39 | How to successfully navigate change

What Ben had taught me in that moment was gratitude. He'd shown me that I needed to focus on what I had, not what I'd lost in the form of physical function. He showed me that every challenge was an opportunity to quit, but every challenge was also an opportunity to adapt. He had most importantly shown me that I was lucky to be a paraplegic.

Welcome to the Inspiring Change Podcast, where we talk to leaders about all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Inspiring Change podcast. We're in our 10th week now of coronavirus lockdown, and although people now are starting to get back to work and starting to somehow get back to some semblance of, of what a normal life might look like going forward, it's going to mean a huge amount of change for people. Obviously we've had significant change already in, in having all been locked down at home for what feels like months and months, but I think actually it's going to be from now on that the real change is going to happen as people get back to probably a situation or a normal, in inverted commas, which is largely unknown. And that's the funny thing about human beings, we're not very good with unknown. We like to know what's going on. And I think people are going to really struggle with that and that whole idea of change. So I'm delighted today to have as my guest Ryan Campbell. I'm not going to say too much about Ryan, I'm going to let him talk about himself because he'll do a much better job of it than I will. Ryan is, is Australian-born, living in the States, and has got a really interesting story. And I think that particularly around change, which is an area that he now specializes in given the journey his life has taken, both physically and metaphorically, I guess, he's gonna be far better placed to bring us through. So good afternoon, Ryan, how are you getting on?

I'm good, thanks, Scott, how are you?

I am awesome. It's really, really good to have you on. Thanks a million for coming on today.

No, I appreciate you having me on, I really do.

Great stuff. Listen, why don't we start off with, I guess, what the, Maybe the most important part of this podcast is, and the reason for you being here today and me interviewing you, really is your backstory and where you came from, your background and what you're doing today. So why don't you spend a few minutes bringing us through that?

