Over the last couple of weeks we've been building out your tool belt. 

We started with the basics — that's your foundation — and this week we add another one: the phraseology tool.

But here's the thing right up front. 

This isn't really about phraseology. 

Not in the narrow sense, anyway. 

When I say phraseology, I mean the details that make up being an air traffic controller.

I want to open with a quote from Pat Riley, the basketball coach: "Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better."

Great air traffic controllers aren't great because they know one big secret. 

There isn't one. 

Great controllers are great because they consistently pay attention to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of small details.

That's what this tool is about.

We started with the learning tool — how to become an ATC learner, which is different from just being a good student. Last week was the listening tool — how you receive information. 

This week's tool is about something bigger than how you say things. 

Most people, when they think of phraseology, think about talking. 

I think phraseology is really about learning to think precisely, with details in mind. 

And that's something you can start doing before you ever set foot in Oklahoma City.

Standard phraseology is standardized communication. 

That's exactly why it exists — it's why the FAA has an inch-and-a-half thick book full of it.

But I want to go beyond that, because it's bigger than the book.

When you dig into phraseology and the details underneath it, you start focusing on precision. 

You start focusing on consistency. 

There's a discipline to saying it right every time, doing things right every time, paying attention to the details every time. That attention to detail — that's what this whole profession is built on.

Every word has a purpose. 

Everything you do has a purpose. 

Every detail has a purpose. 

And every omission, every deviation from those details, has consequences.

Let's walk through this tool across the four levels.

I've talked before about things you can start doing before you get to Oklahoma City, and one of them is getting into a "details matter" mindset.

There's plenty you can actually learn ahead of time. 

Learn the ICAO phonetic alphabet. 

Learn how to say your numbers. 

You don't have to say "five" as "fife" — I've genuinely never heard anyone do that. I've heard controllers say "tree" instead of "three." But the one that'll actually get you at the Academy: there is no "nine." It's niner. There is no "oh." There's zero.

Those are details about numbers, and they're free to learn right now.

I've also said on other episodes: if you can, memorize your map before you get to Oklahoma City. Doesn't matter if it's the en route non-radar map, the tower airport diagram, or a terminal radar map. You can find them. Learn them. It will give you a massive head start.

One more habit worth building early: everything in ATC gets written in capital letters. There are no lowercase letters in this job. Get comfortable with that now.

Those are the things you can control before you ever arrive.

Once you're at the Academy, all of those details suddenly matter in a way they didn't before. 

You have to pay attention to them. 

You have to practice them, and practice them correctly. 

This is where focused, intense practice comes in — and it's not the same thing as memorizing.

You cannot memorize ATC. 

You can memorize for your written tests, and you'll do fine on those. 

But to perform in the labs, you have to practice, and you have to try to put yourself under real pressure. That's where your classmates come in — they have to push you. A stopwatch, a timer, or just holding you accountable to doing it correctly every single time. You need pressure while you practice, and you need to practice consistently.

Here are a few things I want you to hold onto as you go through this.

Accuracy is more important than speed. 

Always. 

At every stage of your career, but especially at the Academy, because you're still learning the job. Accuracy before speed.

You have to say the things they need you to say, correctly, in the correct order — and the only way to build that is practicing with your classmates. 

You cannot do this alone. I know, because I tried. 

When I went through the Academy, I tried to do almost everything on my own — that's just who I was. I found out fast that it wasn't going to work. Fortunately, I found out soon enough that I could change, and I changed enough to pass.

I'm telling you now: you cannot do ATC on your own. 

You cannot get through the Academy on your own. 

Not without a lot of prior experience, and even then, there's no guarantee.

Part of accuracy is finding the right cadence — not rushed. Your goal in the lab, whatever you're working — tower, terminal, radar, en route, doesn't matter — is to be boring. You want to put your evaluator to sleep. Because you're doing the job well. You're talking at a rate close to how I'm talking right now. That's the rate you need.

