to cover today: "For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them."

That single sentence captures something fundamental about air traffic control that a lot of people don't fully grasp until they're already sitting in the lab wondering why everything they studied isn't translating into performance. 

Learning in ATC isn't like learning anywhere else. 

And if you don't understand that going in, it's going to catch you off guard at exactly the wrong moment.

This is tool number one in the ATC tool belt series — the learning tool. And I'd argue it's the most important one, because without it, you're going to have a very hard time picking up any of the others.

Here's something worth being honest about. 

The vast majority of students who come through the Academy are good students. They did well in high school. They did well in college. Some of them excelled in graduate programs or military training. They know how to study. They know how to take a test. And almost all of them discover, at some point during their time in Oklahoma City, that those skills — as valuable as they are — aren't enough on their own.

Here's why. 

Most of the learning you've done in your life up to this point has been about knowledge. Read it, understand it well enough to explain it back, pass the test. And in college especially, even when you get into more applied coursework, the core skill you're developing is the ability to absorb, retain, and recall information. 

That's a real and important skill. 

But it is not the primary skill that ATC demands.

And here's the part that catches people off guard: the Academy actually lulls you into a false sense of security about this. Basics is a lot like college. You're sitting in a classroom, taking notes, learning facts, taking tests to move forward. If you're in the en route program, you're learning and memorizing the map. 

It feels familiar. 

It feels manageable. 

And then you get into the non-radar problems, or the tabletop scenarios for tower, or the radar problems for terminal, and everything shifts.

Suddenly you're not being asked to recall information. 

You're being asked to use it — in real time, under pressure, while things are changing around you. 

And those are fundamentally different skills. 

Memorization gets you to the starting line. 

Understanding and application are what get you through the race.

I was talking to a group of junior high and high school students who came through the tower on a tour recently, and I told them the same thing: you cannot memorize your way through air traffic control. 

A lot of what this job actually is, is trying things, seeing if they work, and if they don't, trying something else. 

You can never give up. 

That's what the FAA is looking for at the Academy — not perfection, but persistence. 

Not someone who knows all the right answers, but someone who keeps going when the answers don't come easily.

So how do you actually develop this tool? 

Here are five techniques that apply across every level of your career, starting before you ever get to Oklahoma City.

This one starts now, wherever you are. 

Not "what do I need to memorize?" but "why does this work the way it does?" and "how does this apply in a real scenario?" 

The quality of the questions you ask directly determines the quality of what you understand. 

At the Academy, ask questions constantly — of your instructors, of your classmates, of anyone willing to engage.

At your first facility, find the people who are patient enough to let you ask a lot of questions and lean on them hard. 

And after you certify, don't stop. 

The best controllers I've been around never stopped asking questions, because they understood that there's always something else to learn.

I've talked about this in the six drivers series, and it's worth revisiting here because it's directly connected to how you learn in ATC. 

A lot of students try to hold a big overarching picture of everything that's happening in their head at once. It almost never works. The picture evaporates under pressure. 

What you actually need — and what actually works — is focusing on one airplane versus one airplane. 

One relationship at a time. 

One task at a time. 

You build separation, you work the clearance, you move to the next thing. 

And by doing that consistently, one piece at a time, you end up with a complete picture — not by trying to hold the whole thing at once, but by building it one pixel at a time. 

That's not just a technique for working traffic. 

It's a technique for learning. 

Take one concept, understand it deeply, apply it, then move to the next.

This is one of the reasons I keep pushing people to memorize the map before they get to Oklahoma City. 

Not just to have the map memorized, but to practice the act of active recall — pulling information out of your memory rather than just reading it off a page. 

Flashcards work. 

Teaching it to someone else works even better. 

Seriously — if you feel like you've got the map down, explain it to a family member or a friend. Walk them through what everything means. 

If you can teach it clearly, you actually understand it. If you find yourself stumbling, you've just identified exactly what you need to work on. 

The best way to find the gaps in your understanding is to try to explain it to someone who doesn't know it yet.

This doesn't have to be a long, involved process. 

At the end of each day at the Academy — or at your first facility in training — take a few minutes and ask yourself three questions: what did I do well today? What do I need to do better? What confused me? 

Then take that list of things that confused you or went wrong, and pick one or two. Not the whole list — just one or two. Focus on those for the next day. Understand what happened. Understand what needs to change. Then go do it better. 

The Academy is about consistency and incremental improvement, not about fixing everything wrong in one day.

A little better every day, consistently applied, adds up to something significant by the end of the program.