Absolutely, I'd love to. I have lived, I think in a simplest form, a life of adventure and adversity, a life that had some unbelievable highs but also some unbelievable lows. When I was a young kid, I decided I wanted to be a pilot. I found my passion, and that was all things aviation. When I was 14 years old, I found out that you could fly an aeroplane on your own for the very first time on your 15th birthday. Something that common sense just— it just didn't line up. That was just madness. It was honestly just out of this world. So I decided at 14 that I wanted to learn to fly an aeroplane. I set my first big goal, which was to fly solo on my 15th birthday. And I went and found 2 after-school jobs to pay for it. I would fly a flying lesson once every 2 weeks. And thankfully, on the day that I turned 15, the skies were blue, the winds were calm. I climbed into an airplane, took off, and flew around and landed completely on my own for the very first time. That was a moment that Everyone loved, except my mum. She was absolutely beside herself. What that did for me was start this crazy kind of obsession with doing everything I could at the youngest possible age. Now, specifically in aviation, I worked through at 16 years old. I was licensed to fly my friends and family around in a bit of a restricted area, so I could take people up for a ride. I was at that point in time too young to drive a car on my own, so I had a deal with my schoolmates. They'd drive me from school to the airport. Once we'd finished our day, we'd jump in the airplane, I'd take them for a fly, but then they had to drop me back home. So it was a wild kind of adventure of aviation. But at 17 years old, I come up with a whole new adventure. I wanted to be the youngest person and the first teenager in history to fly a single-engine airplane solo around the world. Now, back in 2008, the world record was 37, so there really was not a youth-based record. In 2008, late 2008, that record was broken to 23. So at 17 years old and not real good at math, I could pretty much work out 6 years. I had 6 years to kind of make this whole dream happen. Now, uh, at 17 years old, I didn't know how to start this kind of investigation into how you would take on such an adventure. So I did what any kid would do, and I jumped on the internet and I Googled how to fly solo around the world. Now, everyone laughs at me, but I found a website that was how to fly solo around the world. Now, there wasn't a lot of information on the adventure at the time, because to give you some context, more people have been to space and flown solo around the world, uh, back then. So, uh, I took all the information that I found on Google, I printed it off, I highlighted all the important parts, and I hid it in my desk. Now, the reason I did that was I did not want family, friends, mom, or anyone to find that paperwork. I did not want them to think that I actually thought that this was possible. So I ended up with a bunch of information that I read. And over the next probably 2 months, I read those same 6 articles over and over again. At that point in time, I realized I still wanted to pursue this further. So I decided to contact a very famous Australian businessman. He was an adventurer, a round-the-world pilot. He was a household name, you could say, someone that my mum and dad grew up watching in the media. Now, I contacted this guy called Dick Smith, but again, at that age, how do you find a way to get to such a famous person? Well, I Googled Dick Smith's email address and I found 5 addresses and I emailed all 5. He actually responded. What this amazingly famous and well-known adventurer and businessman told me was that what I wanted to do was dangerous. It was risky. It was wild. It had never been done before. But at the end of the email, All that he wrote was 5 words that changed my life, and that was, "But it can be done." So off I went. He told me to find a mentor, someone who could support me, someone who could tell him that I would do this safely. He said, "If you can find that, then I will support you." I went to a guy called Ken who I knew had flown around the world. I took that same email, wrote, "Dear Ken," instead of, "Dear Dick," and I sent it to this guy called Ken. He agreed to be my mentor. So I went back to Dick Smith. I went, dear Dick, remember me? I'd like you to meet Ken. All of a sudden, as a 17-year-old kid, I had a team of 3. I say a team of 3 because my parents still didn't know. Now, that's an awkward situation to be in. So one night after washing the dishes, which I think helped, I sat down with my mum and dad and I said, hey dad, hey mum, what would you think if I told you that maybe one day I might potentially want to fly an airplane solo around the world. And their responses were, oh, that'd be so cool. Imagine what you would see. I was just a kid with a big dream. But then I took an email, a folder of emails, all in chronological order and color-coded. I wanted this to go as smoothly as possible. And I sat that folder down in front of them. They opened it up and they saw emails from a gentleman that they had seen in the media and in their life since they were kids. They realized how serious this was. What that started was 2 years of training, planning, fundraising, fundraising over a quarter of a million dollars on a laptop computer. A normal Aussie family. My dad was a truck driver and the milkman. My mum was a stay-at-home mum. We banded together. We built a team and we prepared for 2 years. At the end of that 2 years, I climbed into a rented single-engine airplane designed as a 4-seater to fly maybe 5 or 6 hours before it ran out of fuel. We had modified the airplane so that it had 160 gallons of fuel in the cockpit with me as well as what was in the wings. That allowed that airplane to fly about 16.5, 17 hours nonstop. And that's what I needed to cross the oceans. So at 19 years old, I climbed into that airplane. I took off from the Sydney area in Australia, and I started northeast over the Pacific Ocean. What followed was 24,000 nautical miles, 35 stops, 15 countries. A wild journey. The shortest legs were 20 minutes. The longest leg was Hawaii to California, 15 hours nonstop over water in a single-engine airplane. I had all the experiences you would imagine in a true adventure, the highs and the lows. I had unbelievable moments, many, many of them, flying over glaciers, Niagara Falls, the world's biggest air show. The list goes on. But I had some unbelievably hard moments as well. We experienced thunderstorms from sea level to 60,000 feet. A thunderstorm that I had to fly 180 miles right of track just to get around the core. A core that if I flew through, it would have been all over. I experienced icing over the North Atlantic. I experienced bribery and corruption from Greece all the way back to Australia. We experienced air traffic issues in Indonesia. It was ongoing. It was a, a true adventure of highs and lows. Now, at the end of that journey After 70 days and that whole 24,000-mile journey, we landed back at that same airport that I took off from 70 days earlier, and we'd broken a record. We created history. We, as a normal Aussie family and now a really big team, had pulled off something that had never been done before. That really didn't matter to me. The record really just wasn't of importance. What was important was the way that that trip had influenced not only me, changed my life, had changed the lives of everyone directly involved, but had spread and inspired and changed the lives of so many strangers. We released a book called Born to Fly, and that continued that effect of constant inspiration and kind of, you know, change really. It was a catalyst for change in people's lives. It changed their way of thinking. It changed what they thought and realized they could achieve. And we have heard unbelievable stories based off of the round-the-world flight. So all I can say is life was pretty good. I was invited to meet Prince William. I was invited to meet Prince Harry. I shook Buzz Aldrin's hand. I was named one of Australia's 50 Greatest Explorers. I just, I wrote that book. We lived a life of just random things for a normal Aussie kid to ever experience.

