We're continuing our trek through John Maxwell's book Success Is a Choice and looking at how it applies to us as air traffic controllers, and to those of you working to become one. 

The title of this series is Success as an Air Traffic Controller Is a Choice. 

Each week we look at an area where we get to make a choice, and where being intentional can make us more successful than we would have been otherwise.

This week we start with becoming more teachable.

I can't think of a better thing for controllers to remember. 

It doesn't matter if you're in my position, with 35 years in and close to 37, or if it's your first or second day at the Academy. 

We always have to be teachable, and we can always be more teachable.

Maxwell makes a point about talent that every one of us needs to hear. 

Talented people often think they know it all, and that makes it hard for them to keep expanding their talent.

When you think you know it all, you stop right there. 

Whatever level you're at is where you stay.

Teachability is all about attitude. 

It's the desire to listen, to learn, and to apply. It's the hunger to discover and grow. 

As Maxwell puts it, "Intelligent people with teachable attitudes can become extremely successful."

He also says that we are the lid on our abilities, in every aspect of our lives. 

If we stop learning and stop growing, that lid stays right where it is, and we can't go past it. 

If we stay teachable, we can keep raising the lid. 

We can expand not just our talent but everything else in our lives.

Maxwell gives five teachability truths. 

Let's go through them one at a time.

Teachable people are fully engaged in life. 

They get excited about things, and there's a real relationship between passion and potential.

If you're at the Academy, I can tell you from experience, both as a student and as an instructor, that the more passion you have for what you're learning and what you're going through, the better you will be. 

Passion drives your talent and energizes it.

Teachable people are always open to new ideas, and they'll learn from anyone who has something to offer.

That's not always your instructors, whether you're at the Academy, a CTI school, or an advanced ATC program. Sometimes the best things you learn come from your classmates, the people going through it with you. 

That's why the Academy lets you watch your classmates run problems. 

It's encouraged, and when I was there it was even required a couple of times in radar. 

I thought that was a great idea.

You get to see how a fellow student deals with the tasks that come up. We always tried to get our students to notice one thing in particular: how much time they actually have to get those tasks done. 

When you're in the D-side seat, things come at you so much faster than they actually are. When you're sitting behind someone else, you can see it, because you're not the one trying to get everything accomplished.

You'll learn a lot from your instructors, especially in three months of en route or a little over two months of tower. 

And if you practice together, you'll learn from your classmates too.

This one is going to be great for the Academy. 

Too many people view learning as an event instead of a process.

I've seen it over and over, and I still see it in the Discord chat and other places students gather. 

Students arrive at the Academy expecting learning to be a one-time thing. 

They expect to go over the lesson in class and then be able to apply it. 

It doesn't usually work that way.

Learning at the Academy happens day after day after day. 

That's why you have to practice, and practice, and practice everything you go over in that classroom. 

It's the only way to take it from the classroom into real air traffic situations. 

It isn't theoretical, and you can't just think about it. 

You have to actually practice it to make it practical and make it real.

Oh, do I know that one. 

I was one of them. 

I was probably fairly tough to teach, especially when I thought I knew everything I needed to know.

This is going to sound strange, but don't let your talent get in the way of your success. 

Don't rely on the talent you walked into the Academy with. 

Don't rely on the talent you had after a month. 

Stay teachable and make that talent grow every day. 

Try to learn something new every day, and you'll be amazed at the transformation you go through over your time in Oklahoma City.

This is the big one. 

Pride creates an arrogance of success: an inflated sense of self-worth, along with a distorted view of reality.

Here's how it plays out. 

You run a couple of good problems and you start to feel like you've got this. 

I'll tell you that you haven't gotten it yet. 

Maybe you're in the 11s and 12s in the radar lab and running near-perfect problems. 

You're so close to your goal. 

Don't go through two and a half months of intensity and then let up in the last two or three days.

One thing I've seen destroy students is thinking they knew everything they needed to know. 

It was heartbreaking to watch.

That attitude leads to a loss of desire to learn and an unwillingness to change. 

The moment you become unteachable, no matter what skill level you've reached as a controller, that skill level becomes your limit. 

You will never get better than the point where you stopped listening.

Maxwell points out several problems with pride, and they apply directly to our world.

Pride closes our minds to new ideas. 

Teachability is a willingness to open our minds. 

Pride is the exact opposite.

Pride closes our minds to feedback. 

You're going to get a lot of feedback at the Academy, whether you're in en route, tower, or TRACON. 

Sometimes it won't be as constructive as you'd like. 

When I was there, we had some amazing instructors, and we had a few I wouldn't have wanted to sit with my struggling students, because they weren't able to put their feedback in a constructive way. 