If you're talking fast, your evaluator can't relax. They have to stay alert and hang on every word because you're rattling through it. Your goal is the opposite — put them to sleep, because when they're relaxed, it means you're not giving them anything to catch.

The habits you build in Oklahoma City — giving clearances, your rate of speech, your clarity — those become incredibly good habits going forward. You want to be understood every single time you key the mic. Because if you're not understood, you're going to hear "say again" — and just like that, you've gone from busy to super busy.

This is where LOAs — letters of agreement between facilities — become even more detailed and, because it's live traffic, far more important than they ever were at the Academy.

You've got LOAs. 

You've got SOPs — standard operating procedures — and every facility is different. 

Pilots have different accents; you won't always understand every transmission clearly. Frequencies don't always work as well as they should. 

That's real life. 

Your first facility is the real world, and you have to work through those details as they actually exist, not as they appeared in a scripted lab.

Some of those details are things like timing — when to make calls, when to coordinate, when to issue clearances. 

Priorities, which were already huge at the Academy, get even bigger with live traffic. And now you're not just working with pilots — you're working with other controllers too.

One thing you need to master at your first facility: your phraseology has to get to the point where you cannot say something incorrectly.

My first trainer in the tower told me that directly. He said, "You have to get to the point where you cannot say it wrong." You need to sound like you know exactly what you're doing. And if you do — if you sound like it and use correct phraseology — a pilot will fly into a mountain if you tell him to. 

Because they trust you.

When pilots trust you, especially on a busy sector, it changes everything. 

When the controllers around you trust you, it changes everything, and you can actually work together as a team.

The Academy isn't where that trust gets built — there just isn't time. 

Your first facility is where you start developing those habits: the way you talk on the radio, the way you listen, like we talked about last week. Communication runs both directions. You have to listen well, and you have to speak clearly. It's all in the details — the details of listening, the details of talking. That's what the phraseology tool is really about at this foundational stage.

Once you're certified, I've heard people say they still listen to live ATC for reference. You can — just understand that CPCs tend to have looser phraseology than they did in training.

Part of that is legitimate — they're trying to get the point across quickly, and sometimes 7110.65 phraseology is a little clunky. So some controllers slide into plain English to communicate faster.

Try not to do that.

Again, my first trainer told me exactly why book phraseology matters. He said: if something ever happens and you end up in court, and they play the tape, and you were sloppy with how you said things — some attorney is going to ask you what the 7110.65 says the correct phraseology should have been. And then they're going to ask why you knew that and didn't say it that way anyway.

That is not a situation you want to be in. 

Keep your phraseology standard.

Once you're a CPC, you're actually refining it further — and then comes the fun part. You're going to teach a new controller. And you had better want them to say things correctly.

I was blessed — my first instructors in the tower and at the center were all phraseology nuts. Obsessive about the details of the job. That's exactly what you need to become too, because at some point you'll be the one instructing someone else, and you'll have to help them understand why the details matter.

They do matter.

One: Learn the language. 

When you're talking to pilots, you are not speaking English. You're speaking ATC. It's a different language, with its own written form, even though we don't write on strips as much as we used to. You have to put in the effort to become genuinely fluent in it.

Two: Build the transmission before you key the mic. 

Know what you're going to say before you push the button. This matters at the Academy, matters at your first facility while you're training, and eventually becomes second nature as a CPC — though that doesn't always happen right away. You don't want to key up and then start figuring out what to say. It leads to dead air, and it leads to corrections. That's not good ATC. Know what you're saying before you key the mic, so when you do, you say it with authority — knowing it's the right thing to say.

Three: Every word matters. 

Phraseology exists to reduce what you have to say, the same way technology tries to reduce frequency congestion. You key up wanting to say something, someone else keys up at the same time, you block each other, and all anyone hears is a loud squeal. It's going to happen sometimes — but you want to minimize it as much as possible.