And as you said, As you said to me before, that 50 top Australian explorers puts you up among Captain Cook and people like that.

Well, I say to everyone here in the States as a keynote speaker, I was put on a list with people that I grew up in school learning about, and one of those people was James Cook. And, you know, I mean, that guy drove the boat to Australia. You know, like, can you explore any better? I have no idea. And somehow I ended up on that list. Unbelievably humbling for a normal guy to experience all of this stuff. I knew life had gone down a little bit of a unique road when I was standing face to face with Prince William speaking about adventure and aviation. But I knew I was still a normal Aussie kid when I didn't want to eat any of the weird food that they had at that reception, and I somehow ended up at KFC afterwards, unbelievably overdressed. So normal Aussie kid living a pretty cool life. What happened after that is not so positive. I went to work on a normal day flying a 1930s vintage biplane, and many of your listeners may well know it was a Tiger Moth, a very common aircraft in your part of the world. My job was to fly that Tiger Moth up and down the coast. Do some aerobatics and take one person for a ride at a time. It was a great job flying a beautiful, beautiful airplane. On the 28th of December 2015, I was 21 years old, just about to turn 22. It was about a little over 2 years since the end of the round-the-world flight. I climbed into that airplane and I took off for what was a normal day at work, a normal flight, no oceans to cross, no records to break. We departed the grass airstrip. It was very short. As I had the runway disappear beneath the nose, the engine failed at an unbelievably low level. And as a pilot, I pushed the nose down. I went through the, I suppose, the process that we're trained to do. And despite what I could do, despite my best efforts, within seconds it was all over. We were over the top of trees in terrible terrain. What resulted was a horrific plane crash. And not only a horrific plane crash, but one where I was cut out of the wreckage and flown to hospital as the only survivor. I had 5 breaks in my back. I had shattered facial bones, a shattered right ankle, and I had cuts from head to toe. And when they operated on me, That night they placed titanium in me from head to toe, and I woke up in a recovery ward. When I woke up, I had no movement or feeling below my waist. I had suffered a spinal cord injury at L1, and I was a complete paraplegic. So in a split-second moment, I had gone from this unbelievable life of highs— the very thing that gave me my identity, that people knew me for— was the very thing that placed me in a spinal rehabilitation ward and faced with not only wanting to learn to fly again, but learning to walk and finding a way to find a new normal to operate at my maximum potential. What followed that, uh, was 6 months in hospital, 18 months in rehabilitation, and an unbelievably crazy long journey.

So you went from the very highest of the highs both physically and metaphorically in a light aircraft to the very lowest of the lows, which must have been absolutely devastating for you, particularly given the loss of the life of the passenger that was in the aircraft with you. Must have been incredibly tough on you as well from an emotional perspective. I just wonder how that has helped to shape your ethos on change, because I know you and I had a fairly blunt conversation before we recorded this about the whole idea of, you know, everything happens for a reason. Isn't that right?

Yeah, I think a lot of people say that everything happens for a reason, and prior to my accident, I believe it. I believe that the lady in Greece that caused a whole bunch of trouble for us was for a reason. I believe that missing out on a whole array of aeroplanes as I searched for an aircraft to rent and fly around the world happened for a reason. I believe a whole bunch of things happen for a reason. However, I do not believe that the loss of that accident happened for a reason. I cannot ever comprehend that despite everything I've done as a pilot, despite being fastidious and operating to the highest standard I can every day, to being trained thoroughly, having lots of experience for someone my age, to still end up in a position where that was the outcome is unbelievably hard. And I've transitioned now to a more what I would call realistic approach of Hey, life is crap sometimes. And how we react to the situations we find ourselves in is what determines whether we go up in trajectory or whether we go down. So yeah, a whole bunch of things do happen. I'm not sure why they happen sometimes. It may not be our fault, but we are responsible for the way we react. Hmm.