But many instructors were great with students, especially the ones who were struggling. 

Some actively wanted to work with those students.

Stay open to the feedback you get. 

Stay open to what your classmates tell you when you practice together. 

Be hard on each other, but accept that you're doing it for each other, not to each other.

I still do this one myself. 

A situation will come up at work, as it has several times over the last few weeks. I'll work it. Everybody lands, everybody takes off, everybody gets where they want to go. 

But it doesn't feel great, and it probably doesn't look great, and I know I could have done it better. So I'll ask the controller next to me, "What were you thinking when I did that?" 

They tell me, I try to accept it, and I understand that maybe the next time something similar comes up, I can work it better.

Pride keeps us from making needed changes. 

That one's huge. 

We have to be able to take feedback, admit our mistakes, and then change so we don't repeat them. 

When I trained people in the tower and at the center, I didn't care if they made mistakes. 

What I cared about was whether they made the same mistake day after day. 

We would talk about it at the end of each day, and some trainees either wouldn't accept the feedback or wouldn't make the change.

1. Recognize and admit that you have pride. 

We all do. 

We all have a lot of self-pride, and it's hard for us to accept feedback. 

But in the safety environment we work in, and the one you want to join, you have to accept that you don't know everything. You have to be able to accept help from others. 

Pride will keep you from ever seeking help and ever getting better.

I try to thank the people around me for helping. I did it at the center, and I did it constantly at the Academy.

3. Learn to laugh at yourself. 

I'm sorry you don't get to meet the instructor version of me, because one of my main tenets, as an instructor and as a soccer coach, was that you have to be able to laugh. 

It's even better if you can aim some of the jokes at yourself. 

This job is stressful and there's a lot riding on it. 

We have to laugh and tell jokes. 

When I was at the center, my goal was always to say something that busted up the entire specialty. I came close a few times, and I learned that people remembered what I said. I thought I was the only one who did.

Here's how you put it into practice.

John Wooden, the famous basketball coach, said it best:

"Everything we know, we learn from someone else."

I dare each of you to find something you did not learn from someone else. 

When you do, email me at tomhanes@sidebysideatc.com and say, "Tom, you were wrong. This is what I learned, and I learned it from inside me. No book, no audiobook, no podcast." 

I'll be waiting.

Thank you for reading. If you want help along the way, head to sidebysideatc.com. 

You can email me, text me, or set up a free call. 

Text is easier than calling, since a call may catch me at work, where I can't respond. 

If you're at the Academy, hang in there. 

If you're struggling, contact me. 

If you're not struggling, contact me. 

My goal is to make sure you don't feel alone as you go through this.

Don't try to navigate your ATC journey alone. Let's do it side by side.

Last week I talked about phraseology and the details. This week we're staying in the foundational phase of the tools you need as a controller, and I'm calling this one the multitasking tool.

If you've read me before, you know I'm not a huge fan of what most people call multitasking. I don't think anyone can really do multiple things at the same time. Plenty of people disagree with me, and that's fine. 

But there are some things you can and should be able to do together as a controller, and building that ability is what this post is about.

I want to start with a quote from John Maxwell:

"You don't become a great multitasker in one day. You build one small discipline at a time. Eventually, those disciplines become habits. And those habits free your mind to think ahead."

That fits air traffic control almost perfectly. If you've been following along, you know I'm a big believer in finishing one thing and then moving on to the next. These small disciplines are what let your mind do exactly that.

One of the biggest things Academy students don't realize is coming is strip marking.

They don't think about it before they get to Oklahoma City. They don't think about it in Basics, because they don't have to do it there. And strip marking is becoming less of an issue as the FAA moves further from paper strips. 

But there are still places where you have to use them, and the en route portion of the Academy is one of them.

Strips are still used in both radar and non-radar, but especially in non-radar. As long as non-radar is part of the Academy, this is something you need to be aware of.(It looks like the Non-Radar portion of the Academy will be going away early in 2027.)

You can't really practice strip marking before you arrive. 

What you can do is start training your mind to be ready for it. You'll need to mark strips while you're talking; and while you're listening, which is the harder of the two.

Nobody walks into this career able to do that from day one. 

For some people it comes more easily, and for others it's harder. 

But everybody starts at zero. 

If you're struggling with it right now, that's okay. We all struggled with it at some point.

Have you ever watched an experienced controller work and wondered how they're doing all of that at once?

Let me tell you about the time I did. 

I had been in the FAA for nine years and I was an experienced controller. I arrived at Fort Worth Center along with a handful of others who showed up the same day from different facilities. Three of us were experienced controllers, and the rest had come straight from the Academy. For several weeks we were upstairs learning maps and what the facility expected of us.