Listen to the best controllers work traffic. They're not talking fast — they're talking in a rhythm. The whole sector falls into that rhythm. New pilots checking on hear it: clearance, readback, clearance, readback. They learn to wait for their opening. It's amazing how much traffic you can work once you're in a rhythm.

I know some really good controllers who just talk, and talk, and talk — friendly with the pilots, know them by name. I've had those conversations too, but never when I'm busy. When I'm busy, it's all business. My job is to get every airplane I'm talking to where it needs to go, safely. That's the only job. No extra words. No missing words. No incorrect words — because any of those can change the meaning of what you just said.

Four: Standardization. 

This is what the FAA is asking for. If you standardize your phraseology and follow all the details the FAA gives you for the job, you should never have a problem with management, and hopefully you never end up in a courtroom dealing with attorneys. Pilots are expecting that standardization. When you give it to them, they know exactly what to do. You're reducing surprises.

Five: Practice until the precision becomes the habit. 

Don't practice until you get it right — practice until you can't get it wrong.

Watch how athletes train. Tennis players practicing a serve will put a can in the corner they're aiming for and won't stop until they've hit it five, ten, fifteen times in a row. Golfers won't stop practicing putts until they've sunk three, five, seven, ten in a row — miss one, and they start the count over. Soccer players practicing shots do the same thing, over and over, until they can't miss.

ATC is exactly the same. Practice until you can't do it wrong. Commit to that kind of intense, focused practice, and you will have a long career — and you'll actually enjoy it.

Across all four levels, this tool — what I call phraseology — is so much bigger than the word suggests. 

It shows up most obviously in how we talk, but it's really about the details behind every single clearance. 

You have to know the letter of agreement to know what altitude or speed to give a pilot. 

You have to know what the next sector or the next facility expects from you. 

All of that lives underneath the clearance you actually transmit.

Let me tell you a quick story. 

When I was moving from Love Field tower to Fort Worth Center, people at the tower told me, "Oh, you'll do great over there, they're so laid-back at the center, way more laid-back than we are." I got to Fort Worth Center and thought, say what? These guys were obsessive about the details — getting everything exactly right, every time. I went back to the tower and told them, "You guys are crazy, that place is a nuthouse."

But they have to be. 

Airplanes are closing on each other at 400, 500 knots — closure rates approaching a thousand miles an hour.

There's no time to get it wrong. 

You have to be aware of every single detail.

That's what this tool is about. 

Not just learning the language. 

Not just planning before you transmit. 

Not just respecting every word. 

Not just standardization. 

Not just practicing until it becomes habit. 

It's all of those things together, because this job is about details, and it will always be about details.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: phraseology is so much more than talking on the radio. 

It's one of the first places you'll discover what real greatness in ATC looks like, whichever option you're in.

Greatness in this profession comes from respecting the details. 

Learn to care about the little things, and you'll become the kind of controller who cares about everything happening at your airport, at your sector.

I'll close with Robert Collier again: "Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out."

That's exactly what these details are. 

You can't get through the Academy without them. 

You can't get through training without them. 

And you can't train someone else without them either.

Every great controller becomes a great controller one detail at a time. 

Every transmission you learn, 

every word you choose carefully, 

every habit you build adds another tool to your belt.

Keep building it, one tool at a time.

We're just scratching the surface of this tool belt series — clearances and a lot more are still ahead. 

Remember, you don't have to navigate your ATC journey alone. 

If it's not me, find someone. 

But let's do it side by side.

For Help: Set up a free consultation call at sidebysideatc.com. Text me at 817-233-8199 with any questions.

Talent will get you to the door. 

Perseverance is what walks you through it.

We're continuing our series on success in air traffic control being a choice — built on John Maxwell's book Success Is a Choice — and this week we're dealing with what may honestly be the single most important topic for anyone headed to Oklahoma City.

Perseverance.

If you're at the Academy right now, you already know exactly what I'm talking about. And having been there as an instructor for five years, I can tell you this with total confidence: the Academy is going to hit you. 