And why do you— out of interest, why do you think people are so resistant to change? I think that often we're put in situations where change happens. And we have to just kind of put up with it. You know, you were in a plane crash, you became a paraplegic, you couldn't walk, you had really bad injuries. That change happened and you kind of had to come to terms with that. But people so often, we talk about being resistant to change, or are they? You know, I often wonder, are they simply living up to this self-fulfilling prophecy that we often talk about, which is, well, people are resistant to change, therefore people are going to be resistant to change.

No, not at all. I think the world is resistant to change. I think half the planet could sink to the bottom of the ocean floor and we'd grieve for a little while. We'd have a whole bunch of hashtags to pray for the southern hemisphere or whichever one disappears and we'd find a new way to find a new normal and move forward and we would. I think that's just the resistancy of the human race as a whole. Individually, I think we're becoming softer and softer in a way. I would hate to see World War III. I'd hate to see this generation of people go and do what, you know, we saw happen in the '40s. I just, I can't comprehend how that would work right now. People are struggling with a lockdown where they're stuck with, literally, in a beautiful home with all of the information available at their fingertips with the World Wide Web. I'm sitting in Nashville talking to you in a very different part of the world. I don't believe, I think people wish they were more resilient than they are, and they don't understand— and this is very important— they don't understand that building a resiliency to change, learning to navigate change, is a learned and refined skill. You know, we're not born resilient. You know, we grow to become resilient. We are a product of all the experiences that have ever happened to us up until this moment. We look at the statistics, National Health Institute, National Institute of Health study, Scott McInnes here in the States showed that of all the things we worry about on a day-to-day basis, 96% are unchangeable. Something like 30% happened in the past. So we talk about wanting a life where we don't experience change. We don't worry. We just live on the beach sipping margaritas. Yet we worry about like we could lose 96% of our worries. Like, let's just focus on the 4. There's a whole bunch of tools that people need to implement in order to become more resilient, to learn how to navigate change, and most importantly, take those moments of adversity and use them as learning opportunities. And I just don't think that enough of us do that.

Your feedback's important to us, and I'd really appreciate it if you could please take a couple of minutes to rate this episode of the Inspiring Change Podcast and perhaps leave leave a few words of feedback. Thanks so much. And I agree, and I think that whole idea of learning how to navigate change is very important. I know that as a pilot, and you alluded to it there when you talked about the engine cutting out in the Tiger Moth, that one of the things that you'll turn to almost immediately is a checklist. What do I do first? What do I do second? What do I do Third, and I think it was, I was watching a documentary recently where it was actually, it was a Red Arrows pilot was talking at an event that I was at, and he talks about, um, aviate, navigate, communicate, um, the order you do things, in which you do things when, when something goes wrong in the air. Um, you have a checklist, um, to navigating change. Um, tell me, tell me a little more about that, and then perhaps we might, we might talk about some of that in the real-life context of what's going on right now with this, with this health emergency and coronavirus.