Near the end of that stretch, a controller transferred in from Oakland Center. He was on a different training track than the rest of us. The three of us who were already certified had all come from towers, but he came from a center, so he was fast-tracked. He went into our simulator, the DYSIM, and started running problems for the specialty he'd be working. It was one of the busiest areas in the building, if not the busiest.

We were allowed to go down and watch him work the most difficult sector in the building on a simulator problem. I stood behind him, watched, and realized I might be in the wrong building. If they were going to require me to do what he was doing, I wasn't sure it would work.

I'm telling you that story because wherever you are in your ATC journey, you may find yourself in the same spot.

The Academy likes to take your class in to watch a class that's ahead of you for a short while, so you can see where you're headed. Then a newer class comes in and watches you. It's a continuous process. You do it in non-radar, and you'll do it again in radar.

It's the same feeling every time. 

You watch what the class ahead of you is doing, and you start to wonder if you'll ever get there.

Part of what this blog is about, and part of what these tools are about, is getting you from where you are to where you want to be and need to be. 

Multitasking is one of those tools.

Let's talk about what multitasking isn't.

You don't magically learn to do two things at once. I say "appear to," because you're not actually doing multiple things at the same time. 

You're doing things quickly enough, surely enough, and correctly enough that it looks like you're doing multiple things at once to someone watching. The observer simply can't think that fast.

Think about driving. 

Your foot is on the gas and you're looking out the windshield. You're also scanning your speed, your fuel, and your route. If your car has a GPS display, you're checking when your next turn is coming. You're also noting who's beside you, who's ahead, and who's behind. (We'll talk about your scan in another episode.) 

You aren't doing all of those things simultaneously. Your scan is moving fast enough that you can drive and check things in the same moment.

Typing from something that's written down works the same way. You're reading first and typing second, but quickly enough that it looks simultaneous. 

Playing the piano, or any instrument, is no different. You're reading the notes and playing the notes.

When you first learn any of these skills, it takes a lot of concentration and you have to go slowly. Over time you get the mechanics down, and you get to go faster. Your brain learns that it can move ahead.

When you first learn to drive, whoever is teaching you probably doesn't have the radio on. As you get better and the mechanics become automatic, you can turn the radio on. 

Your brain is now free to listen to music without being any less involved in the driving.

That's what we're building.

The Academy will teach you, and then require you, to talk and write when you're giving a clearance, and to listen and write when someone is giving a clearance to you. That's particularly true in non-radar.

You'll start at the point where that's all you can do. 

I've seen students who couldn't listen and write at the same time. I've seen students who couldn't talk and write, even when the writing was just circling the clearance as they gave it. 

It sounds simple, but when you're sitting in that chair and giving the clearance, it isn't simple. 

Not unless you've practiced.

The more you practice, the more your brain gets used to it. 

If you can get to the point where you can talk and write and listen and write at the same time, you'll be so much further along than the people who can't. 

It's all about these little bitty things that you keep adding up, and adding up, and adding up.

You've heard me talk about the four levels, so let's keep using them.

Level 1: pre-Academy (or whatever ATC school you're headed to). 

You've been building individual tools: learning, listening, phraseology, the details, the alphabet, the numbers, your maps. But you haven't really built multitasking yet.

There are simple ways to start. 

Take notes at a lecture. 

Take notes from an audiobook. 

Take notes from a podcast. 

The key is that you can't hit pause. 

At the Academy, you can't stop the clock and finish writing before you move on. 

It's a lot like a lecture. 

When I was in college, we had a joke about one of my history professors: if you dropped your pen, you missed a thousand years of history. She talked that fast. (I'm just glad I didn't have her for Spanish. She taught that too.)

Pre-Academy, you can start training your mind to listen and write and to talk and write at the same time. That matters most if you're headed to en route, but it applies to tower as well. 

There's going to be writing involved: call signs, strip marking for clearances, and probably some strip marking for ground control, like writing runways on strips. 

If you can do those things while you're talking and listening, you're ahead of the game. 

And that's where we want to stay.

I can tell you from experience, from being there with students, that being able to write and talk, or listen and talk, "at the same time" will keep you from feeling overwhelmed. 

If you struggle with it, you're struggling to keep up, and that's when time seems to speed up on you. 

If you can do these things together, the clock seems to slow down. 

You seem to have more time to do what you need to do.

Level 2: the Academy. 

This is where you build the strip marking and clearance habit. 

Clearances and strip marking go hand in hand, and the Academy does a fairly good job of teaching them that way. 