It will hit you when you least expect it. 

And then it's going to sit back and watch how you react.

That reaction is the whole ballgame.

Talent is important. 

I'm not going to tell you otherwise. 

But talent gets beaten up. 

Talent has bad days. 

Talent shows up to a non-radar problem and gets absolutely dismantled.

As John Maxwell puts it: "Talent provides hope for accomplishment, but perseverance guarantees it."

And the World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker said it about as plainly as it can be said: "Think things through, then follow through."

If you're at the Academy already, I guarantee you've heard some version of that from your instructors. 

Probably from every instructor, depending on how far in you are.

"Follow through."

"It's not finished until you are finished." 

"Finish the task."

And here's why that matters so much: if you finish the task, it won't come back around and haunt you.

Every scenario you run — non-radar lab, en route radar lab, tower labs, doesn't matter which — is nothing but a series of individual tasks. 

That's all it is. 

I used to tell my students that if you don't finish a task and you go off to do something else instead, you've just turned that task into a boomerang. And a boomerang whips around, and whips around, and because of the way it's built, it completes the circle. If you don't turn around, it is going to smack you upside the back of the head.

That's what an unfinished task does at the Academy. 

It comes back. 

And most of the time it comes back as a separation error — one of the worst errors you can take.

So follow through. 

Finish each task.

Vince Lombardi said the difference between a successful person and others is a lack of determination.

You are going to have to decide that you will persevere through whatever the Academy throws at you. 

And here's the key — you have to decide that before you get there. 

You have to make the decision that there is nothing that will come up that will deter me from reaching my goal.

I see it in the chats. 

I see it on Discord all the time. 

A student gets smacked upside the face for the first time, and in the en route program it usually happens in non-radar. It can happen on any of the problems. 

The first few are simpler, then it starts to ratchet up — and it has to ratchet up fast, because they only get 27 of them before you sit down with an evaluator.

So a student posts, "I made this many separation errors on this problem." And everybody responds, it happens, you're going to have a bad run.

They're right. 

And when it happens, you have to decide right there to keep going. 

You have to have already decided that this will not deter you.

One bad run. 

Two bad runs. 

Three in a row. 

Remember something important: those are not graded. 

They are practice scenarios. 

Practice is where you're supposed to make mistakes so you can learn from them.

I told my students the same thing I told my players when I coached soccer: practice is where we make mistakes.

But I want you to try. 

Try something new. 

Try something you haven't tried before — try it in practice. 

What I don't want is you trying something brand new for the first time in the non-radar evals. That is not the moment.

Try it in practice. 

And decide ahead of time that no matter what happens, you're reaching your goal. 

With that mindset, you can get through.

Your non-radar scenarios are 30 minutes. 

Radar is 40 to 45.

But it isn't a 45-minute problem. 

It isn't a 30-minute problem. 

It's a series of short tasks you have to complete — step by step by step, in the order the FAA wants you to do them.

That's a great habit to build, and it's exactly why practicing correctly matters so much.

Life isn't one very long race. 

It's a long series of shorter races, one after another. 

Each task has its own challenges. 

Each day is its own event. 

To be successful, you just have to keep plugging away.

And hear me on this: it is not speed that gets you through the Academy. 

It's perseverance, and completing each task.

You will develop speed as you practice. 

I guarantee it. 

I have seen it over and over and over again. 

You don't have to have speed at the beginning. Speed arrives as you get better at all the little details.

Thomas Edison said it's the last step in the race that counts the most. That's where the winner is determined. That's where the rewards come.

So if you're at the Academy — non-radar problem 8, or 10, or 13 is not the one that matters. 

The evals matter. 

The last day of non-radar is what actually counts.

How you get there doesn't matter, as long as you excel on the day.

But — and this is the part people skip — you can only finish well if you've been doing the small things every single day along the way. 

Commit to those, and you will succeed.

Giving up when adversity threatens can make a person bitter. 

Persevering through adversity can make you better.