This one is hard for people who have been successful students their whole lives, and I understand that. 

Nobody likes standing up in front of a class and fumbling through a clearance. I hated it when I was going through it. 

But here's the reality: we learn far more from getting something wrong than from getting it right. 

When you get it right, you confirm what you already know. 

When you get it wrong and you pay attention to why, you actually understand something new. 

Those grade sheets you get at the Academy are not just a record of your performance — they are invaluable information. 

Treat them that way. 

Every mistake is data. 

Every correction from an instructor is data. 

The controllers who become exceptional are the ones who collect that information, learn from it, and don't repeat the same mistakes.

At level one — pre-Academy, before you get anywhere near Oklahoma City — develop good learning habits now. If you can get the map, work on learning it. But more than that, start paying attention to how you learn best. What study methods stick for you? How does your brain process new information most effectively? The more you understand about your own learning process before you get to Oklahoma City, the more efficiently you'll be able to use your time once you're there.

At level two — the Academy itself — use these habits every single day. Pick one or two things to improve on each day and actually go after them. Don't try to fix everything at once. 

Consistency matters more than perfection. 

Show up. 

Get a little better. 

Keep going. 

I never had a problem with trainees making mistakes when I was an instructor at Fort Worth Center or at the towers I've worked. The only issue was when someone kept making the same mistakes without improving. 

In five years at the Academy, that was genuinely rare. 

The students who struggled most were almost always the ones who tried to fix too much at once instead of chipping away consistently.

At level three — your first facility — the same principles apply, but the stakes are higher because it's live traffic.

Be there as consistently as you can. 

Avoid taking leave during training if possible. 

Get a little better every day. 

Find the people at your facility who are willing to answer your questions and take full advantage of them. Not everyone will be patient with a long list of questions — but some will, and those people are worth their weight in gold during training.

And at level four — after you certify — don't stop. 

This is the mistake I see too often. 

Controllers get their CPC and mentally check the "learning" box as complete. It's not complete. The best controllers I've been around in 37 years of this career never stopped learning. They kept asking questions. They kept watching other controllers and picking up techniques. They kept refining their tool belt. 

Strive to be the best trainee your facility has ever seen. 

Then strive to be the best controller on your crew. 

Then in your specialty. 

Then in the building. 

Set the bar high and keep reaching for it.

All of this ties into what I call the success cycle, and it's simple enough to remember but important enough to take seriously. 

You try something new. 

You probably fail at it — that's expected. 

You learn from what went wrong. 

You adjust your approach. 

You try again. 

You might fail again. 

You adjust again. 

And you keep going through this cycle, refining and improving, until that technique or that concept actually becomes something you can do consistently under pressure. 

That's when it becomes a real tool.

ATC is not something you read about and then do. 

You can't study your way to being a controller. 

You have to go through the cycle — try, fail, learn, adjust, try again — over and over and over, with every skill and concept and technique you're trying to develop. 

The learning tool is what makes every other cycle possible.

B.B. King said it well: "The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you." 

That's true. 

Every piece of understanding you build, every technique you develop through the success cycle — it's yours. 

And in this career, you're going to build a lot of it.

Start building now. 

One tool at a time, one day at a time, one pixel at a time.

We're continuing our series based on John Maxwell's "Success Is a Choice," and today we're continuing with valuing preparation. This is absolutely foundational to everything you're trying to accomplish at the Academy, at CTI school, at advanced ATC — wherever you are in this journey.

Maxwell makes a point that sounds almost too simple to bother saying, and yet I see people ignore it constantly: being unprepared puts you out of position. 

That's it. 

That's the whole thing. 

And what it means for us specifically is that if you don't know the phraseology, if you haven't learned the strip marking, if you don't understand the procedures — all of that is preparation, and without it, you simply will not be able to perform when it counts.

And at the Academy, it is consistently one of the biggest separators between the students who pass and the students who don't. 

Not intelligence. 

Not raw ability. 

So why don't people do it? 

Why do they resist it?

Maxwell says talent wants to jump into action — but preparation positions that talent to actually be effective. 

I understand that impulse completely. 

When you know you have the ability to do something, you want to go do it. You want to jump in and prove it. But jumping in without being fully prepared means you're leading with talent that has no foundation underneath it.

Preparation is what gives your talent somewhere to go.

There's also a failure to appreciate the value of discipline. 

And here's the definition of discipline that I think fits this best: discipline is doing what you really don't want to do so that you can do what you really want to do later. 