You need to learn them that way too. 

A clearance isn't really given if the strip marking isn't there, because you need proof on the strip of what you did.

Level 3: your first facility. 

What you'll use depends on where you land. 

TRACONs don't use strips. 

I'm not even sure the TRACON I work under has a printer by the controllers' positions. I know flight data has one, but beyond that I couldn't tell you. Even so, controllers there take notes from time to time.

In towers, it's a different story. 

Where I work, we keep a pad with all the call signs, and we take our traffic count from it. There are times when it gets busy enough that it's very difficult to keep up, and we sometimes have to go back and ask, "How many touch-and-goes did that guy do? How many did this guy do?" and fill in the gaps. If you've built the habit of writing and talking, or talking and writing, at the same time, you'll be ahead and it'll be much easier.

At your first facility there is also a lot more pressure. 

You can't stop the clock when it's real traffic. 

You just have to keep going. 

Being able to do these simple tasks well enough, often enough, and fast enough will help you in training.

Level 4: CPC. 

This is where you become the guy from Oakland Center: calm, assured, and able to step in and work the problem. Remember, I came in as a CPC just like he did, and I looked at what he was doing and thought, Oh no. Will I ever get to that point?

You can. 

You can become the person other people watch and wonder, "How could I ever do that?" 

I got there, and there's nothing special about me. You can get there too.

It doesn't happen because the job has gotten easier. 

It hasn't. 

It's actually gotten much more difficult. 

It happens because those individual tools have become habits, ways you simply do things. 

That frees your brain to anticipate problems and to solve them in interesting ways. (That may be what we talk about next week, though I haven't decided.) 

It also lets you mentor and train others, and it lets you make better decisions.

Writing and talking, and listening and writing, may not sound like a big deal. 

It really is.

Even if you end up somewhere you don't use strips much, training yourself to write and talk at the same time pays off. 

Here's why:

So how do you build this tool? 

One thing at a time.

The Academy will teach you strip marking and where to write things. When you reach your first facility, they'll teach you whatever strip marking they use. 

Learn it, and learn it, and learn it until you can't do it wrong.

This isn't memorization. 

It's practice. 

As you learn the strip marking, you free yourself to concentrate on the listening and on the clearances. 

Practice it until your brain is free to move on, but make sure you finish what you're doing before you let it go to the next thing.

If you do that, you'll stay ahead of the entire problem or scenario, whether it's tower or en route. 

You won't be wondering whether you did that, because your strips or your pad are up to date. 

You can stay ahead without worrying about what you might have missed.

You have to trust the process. 

You have to trust that the practice will make it work.

It isn't about how quickly you become good at something at the Academy. 

It's about how consistently you work at getting better, day by day. 

That's what the Academy is about, and it's what training at your first facility is about. 

It's what Level 4 should be about too. 

Even as a CPC, you should be getting better at your craft every single day.

In the five years I worked with students, watched students, and taught students at the Academy, a few of them could multitask this way on day one. Most of those had come from a CTI school. Even students from the military struggled at times, because the military doesn't require the same amount of writing while talking or listening that the FAA does.

But a lot of the successful students weren't the ones who could do it on day one. 

I tell the same thing to every student I mentor and coach: it's not about doing it on day one. 

They don't give you an evaluation on day one. 

In en route, the evaluations come on day 29, and on days 58 and 59. 

They don't expect you to do it on day one. 

They do expect you to do it on the evaluation days.

So trust the process. 

Put in intense, focused practice, one tool at a time. 

And one day you'll realize you're not struggling at work anymore. 

Whether that happens at the Academy, at your first facility, or even as a CPC, all it means is that you've built your tools to the point where you can do them almost automatically.

I'll close with a quote from Robert Collier:

"Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out."

That's what becoming great at this profession is all about: small efforts, consistently, day in and day out.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for hanging in there with me. If you need help, or you want to schedule a free call so we can talk about where you are in your journey and how to get where you want to go, you'll find the links at sidebysideatc.com.

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

I almost skipped this chapter.

We're continuing through Success Is a Choice — John Maxwell's framework applied to becoming an air traffic controller — and when I got to the chapter on courage, I sat with it for a while and thought, this doesn't fit us.

Courage as an air traffic controller? 

That felt like a strange concept. 

We're not running into burning buildings. 

We're sitting at a sector.

But the more I worked through it, the more I realized I had it completely backwards. 

So we're not skipping it.

Think about where you are right now.

Maybe you're at CTI school. 

Maybe Advanced ATC. 

Maybe you're at the Academy. 

Maybe you just decided to apply and you're starting the process. 