Don't become bitter.

Look at adversity, look at being forced to push through something you weren't prepared for, as an opportunity to get better. 

Every scenario, every setback. I don't care which program you're in — N90, TRACON, terminal, en route, CTI, Advanced ATC. 

It does not matter. 

You are going to face adversity. 

I guarantee it. 

That's life.

But get the sweetness out of it. 

Push through and you come out the other side, and it is sweet over there. 

And you come out better.

Do the right thing every day, day after day. 

Every day you do the right things, you're investing in yourself.

That takes perseverance. 

But the payoff isn't addition — it's compounding. 

Over time it starts multiplying.

To get that, you have to do the right things. 

Have a plan. 

Practice. 

Practice well. 

Be in class listening to the instructors as they drone on through two or three lessons a day.

And understand this: that is your job. 

If you're at the Academy, you are getting paid to be a student. 

That's the job. 

Your job is to be there, to learn, and to do it every single day you're there.

It's only when you're tired that you really need perseverance. 

It's only when you face adversity that you need the strength to get through it.

Anybody can get through easy things. Anybody.

If air traffic control were easy, everybody would be doing it — because it's got to be the best job out there. 

But it's not easy. 

It's difficult. 

Sometimes it's crazy difficult.

I've had moments recently where a situation came up and my mind just said, there's no solution here. So my solution was to get everybody in the pattern on the ground and go from there. Was it the best solution? Maybe not. But it was a solution.

You're going to face times like that. 

You just persevere through them.

There's a quote in the book from Frank Tyger that I love: "Perseverance means more than trying and more than working hard. Perseverance is an investment. It's a willingness to bind yourself emotionally, intellectually, physically, and spiritually to an idea or a task until it's completed."

That demands a lot.

Here's the good news: everything you give is an investment in yourself. 

Everything you do at the Academy, at CTI, at Advanced ATC — all of it is an investment in you.

Each day, keep investing.

Now let's talk about what's coming for you.

A lifestyle of giving up. That one speaks for itself.

A wrong belief that life should be easy. Expectations will keep you from persevering faster than almost anything.

A wrong belief that success is a destination. This one is critical at the Academy. 

If you think you've arrived — if you think you've got non-radar figured out, or radar, or tower, or TRACON, or N90 — that is when you're in trouble. 

The second you think you no longer need to work to make progress, you start losing ground.

Every Academy program is designed so that you cannot stop progressing. 

If you feel like you've conquered this thing before the last day, you'll start going backward. 

And once you're going backward while the Academy keeps moving forward, catching up is incredibly difficult.

Success is not a destination. It's a process.

A lack of resiliency. You have to bounce back no matter how you feel. And again, that's a decision you make before you get to Oklahoma City. Decide now that there's nothing this program can throw at you — and it will throw everything it has — that will stop you from reaching your goal.

A lack of vision. No goal in front of you, no dream in front of you, and there's nothing pulling you forward. That's why companies have vision statements: it keeps everybody moving the same direction. 

We need the same thing as people.

Find a purpose. You have to have a vision. You have to have a goal.

Here's the line I want you to write down: "Persistence is stubbornness with a purpose."

Post it in your room. 

Put it on the bathroom mirror where you see it every morning. 

When you have a passionate sense of purpose, your energy rises, obstacles become incidental, and perseverance wins out.

Eliminate excuses. That one speaks for itself too.

Develop stamina. Everyone who achieves and maintains success has it. Stamina is the key to perseverance, and perseverance is a key to becoming successful. And all stamina really means is this: being able to work through it when you don't feel like it. 

Being able to push when you'd rather not.

That's it. 

That's the whole secret.

Perseverance is one of the main things you're going to need at the Academy to get through it. 

Not the only thing — but if I had to pick one, this is close to the top.

Think things through. 

Then follow through.

Don't leave boomerangs behind you. 

Don't let one bad practice run decide anything. 

Don't confuse the middle of the race with the end of it.

