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"I will persist until I succeed." - Og Mandino

The Preparation Principle: What an Airline Pilot Taught Me About Staying Calm When Life Doesn't Go According to Plan

Have you ever sat in the middle of an ordinary chaotic day, dishes stacked, calendar overflowing, one more thing falling apart, and wondered if calm is even something you have access to anymore? Not the fake calm you perform for everyone else. The real kind. The kind that shows up on its own when something actually goes wrong.

That question sat with me for a long time after I recorded this conversation. My guest was Barbara Bentzin, and her story is a little different from what we usually talk about here. We talk about hormones, nutrition, stress, the body. But health has never only been about what we eat. It's how we live, our purpose, our resilience, our courage, and how we keep growing through every season of life. That's why I wanted Barbara on the show.

Barbara spent more than three decades flying for major airlines, and forty-six years as a licensed pilot altogether, piloting everything from a small two-person Cessna to a 787 on long-haul international routes. She was one of a small number of women in a field that has historically been dominated by men. And she is retired now, which means she is in the middle of a different kind of flight plan: figuring out what lights her up next. What she taught me about calm, risk, and reinvention has stayed with me since we hung up the microphones.

The Career Nobody Handed Her

Barbara didn't grow up dreaming of the cockpit. She wanted to work in medicine. She had loved life sciences since high school, worked at an animal hospital, thought about becoming a vet. It was a career counselor at a community college, someone she met almost by accident during a year off after high school, who first suggested she consider flying. She was interested in travel, science, and math. The counselor connected the dots Barbara hadn't connected herself.

She took an introductory flight. One lesson in, she was hooked. What followed was not a straight line. She earned her private pilot license while considering engineering school. She realized she couldn't keep flying as a hobby and hold onto it seriously at the same time, so she made a choice: turn it into a career or set it aside until she could afford to fund it herself. She chose the career. It took about ten years from her first lesson to her first regional airline job. When she finally became an airline pilot, some of her father's friends admitted they had assumed it would never happen. The odds, as she put it, were stacked against her.

Barbara became an airline pilot during an era when only a small percentage of pilots were women, in a country where the first female airline pilot wasn't hired until the 1970s. She met a woman who had flown large aircraft during World War II and was told afterward by a major airline that she wasn't strong enough to fly. Barbara walked into that history and didn't let it define what was possible for her. When people questioned her about riding a motorcycle to afford flying lessons, her answer was simple.

"Why should guys have the corner on fun stuff?"

I think about how many of us are still asking permission for the things that light us up. We wait for someone to tell us it's allowed. Barbara's story is a reminder that permission was never actually required. It was just a story we were telling ourselves.

Training for Calm

Barbara told me about the moment she was a junior captain and had to shut down an engine mid-flight. She said she felt calm. Not because she was naturally fearless. Because she had done it so many times in a simulator that her body already knew what to do before her mind had to think about it.

We tend to think of being calm as a personality trait, something you either have or you don't. Barbara's story proves otherwise. Calm is trained. When your nervous system has practiced a response over and over, in a low-stakes setting, it becomes the default when the stakes are high. Pilots don't wait for an emergency to figure out what to do. They rehearse the emergency hundreds of times before it ever happens, so that when it does, the body simply executes what it already knows.

I lived a version of this myself when I worked in hospice. I used to look at my patient assignments the night before so I could mentally map my day, and every single morning, when I re-synced my schedule, the day had changed. I would get agitated every time. So I decided to stop looking the night before entirely and let the discomfort of not knowing become the practice. It took a couple of months before that discomfort stopped feeling like a threat. What I was actually doing, without having the language for it yet, was training my nervous system the same way Barbara's training trained hers. Not to eliminate the unexpected. To build a default response to it that wasn't panic.

This is why I don't just teach women to manage symptoms. I teach women to build a nervous system that can hold the unexpected without falling apart. Your breath, your walk in the woods, your five slow minutes before the day starts, these are not indulgences. They are the simulator. You are training the response you want to have before you ever need it.

Calculated Risk, Not Recklessness

Somewhere in this conversation I called Barbara fearless, and she corrected me, gently but clearly. She has fear. She jumped out of a plane exactly once and hasn't needed to again. What she actually practices, in flying and in life, is calculated risk. She assesses the weather, her own wellbeing, and the condition of the aircraft before every flight, and if any of it doesn't add up, she puts the flight off. She wears full protective gear on her motorcycle now, helmet and leathers, no matter how hot it is, even though she used to ride with laundry on her lap and no helmet at all. When she scuba dives, she never cave dives. She always keeps a way out in sight.

Fear and excitement live right next to each other. When she flies with children who say they're scared, she asks them if it's rollercoaster scared, the fun kind, or the other kind. Most of the time, it's the fun kind. That's the kind we sign up for on purpose. The other kind, the kind where there's no rope, no checklist, no way out, that's the kind worth pausing for.

"I'm always calculating that risk."

I think about how many high-achieving women push through their calendar the same way Barbara refuses to fly in weather she hasn't assessed. We say yes to one more thing without asking what it costs. We don't check our own internal weather before committing to anything. What if, before you added one more thing to your week, you asked the questions Barbara asks before every flight. What's my wellbeing today. Am I already overloaded. Can I actually say no to this one. The weather changes every day. So does your internal wellbeing. Treating that as data instead of a character flaw changes everything about how you make decisions.

Finding What Lights You Up

Barbara has been retired for almost a year and a half now, and she told me, with total honesty, that her youngest cousin has been the one pushing her to actually start the list of things she said she wanted to do. That's a real thing that happens after big transitions. We name the dream, and then life fills back in around the space where the dream was supposed to go.

For Barbara right now, the thing that lights her up is hiking. She found a small mountain trail near her home and a group of women to walk it with a few times a week. What struck her, and what struck me even more, is that this one hobby hits multiple values at once. Health. Community. Connection to nature. Sunshine. When an activity you want to do hits multiple values, you'll have enough motivation to keep going even on the hardest day. The more values a thing touches, the more it can carry you through resistance.

If you're in a season where you feel like you're only living for other people's schedules, and you don't know where to start, don't try to overhaul your whole identity overnight. Start smaller. Ask yourself what actually lights you up. If you don't know yet, that's fine, try things. Notice what feels fun and what feels boring. If this resonates, go back and listen to episode 98 with the Midlife Whisperer, where we go even deeper into finding that joy again in midlife.

When I asked Barbara what she hoped the next generation would remember about her besides being a pilot, she didn't hesitate. She wants to be remembered as the crazy auntie. The one who went skydiving, rode the motorcycle, traveled the world, flew the planes. The one who showed the people she loves that it's possible.

What This Means For You

Calm under pressure isn't a personality trait you either have or don't have. It's a trained nervous system response, built through repeated, low-stakes practice, that becomes your automatic default when the real thing happens.

The Next Step

Before you say yes to the next thing on your calendar, run Barbara's pre-flight check. Assess your wellbeing today, not last week's version of you. Ask if you're already overloaded, and ask if you're actually allowed to say no.

The Small Shift To Try Today

Pick one small practice, five slow minutes, a short walk, a few breaths before you check your phone, and do it on purpose, even when nothing is wrong. That's your simulator. You're training the calm you'll need later.

There will be turbulence. There will be smooth air. You've trained for this. You know how to breathe. You know how to check the list. Assess the weather. Assess yourself. And when it's time, go for it. Breathe in. Breathe out. The river of life flows.

Lots of love,

Rachel

Find Rachel on Instagram: @peaceinperimenopause

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