You might not love sitting down and going through strip marking procedures for the hundredth time. You might not love drilling the phonetic alphabet or memorizing distances on the map. But you do it anyway, because what you're really doing is buying yourself the ability to perform on eval day.

And speaking of eval day — here's a reality check about preparation and time. 

At the Academy, you're going to go through roughly 12 weeks of training in the en route program. Three months of showing up every day, working scenarios, building your skills. But when you break down where your score actually comes from, 80 percent of it is determined across five scenarios: two non-radar runs and three radar runs. 

That's just over three hours of actual work that your three months of preparation is building toward.

Preparation takes far more time than the event you're preparing for. 

That's just the truth, and it's the truth in almost everything worthwhile. 

Welcome to it.

Maxwell lays out several principles of preparation in this chapter, and I want to walk you through each one because every single one has direct application to where you are right now.

Preparation allows you to tap into your talent. 

Knowing the phraseology, knowing the strip marking, knowing the procedures, knowing the LOAs and the SOPs — these aren't just hoops you jump through. These are the steps that let the talent inside you actually come out. You can be the most naturally gifted person in the room, but if you can't say it correctly, can't write it on a strip correctly, don't know what the LOA requires of you — you're going to fail. 

The talent is there, but it has nowhere to go. 

Preparation opens the door.

Preparation is a process, not an event. 

At the Academy, it's a 12-week process. At CTI school, it could be a year and a half to two years or more. You can't cram your way through it. Maxwell quotes a principle I think about often in this context: leadership develops daily, not in a day. 

The same is true of your preparation as a controller. 

You have to be doing something every single day — and on the days when you're not running scenarios, that's a great time to read over the LOAs, go through the SOP, find another way to engage with the material. 

I had a student who made voice recordings of the SOP so he could listen to it while he read it — hitting two senses at once. That's creativity in the service of preparation. Find what works for you and do it every day.

And here's something John Wooden said that belongs in every Academy class: "Don't try to be better than somebody else, but never cease trying to be the best that you can be." 

Don't look at your classmate who seems to be picking things up faster and use that to measure yourself. 

The only comparison that matters is who you were yesterday versus who you are today. 

If you're better than yesterday, you're on the right path. 

Keep going.

Preparation precedes opportunity. 

Here's the opportunity sitting in front of you: a chance to start one of the most incredible careers available to anyone in this country. But if you're not prepared when that opportunity arrives, it doesn't matter. 

That's why I keep hammering on getting ready before you get to Oklahoma City. 

Prepare mentally, emotionally, physically — and prepare the things outside of ATC so that they don't compete for your attention while you're trying to learn. 

When you arrive prepared, your talent has a chance to come through. 

When you don't, the opportunity is there but you can't use it.

This one is so practical and I see students get it wrong constantly. 

I watch people on Discord who haven't even finished basics yet asking detailed questions about radar scenarios that are a month and a half away. 

You're worried about tomorrow when you need to be focused on today. 

Here's how I'd think about it: look ahead one week at a time. 

Know what's coming that week. Prepare for it. Maybe skim over what's going to be covered so you're not walking in completely cold. But within that week, concentrate on each individual day. 

Get what you need to learn from today so that tomorrow you're not still trying to catch up on yesterday. 

That's the rhythm that keeps you current — and staying current is the only way the Academy stays manageable.

Preparation requires maintaining a good perspective. 

The Academy is a mental grind. 

It's designed to be. 

Twelve weeks is a long time to sustain that level of focus and intensity, and there are going to be stretches where you feel the weight of it. 

The best antidote to that grind is having walked in prepared — knowing what's coming, having a plan for yourself that goes beyond just following the FAA's schedule, having the mental and emotional tools already in place. 

Preparation doesn't just get you ready for the content. 

It gets you ready for the experience of the Academy itself.

Good preparation leads to action. 

When you're prepared, when the opportunity presents itself, you can actually do something with it. 

Maxwell says preparation does not mean mastery of all the facts. It does not mean knowing every answer. 

What it means — and this is the part I want you to hold onto — is putting yourself in a better position to succeed.

You don't need to be perfect before you walk into that lab. 

You need to be prepared. 

There's a difference, and it's an important one.

I want to close this section with something that I don't say to discourage you, but because it's true and you deserve to hear it straight: people don't often get a second chance to seize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. 

The Academy is that opportunity for you. So is CTI school. So is every step along this path.