Do the small right things every day and let them compound.

You'll finish.

Wherever you are in this journey, you don't have to do it alone. If you've got a question, email me at tom.hanes@sidebysideatc.com, or head to sidebysideatc.com and let's set up a call.

We'll get through it. We'll get through it together, and we'll get through it Side by Side.

"The more difficult the victory, the greater the happiness in winning." - Pele

That's from Pelé — soccer legend, and one of my all-time favorite athletes. I actually got to meet him once. I shook his hand. That was it. To be clear: I got to meet him. He did not get to meet me.

But that quote has stuck with me for a long time, and it fits exactly where we are in this series.

We've walked through Level One — everything before the Academy. 

We've walked through Level Two — the Academy itself, and I know a lot of you came through CTI, Advanced ATC, or the military instead, and I hope you pulled something out of that one anyway, because there's a lot in there that carries over.

This week we're at Level Three. 

Your first facility. This is where learning becomes reality.

And here's the part nobody wants to hear on graduation day: the Academy is difficult, and passing it feels amazing precisely because it's so difficult — but passing it doesn't make you an air traffic controller.

A lot of students carry around the idea that if they can just get through the Academy, they'll finally be a controller. The reality is that passing the Academy earns you one thing. It earns you the right and the opportunity to go to the next level. You did something hard, and your reward is the chance to try something even harder.

Doesn't matter which option you went through. Doesn't matter which facility you're headed to. Here's what's different.

The Academy is about concepts. Procedures. Phraseology. Running scenario after scenario and squeezing as much learning out of each one as you can until you pass and you graduate.

Your first facility is not simulated.

Yes, you'll get simulator time. 

You'll get training scenarios. 

But when you plug in and start OJT — on-the-job training — that is live traffic. 

Real airplanes. 

Flown by real pilots. 

Carrying real people.

And that changes everything.

What your facility is going to teach you is that you have to adapt to the traffic. You have to be able to change your plan midstream when the traffic tells you to. 

And you're going to discover something that the Academy only hinted at: you cannot memorize ATC. You cannot memorize your way through training. You couldn't really do it at the Academy either, but at your first facility it's flat-out impossible.

You have to be able to take what your trainers are telling you and apply it. 

That's the whole game.

On top of that, you've got local procedures. Local airspace. And every facility has its own culture — its own way of doing things, its own personality. Every facility is different. You have to learn all of it and adapt to all of it at the same time you're trying to become a CPC.

Your first facility is where all of it comes together for the first time.

This is the one I see hit Academy graduates hardest.

You're starting over. 

Day one. 

Again.

In a lot of ways it feels exactly like your first day at the Academy. 

New building you've never been in. 

New faces. 

Nobody knows you. 

And here's the thing — that's just how it is, and that's how it's going to be every single time you change facilities for the rest of your career. You're going to be the new guy or the new girl. That's the deal.

A lot of graduates walk in thinking, I passed the Academy, the hard part's over. 

Then day two arrives with new maps, new procedures, new expectations — sometimes enormous expectations — new instructors, new supervisors, new management.

It is a lot to take in.

This isn't usually a problem with Academy graduates, but I'm going to say it anyway because it matters that much.

Go into your first facility incredibly humble.

I don't care what you scored at the Academy. And I can guarantee you they don't care either. 

They see Academy graduates come through all the time, and as far as they're concerned every single one of you scored about a 71.

So if you were one of the people who scored a 95 or a 98 — I think 98 is the highest anyone's ever put up going through the En Route Academy — it doesn't matter. And if you scraped through at 70.01, it doesn't matter either.

You all start over. You all start at the same point.

Go in as a sponge. 

Go in wanting to take in everything, learn everything. 

You're not going to learn everything in your first few months — nobody does — but that has to be the attitude. And make sure everybody who comes in contact with you can see it. 

Not because you're saying it. Because you're doing it.

At your first facility, it's all about what you do, how you carry yourself, and how much effort you put in. That's what determines how your coworkers see you and how they respond to you.