Maybe you're in the military working traffic right now.

At every one of those moments, when you made the decision to go after this career — that took courage.

I've told this story before. 

When I first decided I wanted to take the test, my wife and I were dating. I called her up specifically to tell her what I wanted to do, and I knew she was going to be against it. I just knew it. 

I knew she'd hate the stress. I knew she'd hate all of it.

So we're talking, and I say, "Hey, I've got an idea. I want to go take the test to become an air traffic controller."

She didn't even hesitate. She said, "Oh, I think you'd be great at it."

And I thought, you have got to be kidding me. You really have got to be kidding me.

But she meant it. 

And it was in that moment that I realized this was what I needed to do. 

That this was what I was going to be called to do.

Some of you have that. 

You have friends and family backing you all the way. 

And some of you are going to have to make this journey largely on your own.

If that's you, understand that's exactly one of the reasons I'm here. 

I don't want any of you feeling like you have to go through this alone — because every single one of us, at some point in this journey, is going to need help.

But make no mistake: deciding to do something this outlandish takes courage.

C.S. Lewis said,"Courage isn't simply one of the virtues — it's the form of every virtue at its testing point."

Here's what that means for us. 

It takes courage to apply. 

It takes courage to take the test. 

It takes courage to travel to Oklahoma City, a place you may have never been. 

It takes courage to walk into a room full of people you've never seen before, knowing you don't know it all.

That may sound simple. 

It isn't. 

It takes courage to commit to something bigger than what you started out as.

You can do nothing worthwhile without courage.

To discover and develop your talent, you're going to need courage. 

And once you display courage, it's going to get tested — continually. 

Here's where.

Your courage will be tested when you seek a truth you know may be painful. For us, the truth you're seeking is the dream. It's the goal. And I'll tell you right now, especially if you're headed to the Academy: there is going to be some pain in it.

It'll be tested when change is needed but inactivity is more comfortable. People resist change. That's just human nature. The moment you decide to step out of the ordinary, you're going to be challenged.

There's a line in the book worth sitting with: 

our situation doesn't make us — we make our situation. 

Our circumstances don't have to define us; we can redefine our circumstances through our actions.

And then this one: we must be willing to give up all we have in order to become all we can be.

How great is that? Read it again.

It'll be tested when learning and growing expose your weaknesses. And they will get exposed — especially at the Academy. It's easy to be brave in an area of strength. It's much harder in an area of weakness.

That's exactly why you need a support system in place before you start finding out what your weaknesses are. Family. Friends. A coach. Your classmates. Your instructors. Somebody. Because you're going to have to get past those weaknesses, and doing it alone is brutal.

It'll be tested when you take the high road while others treat you badly. This one may not come up as much at the Academy, but keep it in mind. If a situation comes up — a classmate, or an instructor — take the high road.

That said, I'll be straight with you: don't assume that everything an instructor tells you, or how they tell you, is proper. If an instructor does something you feel is genuinely improper, by all means let someone in the FAA know. There were several instructors during my time who had no business being instructors. Unfortunately.

It'll be tested when being out front makes you an easy target. When you decide to be a leader — and I want all of you to be leaders — part of the deal is that you take some flak, because you're out front.

But here's the beautiful thing about it. A leader is willing to take that, so the people behind them don't have to. Sometimes you're going to be out front and you're going to absorb the barrage. That's just what it is.

And it'll be tested every time you hit an obstacle to your progress. Adversity is always the partner of progress. Anytime we want to move forward, obstacles, difficulties, problems, and predicaments show up. We should expect nothing less — and if you're at the Academy, you already know all about that.

But we should almost welcome those things. Because what they mean is that we're progressing. We're growing. Every one of them is something we can learn from.

Inside. Not outside.

There is no one who can make the decision for you to have courage in the face of adversity. 

People can try. 

If I'm your coach, I will try. 

But it is an internal decision and it always will be.

You'll face internal decisions to follow the rules in all walks of life, and especially in ATC. 

Internal decision. 

You'll face the choice to push past adversity or let it stop you. 

Internal decision.

And let me be specific about what I mean by "the right thing," because I'm not talking about the rules, or the SOPs, or the LOAs. That's not it.

The right thing — the thing that actually takes courage — is the practice. 

The studying. 

The work outside the classroom and outside the lab that you have to do to be successful.

Doing that continually. 

Making it a habit.

I want y'all to really hear this: it takes courage to do that day in and day out. Especially when you're not seeing results yet.

And I'll say this plainly, because somebody needs to hear it: we all progress at different speeds and different rates. 

Some faster, some slower. 

If you're progressing slower than you think you should be, it takes courage to keep going anyway.