100%. So I spent 6 months in a spinal rehabilitation ward learning how to walk, and I was given a purple wheelchair with white wheels, which is all the reason I needed to get out of it, as I tell people. And I was told that I would never walk again. I was a complete paraplegic. I started to live a life where I was learning how to drive the wheelchair and learning how to transfer into a vehicle and learning how to live with a spinal cord injury. I was wheeled to the rehabilitation gym one day, the first time I'd ever been taken to the gym. Now we spent 2 sessions in there every day, a place where quadriplegics and paraplegics were doing everything they could to bring their bodies back to life. The first time that I ever went into that ward, my life changed. They laid me down on an exercise bed. Everyone was watching, my physiotherapist, my mom, my dad, the nurses, and my first lesson of the day was to roll over, to learn to roll over. Now, I love the challenge, so I made a plan how I could lift up one of my chunky legs and place it over the other leg and how I could twist my body. And I had this plan as to how I could end up, you know, lying on my stomach. Halfway through this rollover, I was up on my side and the pain through fibroids in my back was just too much. I just stopped and in the hope that my pain would kind of calm down for that moment, and it did. So I just laid there on my side. My right arm was all twisted up and I ended up looking through a small hole made by my elbow and I looked into the eyes of a guy who would change my life, change my way of thinking forever. His name was Ben. He was a quadriplegic who had slipped over mopping his girlfriend's floor in his early 30s, hit his head, broken his neck. He was a quadriplegic from no movement or feeling from his chest down, very little movement in his arms or his hands. I looked at Ben and Ben was looking straight at me. And here I was feeling sorry for myself, sad about, you know, what had happened, the accident, sad about the fact I couldn't fly, let alone walk, let alone go to the bathroom like a normal person. But when I looked at Ben, I realized what he'd give for just one chance at rolling over, just one. And I felt like the worst human on the face of the planet. And I finished my session. They put me in the wheelchair, took me back to bed, and my mind was just racing a million miles an hour. What came from that moment was not only realizing a whole bunch of lessons, taking a whole bunch of lessons from that moment with Ben, but realizing I needed to remember it. I needed some form of systematic approach that I could apply every time I came up against a challenge or a bad day. And I knew there were plenty of bad days on the horizon. What Ben had taught me in that moment was gratitude. He'd shown me that I needed to focus on what I had, not what I'd lost in the form of physical function. He showed me that every challenge was an opportunity to quit. But every challenge was also an opportunity to adapt. He had most importantly shown me that I was lucky to be a paraplegic. Lucky to be a paraplegic. And never in my life would I ever have thought that those words would have come out of my mouth, but that's what he showed me. Overall, Ben showed me gratitude. When we fly an aeroplane and a red light comes on or a warning buzzer sounds, the pilot uses a checklist, and that checklist is a systematic tried and tested, proven approach to overcoming all sorts of predetermined scenarios. So they've looked ahead when all this stuff could go wrong. Let's write a checklist. All right, that's how you're going to find a solution. So we work through that list, and we hope by the time we get to the end of it— we don't skip any steps, we do it in order— we get to the end of it, hopefully we've found a solution for the problem. How could I create a checklist that I could use every time I had a bad day? That's the 3-step checklist for navigating change. So the first step is simply gratitude. That lesson from Ben. Every time we come up against a challenge, every time we have a bad day, every time we have to navigate some form of crisis, I want you to find gratitude in the problem at hand before you even start to navigate it. Just stop, step back, look at the big picture, find something to be thankful for. If I could find gratitude in being a paraplegic plane crash survivor, there are a lot of things to be thankful for. You might not think it at surface level, but start to dig deep, you will always find something to be thankful for.

And they could be the tiniest things in the world, I guess, the tiniest things.

100%. And those tiny things allow us to take a really big mountain that we have to climb and shrink it, to look forward at the problem at hand and have a different perspective on it. It makes it easy before we even begin. The second step is confidence. You have to have confidence. You can have all the thankfulness in the world. Now you've shrunk that mountain. You have to have confidence in your own personal ability to get through the challenge ahead of you, right? No one else can do it for you. Having confidence comes from locking in the next step, not by knowing the entire way that this whole process is going to play out. Like, from the position we're all in right now to the end of coronavirus or whatever the resolution, solution, or end goal of the challenge you are facing, you have to understand that we will never know the entire process. We're just not— it's unknown. We don't know when it'll end. We don't know how it's all going to play out. We can lock in the next step. So by locking in the next step, it removes excuses and it gets us to work. It puts us to work. So locking the— find confidence by locking in the next step. That was a lesson learned during the round-the-world days that, as you could probably guess, became unbelievably useful when learning to walk again. Learning to walk was literally one step at a time. So we've found gratitude. We have found confidence. We know what the next step is. We've now started to work. The third step is resilience. Resilience, at the end of the day, it's probably the most phenomenal tool, the most powerful asset we have to overcome rough times in our life. You have to be tough. It's time to come out from under the covers and realize that life is tough sometimes. That's just part of it. It's a byproduct of being human. We've all experienced adversity. We will all experience more. We have to be resilient. And the way that I have found that in my life is by anticipating the need to adapt, anticipating the need to adapt, understanding that there is no golden nugget to solve all your problems and that the journey from here to the end goal, the solution, the resolution, wherever we're headed, will have tough times, obstacles where We have to jump left or right to get around them. That's just part of it. But by looking forward and identifying potential obstacles, having a look at what might be the struggles on your journey and starting to think about ways you'll move around them, you take these obstacles on your journey and you just make them part of the process. And more importantly, when they arrive at your doorstep, you're not in shock. You are in fact completely okay and expecting that hurdle. And then you just lock in the next step and work your way around it.