Driver One: Purpose. 

This matters even more here than it did at the Academy. 

You are going to have highs and you are going to have lows, and when you hit those lows you need your purpose solid and in front of you. 

Write it down. 

Why are you willing to keep pushing? 

Training is long. It gets frustrating. It gets emotional. 

Your purpose is what keeps you moving forward on the days when you can't seem to do anything right.

Driver Two: Plan. 

Your facility will have a training plan for you. Early on it'll feel like they're just dumping things on you — here are the maps, learn them, draw them. And believe me, they're a lot harder than the Academy maps. 

That goes for towers and TRACONs. You're learning approach plates on top of it.

They have a plan. 

But you need a plan too. 

How many hours are you studying? When are you reading through the SOPs and the LOAs? 

I'm at a contract tower and I think we have seven LOAs. 

A decently busy tower will have eight to ten. 

A TRACON has one with every Podunk tower in the airspace. 

At a center — oh my. LOAs everywhere. 

And you can't just know they exist, you have to understand them.

That takes a plan. 

Daily goals. 

Weekly goals. 

Monthly goals.

But here's the good news: this is not the Academy. 

It is not twelve weeks of pure terror. 

You do not have to give up your family or your entire social life to get through your first facility. 

You do have to manage your time well, because you have to keep moving forward — but you have time.

Driver Three: Phraseology. 

Every facility has its own phraseology. 

Honestly, every controller does — all of it inside the 7110.65, but everybody's got their own read on what's real phraseology, what you can get away with, and what you can't.

When I say phraseology at this level, I really mean all the details. 

Facility-specific techniques. 

How they want you to work traffic. 

How they want you to communicate with each other, on the line and off. 

You will not be left hanging in the wind trying to come up with your own interpretation of the .65. 

Your trainers will tell you. They'll give you more than a few tips on exactly what they want.

Just expect there to be a ton of it. 

You thought the Academy was a lot of information — and it was. 

Your first facility is more. Don't let that surprise you.

Driver Four: Practice. 

Repetition becomes critical here, and so does observation. 

You're going to have a lot of opportunity to watch your coworkers work traffic. Find the ones who are obviously at the top of their game — usually the ones with fifteen, twenty-plus years in. 

Sit down. 

Listen to how they work. 

Watch how they work. 

You won't understand a lot of it at first. 

You're new. 

That's fine. 

Keep watching, keep listening, keep learning — and your willingness to do that will show.

You'll get simulator time too. 

Bigger facilities have them; smaller ones might not. 

When I got to Love Field in Dallas there was no simulator, and when I finally got to the radar position my trainer took me over to the TRACON so we could use theirs to practice. 

The opportunities are there if you want them.

And at the end of every training day, you and your trainer sit down and go over it. Sometimes you'll get to watch exactly what you did on a replay and talk through what you might have done differently. 

This is serious training. 

Driver Five: Picture. 

This is one of your biggest growth areas. 

You move from memorizing procedures to seeing traffic — and then from seeing traffic to anticipating conflicts. 

You scratched the surface of this at the Academy. 

At your first facility you take it to a much deeper level. 

You start to understand not just what they told you to do, but why. 

Because it works.

You become the chess master who can see four, five, six moves down the road. 

You begin to think like an air traffic controller.

Driver Six: Performance. 

It all comes down to this. 

It did at the Academy, and it does so much more here, because you're in a real operation, in a real building, talking to real pilots.

Your confidence is going to go up. 

Then it's going to take a hit. 

Then up, then another hit. 

At the beginning those are big waves.

Here's how you flatten them out: consistency. 

Put off leave. 

Put off big family events as much as you reasonably can — it doesn't have to be a hundred percent, but as much as you can — so you can train day in and day out, as many days a week as they'll let you. 

Three, four, five, whatever it is. 

Be there.

Do that, and those waves start to level off. And when they do, two things happen. 

You start to trust yourself and your own decision-making. 