When I got to Fort Worth Center for the first time, I walked in and looked around the control room and thought there was no way I was ever going to be able to do what those controllers were doing. They seemed larger than life. And then I started going through training, and something shifted. I started to realize — some of these people aren't as untouchable as I thought. And sometimes, I was already better than some of them in certain things. 

The gap between where you are right now and where those experienced controllers are is not as unbridgeable as it looks from day one. 

But you have to prepare to get there. 

Every one of them started exactly where you're starting. 

They just went through the stages and did the work.

You can too. 

But it starts with valuing preparation — not as a burden, not as a box to check, but as the foundation that everything else is built on.

Don't waste the opportunity. 

Start today.

I want to start this one with a quote that I keep coming back to, because it sets up everything we're going to talk about today. It comes from Aristotle, and it goes like this: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act. It's a habit."

That idea is at the heart of what I want to discuss in this new series — the air traffic controller tool belt. 

It's a phrase I've heard throughout my career in various contexts, usually in reference to learning something new and being able to apply it. And the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized it's one of the most accurate ways to describe what this career actually is — a continuous process of building, refining, and adding to a collection of tools that you carry with you from the very beginning all the way through to the end.

So let's talk about what that means, where it starts, and why it matters more than most people realize.

Here's something I want you to hold onto, especially if you're early in this journey: every single controller working live traffic today started with an empty tool belt. 

Every one of them. 

The controllers who seem larger than life when you walk into a facility for the first time, the ones who make it look effortless, the ones who are working the busiest sectors with weather and complexity piling up on all sides — none of them walked in with those tools already in place.

Nobody begins an ATC career with perfect phraseology. 

Nobody starts with a deep well of confidence or judgment or control. 

Those things get built. 

They get developed through experience, through repetition, through failing and learning and trying again. 

The difference between the controllers who become exceptional and the ones who plateau isn't where they started — it's what they did next. 

The great ones didn't get satisfied with an empty tool belt. 

They kept filling it.

That's what this series is about.

I want to be specific about this, because when most people hear "tool belt" they picture something physical. But the tools we're talking about here are different. 

A tool in the ATC context can be a skill. It can be a habit. It can be a checklist you rely on, a mindset you've developed, a process you run through consistently in your daily work. It can be something as simple as a question you ask yourself — how did that work? Did it work the way I intended? How could I have done it better?

A tool is also a way of thinking. And over the course of a career, you're going to develop hundreds of them — maybe thousands. Some will be broad and foundational. Others will be narrow and situation-specific, pulled out rarely but absolutely critical when the moment calls for them. The important thing to understand is that all of them have to be developed. 

None of them come pre-loaded.

I've talked in previous episodes about the four levels of an ATC career, and it's worth revisiting that framework here because the tool belt looks different at each level — not because the tools themselves change completely, but because they deepen and grow more complex as you do.

Level one is pre-Academy. That's the period before you get to any formal training — before the FAA Academy, before CTI school, before the military program. It starts the moment you decide this is what you want and you begin working toward it. At this level, your tools are foundational and relatively simple. The phonetic alphabet. The maps, if you can get your hands on them. Basic habits of study and discipline. The mindset of someone who's preparing for something demanding.

Level two is the Academy — or whatever training environment you're in. Here the tools get more complex. You're learning the language of ATC at a deeper level. You're learning strip marking and procedures and LOAs and SOPs. You're developing your ability to work under pressure, to build the picture one task at a time, to prioritize and execute. The tools multiply quickly at this level, and the demands on them are real.

Level three is your first facility. Now it's live traffic. The clock doesn't stop. You can't redo a simulation. And the complexity of what's required ratchets up in a way that even the Academy didn't fully prepare you for — because the Academy, as intense as it is, is still a controlled environment. Your first facility is the real thing. The tools you built at the Academy have to hold up under that weight, and new tools have to start forming quickly.

Level four is becoming a certified professional controller — a CPC. And even here, even after you've earned that certification, you don't stop building. You keep watching other controllers in given situations and noticing things you wouldn't have thought to do yourself. You try it. You work on it. You refine it. And it becomes part of your tool belt.

The tools don't stay the same across all four levels. 

They stack. 

They build on each other. 

They get more nuanced and more capable as you grow — because you grow alongside them. 

Phraseology at the pre-Academy level is learning the alphabet. Phraseology at a busy center sector after ten years of live traffic is something else entirely. 

Same category of tool, completely different level of sophistication.

Here's something important to understand about the process of developing a tool. 

It's not linear, and it's not clean. 

You don't learn something new and immediately apply it successfully. 

That's not how it works — not in ATC, not in anything that matters.