Keep practicing. 

Keep studying. 

Be courageous in those exact moments, and you will see growth. 

You will see yourself get better. 

It will happen.

But if you decide not to — it won't. 

It's pretty simple. 

Decide to stop practicing, and you stop growing, and that dream gets further and further away.

That is not what we want for you.

One thing I noticed about the classes that were most successful at the Academy — they weren't just close-knit. 

They had leaders. 

And usually not just one. They had several people who, because of who they were and the decisions they made day in and day out, got looked at as leaders by the whole class.

Every class needs that. 

Every class needs somebody who, at the right moment, stands up and says: hey, we've got this. Let's get through it.

Here's the payoff. 

Act courageously, get past adversity, and watch your horizon expand — every single time.

If you want success, you have to show courage. There's no other way to reach your potential.

And it's your potential you're chasing. 

Not somebody else in the class. 

Not somebody else at school. 

Your potential as a person and your potential as a controller. 

That's the target, and reaching it takes courage.

It may not seem like being an air traffic controller is a courageous career. But there are going to be so many times in your career when you face adversity. 

I've been there. 

And how you face it is going to say a great deal about the person you become.

I'm not the same man who decided to take that test about 37 years ago. 

I'm not the same guy who walked into the tower in Brownsville, Texas. 

Not the same guy who walked into the tower in Dallas. 

Not the same guy who walked in the door the first time at Fort Worth Center. 

And not the same guy who walked into the Academy to become an instructor.

Every day I try to grow. 

A better me. 

A better dad. 

A better husband. 

A better controller. 

A better podcaster. 

A better coach.

A better mentor.

Because if I ever stop — if I ever feel like I've attained what I needed to attain — that's when I start going backward.

So every day for me is about becoming better, stronger, more resilient. 

More perseverance. 

More courage.

I'm in the middle of that process right now. 

So are you. 

I don't care who you are, where you are, or how old you are. 

We're all in it.

That's exactly why this company is called Side by Side ATC.

Whether it's this blog, the podcast,  the coaching/mentoring program, whatever it is — we're going to do it together. 

We're going to get through the process of becoming a controller, or becoming a better controller, side by side.

And honestly, that's what I wish I could have given more students when I was in Oklahoma City. I really believe there were quite a few who would have made it if they'd had somebody there with them — more than I could be as an instructor standing at the front of the room.

So if you've got a question, email me at tom.hanes@sidebysideatc.com. 

Questions about the website? I'm an air traffic controller, not a website builder. Send them anyway — I'm happy to answer.

And wherever you are in your journey, we'll get through it. Together. Side by side.

"A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way."- John Maxwell

This is exactly where we're headed this week, because Level Four really is about becoming a leader.

We've walked the whole road now. 

Level One was pre-Academy — building the foundation. 

Level Two was the Academy, or CTI, or the military — where all that preparation meets performance. 

Level Three was your first facility, where learning becomes reality and you start working real traffic.

This week we finish it. 

Level Four. You're a CPC.

And this is the one everybody's chasing.

Here's the trap a lot of people in those first three levels fall into: All I have to do is get certified. Then I can coast. Nice career, punch the clock, ride it out.

If you think about certification as a finish line, you are going to miss out on an awful lot.

And understand — certification itself is a process, not a moment. 

In the en route environment you'll certify on being area rated first. 

That lets you rip strips. 

Then you get your D-sides, which lets you work a position while you're still training on others. 

Then radar school, and you start certifying on your radars. 

Every specialty at every center has its own progression for which sectors you work first. Generally it's the easier sectors first — though there are specialties and there are centers that don't have any easy sectors, and you just get thrown in.

That whole progression is a process. 

Becoming a CPC is a process. 

And it should never, ever be the finish line. 

It's a goal along the way.

You've had a purpose and a plan at every one of these levels, and I've said before that they have to be fluid — they have to change as you move up. 

That doesn't stop at Level Four. If anything, that's where it matters most.

Every CPC will tell you about this day.

You're sitting on the last sector you're training on. Your supervisor's been plugged in. Your trainer's been plugged in. 

And then both of them unplug and walk away.

Now it's your sector.

Now they're all your sectors. 

You're the one responsible. 

And a lot of the time, you're the only one on that sector.

That's the moment everything changes.

You're not worried about surviving anymore. 

You survived. 

You survived the Academy. 

You survived training. 

That weight comes off your shoulders and it's an incredible feeling.

Now — that doesn't mean you'll never train again. You will.

Even if you never change facilities, I guarantee you they're going to change what sectors your specialty owns, and you'll be training again. 