And your trainer starts to trust you too. 

They sits back. 

They let you take more of it.

Remember: in training it's still their position, on their ticket. 

They're responsible for the operation. 

You're responsible for learning and for showing them you've learned. 

The more consistent you get, the more you make the right decisions at the right time, the more he — or she — lets go. 

And that's when you really start to grow.

I failed a D-side evaluation once at Fort Worth Center. 

Then the computer went belly up and we had to run the problem again — and they only had one problem, so it was the exact same scenario. 

Now, I may not be the smartest man in the world, but I'm smart enough to know not to do the same thing twice when I already knew where I'd messed up. So I did it the right way. Everybody laughed, because it was pretty obvious.

You don't have to do the drivers. 

Nothing says you have to. 

Nothing says you have to listen to me at all. 

I've just been doing this since 1989 — that's when I started training at my first facility, after the Academy in 1988. Yes, back in the 1900s. 

I'm an old man. 

It'll be thirty-eight years in November since I hired on with the FAA.

You don't have to take my advice. 

I can pretty much guarantee you'll have an easier time if you do.

You're not a student anymore. 

You're a developmental. "Academy graduate" is just the pay band.

Your Academy scores? 

Throw them out. 

Nobody cares. 

Nobody has ever asked me mine. 

The only time it ever came up was when I was back at the Academy as an instructor and we sat around going, "hey, what'd you make?" — and I won't even tell you what most of the instructors scored when they went through.

What they care about is what you do at their facility.

It isn't intelligence. 

What they're watching for is:

Because you are going to make mistakes. 

That's not in question.

I've seen trainees who weren't coachable. I've seen trainees who weren't really willing to learn. They're hard to work with and hard to train, because they find it difficult to accept your observations and the way you want to train them.

And I've seen the complete opposite — trainees who came in every single day wanting to learn as much as possible. Those trainees were a joy to train. An absolute joy.

When you make a mistake, acknowledge it and learn from it. 

Learn from your mistakes and those mistakes are moving you forward. 

Don't learn from them and those same mistakes will stop you in your tracks.

You're going to have bad training days. 

Everybody does. 

CPCs have bad sessions. 

Your trainer is going to have a bad day training you. 

We're all people. It happens.

You're also going to plateau. 

You'll improve and improve and improve — and then you'll sit at one level and stay there. 

The good news is you're not regressing. The bad news is it doesn't feel like you're going anywhere, and your trainer and your supervisor feel it too. They just want a little more so they can certify you on that position, and you're stuck.

That's frustrating. 

And if it lasts a while, you start to doubt yourself. You start wondering if you'll ever get to where you need to be.

These are the emotions. 

This is exactly why you need a purpose and a plan.

Because there's only one way to crack through a plateau. 

One way through the bad training days, the frustration, the self-doubt that shows up in every single trainee.

Be consistent. 

Be there, day in and day out.

If you do that, you will get through it. 

You will certify.

And remember one more thing about your trainer, and about every controller in that control room, in that tower, in that TRACON: every single one of them was a trainee once. 

Every one. 

And the ones who volunteer to train — they're volunteers — they want you to succeed. They want you to get to CPC. 

They don't just want you to certify, either; they want you to become a great controller. And they'll help you get there.

So focus on daily improvement. 

Trust the process. 

Keep developing. 

You'll get through Level Three.

I'll leave you with this quote from Robert Collier:

That is what it is all about!

If you've got a question, or you need help, head over to sidebysideatc.com and set up a call. It's free, there's no pressure, and we'll just talk for as long as we need to. It says thirty minutes on the calendar — I'm not much for clocks.

Text me if that's easier: 817-233-8199. (I love that I've got two niners in my phone number. Perfect.) Questions, concerns, or something you just want feedback on — I'm happy to help. That's why I'm here. My mission is to help as many people become great controllers as I can.

And whether it's me or somebody else, just remember: don't try to navigate your ATC journey on your own.

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.