You encounter a new concept, a new technique, a new way of thinking. 

You try it. 

You probably fail at it the first time, or the second, or the fifth. That's expected — it's something new. 

But then you learn from what went wrong. 

You adjust. 

You try again. 

You keep going through the cycle, refining and adapting as you go, until one day you realize that this thing — this technique or habit or approach — actually works. And then you start discovering that with a small adaptation, it works in this other situation too. And now you have a tool. 

A real one, earned through repetition and refinement, that you actually know how to use.

The reason to start this process as early as possible — ideally before you ever set foot in Oklahoma City — is that the success cycle takes time. And when you're at the Academy and the pressure is building, the last thing you want to be doing is going through the earliest, roughest stages of developing a basic tool. 

You want those foundational tools already refined enough to be useful. You want to walk into the pressure with tools that have already been tested, not tools you're just now discovering you need.

The earlier you start, the better off you're going to be. 

It's as simple and as true as that.

I want to give you a sense of what's ahead in this series, because it's going to be extensive. 

There's a long list of tools that every controller needs, and we're going to work through as many as we can.

Learning how to learn is a tool. Discipline is a tool. Communication — how to communicate clearly, precisely, under pressure — is a tool. Building the picture one pixel at a time, which we've talked about before, is a tool. Phraseology in all its depth is a tool. Decision-making is a tool. Situational awareness is a tool.

Here's one that might surprise you: leadership. I know that might seem like something for later — something you'll worry about once you've been certified for a few years. But you want to start working on leadership before you ever get to Oklahoma City. The habits of leadership, the mindset of someone who takes ownership and initiative, the ability to influence the people around you — those things take time to develop. 

Start now.

Confidence is a tool, and we've talked about how it's built through repetition, not through wishing it into existence. Stress management is a tool — and I'll be direct, stress management is going to be significant for the rest of your career. The job comes with stress. The question is what you do with it. So start putting yourself in uncomfortable situations before you get to the Academy, because I guarantee the Academy is going to be uncomfortable, and your first facility is going to be uncomfortable, and the busiest shift you ever work is going to be uncomfortable. Get familiar with that feeling now so it doesn't own you later.

Receiving feedback is a tool. And this is one that people underestimate. From the moment you get to Oklahoma City until the day you retire, you are going to receive feedback constantly. Feedback from instructors, from evaluators, from trainers, from supervisors, from the controllers around you. The ability to take that feedback, not take it personally, and actually use it — that is a skill. It's a tool. And not everyone has it naturally. 

But you're going to need it, so start developing it.

Prioritization is a tool. Not just at the Academy, where figuring out your priority list is built into the process, but working live traffic, where the priorities don't always announce themselves clearly. Get it wrong sometimes — that's how you learn. But keep working at it. 

Checklists are a tool. 

Adaptability is a tool. 

Professionalism is a tool.

The list is genuinely long, and I don't think I could fully cover it all in one blog series — it could honestly take years to do it justice. 

But we're going to cover as many as we can, and if there's something you want addressed specifically, reach out and let me know. Tell me what you're struggling with, what you don't know how to develop, what you're not sure you're going to need. 

We'll make it part of the series.

I want to close with this, because it's something I see misunderstood more often than I'd like.

Getting past the Academy is not the finish line. 

It's step one. 

A significant step — don't minimize it, because it's genuinely hard and genuinely important. 

But it's the beginning of the career, not the culmination of it. 

The tools you need to be an air traffic controller at a live facility are more refined, more adaptable, and more numerous than the tools required to pass the Academy. And the tools you need five years into your career at a busy sector are even more developed than those.

A surgeon doesn't walk out of medical school and step directly into an operating room. 

A new pilot doesn't get a private license and immediately fly jumbo jets. 

This career works the same way. It's a progression. Each level builds on the one before it. And at every level, you're adding to the tool belt, sharpening the tools already in it, and figuring out how to apply the whole collection to situations that keep getting more complex.

Jim Rohn said it well: "Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals." 

That's it. 

That's the whole thing. 

Success as an air traffic controller is about consistently applying your tools — the fundamental ones you built early, the more sophisticated ones you've developed over time. 

Consistent application. 

Over and over. 

Getting a little better each time.

Start building your tool belt today. One tool at a time, at whatever level you're at right now. 

Because this is a team sport, and you don't have to figure it out alone.

As always, you can find resources and reach out at sidebysideatc.com. 

And remember — you don't have to navigate your ATC journey alone. Let's do it side by side.