You're almost welcoming those speed bumps.

100%. And you're accepting that as part of the journey. Whereas when we live a life where we think that it's all going to be rainbows and unicorns, when it comes along and it is tough, that's a really hard thing to digest at the time. I had a moment early on in my time in spinal rehabilitation where I wheeled out to a cafe and I sat opposite my mum and I said to my mum, hey, you know, I know how I'm going to get through this. And she had a big grin on her face and I think she thought I'd had some form of moment where it was just all going to be easy from here on out. And I said to mum, I'm going to toughen up. And I think that was a little bit of a downer, you could say, for her. But I had realized that this was a rough road. And I was going to need to get through it through being resilient. This 3-step checklist, most importantly, is not there to solve your problems. I don't know what the actual solution is to your problem. We all have different problems. There is no one system that will solve the world's problems. If there was, I wouldn't be on a podcast with you. I'd be on my yacht somewhere in, you know, a really nice part of the world sipping margaritas. There is, however, a way to apply a checklist that places us into a more change and challenge ready mindset that allows us to take the problem at hand and put ourselves in a better state to navigate our way through it, to overcome it, and to get back to our normal life. This whole concept of navigating change and crisis is a small part of our existence. It's something we need to master. So that we can go and do all the things that we want to do in life, to smile, to laugh, to sit by the pool, to hang out with family and friends and find success and purpose and all those good things in life. So gratitude, confidence, and resilience, that's the 3-step checklist to navigating change that I share with individuals and organizations around the world.

And where does empathy fit in? Because for me, during change, empathy is such a strong emotion that I understand what you're going going through, I get it, I can help. Where do you think that fits into your checklist or into the process?

I, as an Aussie, have seen, you know, as an Aussie living in the States, I've seen how cultures differ even between two very similar countries. I have seen the Aussie put out a hand to help a mate, you know, at any time kind of attitude. That, I think, is an Australian's way to show empathy and support and care. Whereas you come to America and it's more of a self-help, I suppose, you know, keynote culture where people jump up and they really talk and they push it home and whatever. And whatever works, works. Whatever you can provide in the form of empathy, I think, is— I mean, that just comes down to a a phenomenal core human value. I think you just have to be yourself. I've come to the US and I don't stand up and jump around. I'm a typical Aussie, any more laid back, I'll be lying down. I rock up and I tell a story through good old Aussie storytelling. And I want my tools to be adopted and utilized on the back of the stories I share because people hear the stories, they realize that these tips, tricks, and suggestions, this checklist and the mindset toolbox I also share came from a place of pure experience and they truly changed my life. And through that, I hope it changes. That's my way of being empathetic and then contributing to help others. So I think it has to be part of your day-to-day life for sure.

I think the fact that, you know, I'm a huge supporter and proponent of storytelling and I spent a lot of time talking to my clients about it as well, about about the power of stories and your whole ethos, your whole thinking, your whole way of being, your business, your income, your livelihood is based on a story, your story, the story of where you came from and what happened to you through your life. I wonder how, actually, and for me, that makes it very powerful. It makes it very relatable and very powerful. I wonder how people that maybe haven't come through what you've come through, How do they apply your checklist? Let's take, for example, somebody that's sitting in a bedsit currently, you know, because they can't go to work. They may be away from their family and friends. They're having to isolate. They can't go to work. They're not seeing people. How would they take your checklist and apply that in their situation?