When I was at Fort Worth Center we had four sectors in my specialty. I certified on all four. Then they gave us two more, so I trained on those — now I'm certified on six. Then they took those two away, and I'm back to four. Then they decided to give us two other sectors — three, really, but two were being combined into one.

So now I'm certified on six again.

That's what happens over the course of a year. 

Over the course of a career. 

And I never even changed specialties. 

Some people do change specialties and go through the whole thing again with different sectors, starting back on D-sides — it goes much faster the second or third time, but you're still doing it. 

I stayed put and still had to train on new sectors. That's just a fact of life.

If you change facilities, you are starting over. 

But you won't be starting as an Academy graduate. 

You'll be starting as a CPC transfer, and they treat you differently.

In a terminal, hopefully there's movement — though right now, unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot. 

And there's only so much a tower can do as far as giving you new sectors. So you may not train much again, and if you never change facilities, you may never train again at all.

But even without training, you still have to have goals.

Becoming a CPC doesn't make you immune to any of this. 

The drivers don't go away. 

They evolve.

Your purpose used to be get through training. 

That was the whole thing.

Now your purpose has to expand beyond yourself. 

How can I contribute? 

How can I make this operation better? 

Do I have ideas that might actually improve it? 

And how can I help the newer controllers succeed?

And here's something important: these drivers aren't just for work.

Now that you're a CPC, you can expand your horizons. 

You can have a purpose outside of work. 

Up until now your main purpose had to be succeeding in training. That was correct. But now you get to look wider.

One caution, and I've seen this go wrong. 

I have watched new trainees come into the center and immediately get hyper-involved in the union — to the point that they're not training, and it's actively costing them. 

I'm sorry, but that's not your purpose. 

Your purpose is to train and certify. 

Then you expand. 

Get certified first.

Give yourself time after certification, too. 

It doesn't have to happen the day after you certify. 

Get comfortable. But start thinking about it.

You'll notice something at the centers, and in the towers too — and the busier the tower, the more likely it is: controllers are great at side hustles. 

Side businesses. 

Side things.

And to a certain extent, you need that. You need something more than work.

I've known people — I still know people — who don't really have anything outside of work. 

They're not the happiest people at work. 

And they'll keep working for years and years past the point where the FAA forces them out, because that's what they have. That's who they feel they are.

So have a plan. 

Continuing education. 

Career goals inside the FAA. 

Facility involvement. 

Leadership opportunities — there will be plenty available. 

Look into them.

And if your plan is focused on something outside of work entirely? More power to you.

For a lot of my career, my focus was outside of work. 

My family. 

Traveling with my wife before we had a family. 

Somehow I always knew I needed something out there to point at. It's what allowed me to come in, work the traffic, do what I needed to do day in and day out, and have something else I was building.

Education, becoming a pilot, starting a business, whatever it is. 

Have a purpose. Have a plan.

You're right in the middle of it now — but now you're modeling it.

Others are watching the details of how you work. 

How you see things. 

How you process them. 

Your professionalism. 

Your communication habits. 

Your consistency, being there day in and day out. 

They see all of it.

And the newer controllers at your facility are going to reproduce what you show them.

That's a lot of responsibility. 

But that's part of this amazing career.

You're not practicing to get through training anymore. 

You're practicing to get better at the profession you chose.

And the FAA will make sure you get practice — always. 

There will always be things they want you drilling on, and most of them revolve around those unusual situations that just don't come up. Hopefully once in a career, if that. You practice them so you're ready when they do.

There's traffic management within your sector, within your specialty, within the building — and if you go that direction, outside the building. 

Those things take practice.

And if you decide to become an instructor, you really need to practice at that. 

It does not always come naturally. 

The good instructors hone their craft continually, exactly like the good controllers do. 

You refine your techniques not just as a controller, but as a teacher.

I've always said it's not one big picture — it's a lot of small pictures.

Well, once you're a CPC, those small pictures start to grow. 

You can scope out, so to speak. 

You start seeing not just your sector but the sectors around you. 

How you can help them. 

How you can ease the load in their airspace when you're able to.

You become aware of the total operation — the flow, the needs of the sectors in your specialty and in the facilities next to you. And you can do that now because you have the experience. That's why it expands.

It's no longer just about seeing five, six, seven moves ahead to get through a rush. 

It's about seeing the sectors and facilities around you and asking how you can help.

And then something else gets added to your picture: trainees.

That's a whole different picture. 

Because now you have to figure out who this person is. 

How do they learn? 

How do they process things? 

It's not about you anymore. 

It's about somebody else's career.

It's always going to be about performance. 

This is a performance profession.

You are still going to have bad days. 