Well, that's, for me, like, that's a really important question, so I'm glad it's came— it's come up. The thing about adversity, challenge, change, crisis is that when a 6-year-old kid falls over and grazes his knee, that's a rough day, right? He's had a bad day. When a 60-year-old lady who is the CEO of a Fortune 100 company fails to pull through on a however many hundred million dollar merger, that's a bad day. Whether— it doesn't really matter how or what that adversity is that you're experiencing. It's the feeling that we all feel, you know, that we want to avoid, that we want to work our way around. So it doesn't matter whether you have been through a plane crash and learned to walk again or whether you've, you know, flown around the world. I haven't done a whole bunch of things that other people have been through. The checklist was a systematic approach that we can apply to any problem. Adversity is not a competition. This isn't about me looking at your problem and saying, oh well, you only have a broken ankle. Oh, you'll be fine. That's not how this works. We can look at people who have it worse than us and we can use that as perspective. And I did that with Ben. We can use that as perspective. We can use that to find gratitude and thankfulness in our situation to realize how lucky we are. We cannot look at someone who has it better than us belittle their adversity and feelings and tell them to just brush it off. Everyone can apply the checklist. It doesn't matter what situation you're in, find something to be thankful for. You know, I'm experiencing coronavirus as well, you know, and the events industry has come to a screaming halt. And, you know, we have had this opportunity to spend so much time networking through a webcam, and that has allowed me to expand my network and to share content to audiences that I wouldn't normally get to, to spend more time speaking with my family back at home. I could sit down and write out a list of things I am thankful for based on the back of this adversity. So I think it doesn't matter who you are, if you are listening and you are having a rough day, you are up against a challenge, apply the checklist, give it a crack, write it down and see how it works for you.

I think there's definitely— and I said this kind of earlier in the corona days that I'm fundamentally a positive person. I had a bad week last week. I just wasn't feeling quite as positive as normal. And that only came to me this week because I realized that this week I'm feeling like myself again. And therefore last week I realized actually I just wasn't in great form. I was cranky and horrible to people.

I'll be honest with you. I did a talk last night. I did a talk on Friday morning that I just loved. I got up and I'm an incomplete paraplegic. I walk like I've had too many Tennessee whiskeys. I got all sorts of things wrong with me.

But I could—

I just felt like I could have ran away from the computer that day because it was just— was such a good gig and I did so well. But then last night I did another one back to Australia and I hated it. I didn't like it. You know, we all have our moments. I don't care who you are, we all put our pants on the same way and we all experience those days where we're just off and we have to give ourselves a little bit of a break when those days do come.

Yeah, it has to be okay. Um, and I do think though that every cloud— and this is such an overused cliché and I know it is— but I do think that every cloud does have a silver lining. It's just so sometimes that silver lining is microscopically, microscopically thin sometimes and barely visible, but it is, but it is still there. It is absolutely still there.

100%, for sure.

So you've spoken a little bit about the fact that you're an author and a speaker. Tell me a little bit more about that. Obviously, you wrote the book Born to Fly. You're now on the speaker circuit. You're doing keynotes. Where are you doing those, and how are you doing them, and who are you doing them for, and what are you bringing to companies? What are they looking for from you?

Yeah, absolutely. I was a speaker in Australia prior to the accident, and I shared the story of the round-the-world flight with a whole bunch of different audiences. Following the round-the-world flight, although— sorry, following the accident, although I found my way back to flying and found my way back to even flying helicopters and walking, I knew that I wanted to do something to share this message. It was too strong. It was— there was too much there. I did not want people to have to go through what I went through to know what I now know. So at 26, I'm now based in the US as a keynote speaker delivering virtually, but we'll be back to onstage performances pretty soon. I speak all around the world. I'm happy to travel wherever it may be. We speak to everyone from college groups or school groups to Fortune 100 companies. The amazing thing about the topic of change is what we've already talked about, is that everyone experiences a change, adversity, challenge, crisis. It's just a part of being human. Yeah, what people need and what people are taking away from the content we deliver, which is the Mindset Toolbox and 3-step checklist, is a systematic approach to work through the challenges at hand, to place themselves in a better mindset as an individual or a team or an organization as a whole. To then be able to tackle what's ahead of them. At the end of the day, no one wants to go through adversity. We all want to overcome it, and we all want to find ourselves in a position where business is booming, morale is high, and we're just in a good space. So we help individuals get to that point. We help organizations get to that point. And whether that's virtual or whether that's in person, although in person is a little more personable, you know, the I suppose you could say virtual content has been an unbelievably uplifting offering because at this point in time, people need it. We need to hear some stories, you know, and I love to share my own stories, but I love to talk about Ben and I love to talk about a guy called Andrew and a guy called Eric. Really powerful stories. I love to place those figures in the minds of whoever my audience is, give them someone to think about and to lean back on when they're having a bad day. And just help them navigate the rough water that life brings.

Yeah, and I think that whilst you're obviously flying around the world solo, story is absolutely amazing and exciting and adventurous. I think when you temper that with the story of adversity that you went through following that plane crash, it makes the whole thing, certainly for me anyway, so much more powerful. So much more powerful.

Yeah. And I think that, you know, when I was lying in that bed at 21 in the hospital, I knew for a fact I'd been given an opportunity because at such a young age I'd been given an opportunity to compare highs, unbelievable highs and unbelievable lows. Honestly, a high that was higher than a lot of people would experience and a low that was lower than a lot of people would experience. And I was given an opportunity to compare and the simple result from that was we learn from the lows. We do not learn as much from the highs. So adversity then becomes a learning opportunity if you know how to process it, to turn the moment into a tool to place it in your mindset toolbox. Therefore, right now the world has a massive learning opportunity and we need to, to utilize it before it's, you know, all gone and back to normal, you know. I just think that's a mindset that's a little foreign. It goes against the grain, but once you grasp it and start to use it, it's life-changing.

So last question then, building on that learning opportunity idea, what would you say is the one thing that you know now that you wish you'd known 10 years ago?

Oh gosh. Whiskey's cheaper in the USA. Is that a good answer?

No, it's not nearly good enough. Try again.

I shouldn't. Anyway, we won't go down that road. I would say that life is tough. The grass is not always greener. And at the end of the day, we have control. So be ready and understand that life will bring along with it adversity. And when it arrives at your doorstep and you're in the midst of it and you feel very alone, understand it. Every human that you can see, celebrity, you know, stay-at-home mom, you know, someone living on the other side of the world, we are all experiencing it. You are not alone. However, I would love to inject into every 5-year-old kid that you are on a journey where you can build a mindset and refine a mindset that makes you a tough and resilient individual. You don't have to be anyone special. I'm just a normal Aussie kid. But through experience yourself, which is always the best teacher, but through looking outside at this wide world of knowledge we have. If you do not have Goldcast pinned to the top of your Facebook feed, you are missing an opportunity. We have this world of information and resources at our fingertips. Understand that you can build your mindset. You can refine it. And you can become unbelievably resilient and then go out there and find a passion in doing so because you will prep yourself to just succeed, really. And, you know, that is completely independent on what your definition of success is, but we all need to be resilient no matter what the journey is that we're on.

Brilliant. And I think there, I don't think I could add any more to that. I think we will wrap it up. Ryan, it's been really, really good talking to you, hearing about your journey, managing to speak to you from Tennessee. I also prefer doing these things face to face, a bit like you prefer doing your sessions. But look, this has worked perfectly on, on Zoom. I'm really pleased you were able to take the time to join me today. I'm really grateful that you did. Thanks very much for, for taking the time.

You are more than welcome. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

One final thing, people can find more about you at— what's the website?

It is www.ryan-campbell.com. Co. It's not com. I cannot afford the M just yet. It's ryan-campbell.co. Or just email me, ryan@ryan-campbell.co. I would love to chat.

Great stuff. Alrighty, listen, thanks a million, Ryan. You take care.

You too, mate. Thank you.

Thanks for listening. To hear the views of other leaders in our podcasts, to read our blog, or to find out more about Inspiring Change, please visit our website at inspiringchange.com. Change.ie.