Bad sessions. 

And you're going to have great ones.

I've said this before: there will be days you walk out of that control room, or out of the tower cab, absolutely certain you're the best controller in the world — because what you just did with those airplanes was amazing.

Then you'll go on break, come back half an hour later, sit down, and nothing will work. And you'll walk out of that session expecting the chief to call you into his office and fire you.

Both of those are extremes. 

Both of them will happen to you. 

Be ready.

And neither one of them is real. 

It was real traffic, I understand that. 

But you're not the world's greatest controller, and you're not about to be fired. 

The truth is you live somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.

That's where all of us live.

Now, you may need a long conversation — possibly spanning several years — to convince some controllers that they are not, in fact, the world's best. 

But I guarantee you somebody somewhere is better. 

Doesn't matter who you are or where you are. 

Someone's always better. 

And someone's always worse.

So aside from the over-the-shoulder once or twice a year where your supervisor plugs in to make sure you haven't deteriorated, performance now means something different. 

It means being there. 

Shift after shift, week after week, month after month, year after year.

Being consistent. 

Being the professional that puts the P in CPC.

Every trainee's goal is to become a CPC. 

You watched experienced controllers. 

You learned from them. 

You imitated them.

Believe it or not, somebody's watching you now. 

Somebody's learning from you. 

And somebody is going to imitate you — whether you like it or not, and whether you realize it or not.

You can absolutely say, "I just want to be a CPC. I don't want to train. I just want to work traffic." 

That's fine. That's a legitimate choice.

Just understand that the new controllers coming in are watching you anyway, and they'll copy what they see.

Good or bad.

Oh, now this is where the fun starts.

You get to be an OJTI — on-the-job training instructor. 

You get to mentor new controllers, and it is a fascinating experience. 

You get to hand down the lessons you learned when you were the one sweating it out.

You'll hand down what your trainer told you. 

And unfortunately for some people, you'll also hand down how they trained you. 

How you were trained tends to become how you train.

Hopefully you had some great ones. 

I was blessed over my career — I owe it to some of the best trainers out there. 

They had to be the best in the world. 

They were dealing with me, and they got me through.

Training is not for everyone. 

Being a trainer is not for everyone. 

But if you take it on, understand that it's a huge responsibility. You can't just say "this is how you do it, now do it." 

You have to instruct. 

That's why we call you an instructor. 

That person comes in with no experience — especially an Academy graduate — and you have to pass along the experience you earned. 

To do that, you have to understand them.

And again: I wouldn't suggest this for at least a couple of years after you certify. 

Get settled. 

Become the controller you want to be. 

Then start helping other people become theirs.

So it comes down to this at Level Four: What kind of controller do you want to be remembered as?

It's never going to be how many airplanes you worked. 

It's going to be how you treated people. 

How you contributed. 

Who you helped.

I've seen it. I've had trainees go on to do amazing things. I've had trainees who didn't. 

At Level Four it becomes bigger than you. 

You get to decide not just what kind of controller you'll be, but what kind of person. 

And if you decide to become a leader in some way, shape, or form — and you don't need the union or management to do that, you can lead just by how you work — you get to decide what kind of leader you become.

That's when this job becomes even more special than it already was.

So there they are. 

The four levels. 

Level One, building the foundation. 

Level Two, where preparation meets performance. 

Level Three, where learning becomes reality with live traffic. 

Level Four, where you go from developing yourself to developing others.

And here's the biggest lesson in all of it: success in ATC is not a destination. 

At every level you have purpose, plan, phraseology, practice, picture, and performance. 

Those six drivers never disappear. 

They never go away. 

They evolve, they change, they grow as you grow — and hopefully you keep growing.

So two questions for you:

I'll leave you with Martin Luther King Jr.: "The ultimate measure of a person is not where they stand in moments of comfort, but where they stand in times of challenge and controversy."

Level Four is a level worthy of your desire to get there. 

And it carries a dichotomy: it's where the fun starts, because you're no longer training — and at the same time, it's where you take on more responsibility than you've ever had, including responsibility for other people. 

A whole new journey starts.

Everybody wants to get to Level Four. 

It's a worthy goal.

Thank you for reading this series, and thank you for continuing to come back. 

My purpose — the reason I plan, the reason I keep trying to get better and better at this — is so I can help you. That's it. That's the whole thing.

So please remember: you don't have to navigate your ATC journey alone. Find someone to help you. Find people to go through it with you.

If you need someone, let me know. Head to sidebysideatc.com and set up a call, or text me at 817-233-8199. No pressure, no clock.

We can do this together. And we can do it side by side.

Have a great week.

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.